So I have to write a "From Where Do I read the World" essay to explain a little about my worldview....and I thought I would share my rough draft:
Imperative to any understanding of how I read the world is maybe to start at the current version of me. I am a more or less straight, white, cis-gendered, atheist but raised in a Southern Baptist household, male with some economic privilege based on my education, but from a home that split the difference between lower middle and lower socioeconomic class. To all of those, I am also the kind of person who spent many years trying to get comfortable with being able to use words like cis-gendered and not make it all about me, or to begin to process that how white privilege functions is not the same thing as being privileged. My defensive hackles had been up for a long time about several of those terms, and it took some introspection, some dialog, and a fair amount of humility to get there. And despite all that, I am still kind of a jerk sometimes. Part of my defensiveness comes from the misunderstanding that happens with a lot of people, that because I have experienced struggles, therefore I can't have also experienced privilege. It's funny how only privilege can really allow you to say that without seeing the flaw in that thinking. I was once out with a friend who is black and proudly told her that I had called someone out for white privilege recently. She let that linger for about two seconds before explaining to me that being able to call someone out for white privilege with the littlest of social or professional negative consequences, also white privilege. So obviously, like everyone, I realized through that moment that the work of me is never done. But to the original frustration, it was also clear to me that I saw the world through a clear frame of struggles, ones that I wore and experienced through my body, for which I still have scars, and one that absolutely factors in almost every moment of my life.
I started school when I was 4, with an October birthday. I was intended to graduate in the class of 1999, but when I was in third grade, I started slipping, especially in reference to handwriting and spelling. At the about the same time, my home life was starting to get fairly hectic. I know that my dad lost his job, and money was tight, and so he started drinking more, and more consistently than before. It was decided with my ok, to go back to the second grade where I wouldn't be the youngest anymore. My parents were fighting all the time, discipline had flipped on us with only one parent, my dad, doing the physical side of it and my mom yelling, lecturing, and crying. In this kind of toxic environment, and this one of the few times I've ever called it toxic, I started gaining weight, lots of weight, and really quickly. I remember weighing 80 pounds in second grade, 110 pounds in third grade, and so forth. I know how much I weighed 7th and 8th grade because I wrestled, and we were weighed every day then. For reference, in 7th grade I weighed 160 pounds, in 8th grade 175, and 9th grade I weighed 205 pounds, but luckily by then I had grown taller and was much more balanced than before. For the rest of high school, I was at my current height and weighed 260-275 pounds. So starting in 3rd grade, this became my new reality. In terms of home life, my parents stayed together, and times were sometime better and sometimes worse. Finances definitely stabilized when I was in middle and high school and my dad was working two jobs, my mom three.
My weight though became a constant part of my life from then on out. I always played sports, soccer as a kid and wrestling throughout middle and highschool. One reason I chose to wrestle was because it was the one sport where my dad couldn't be my coach, something I always resented about soccer and basketball as a kid. The other reason, one that was also true about football to some degree, was that there was a feeling of belonging because of the role I filled in practice and during matches. As much as I hated myself and my body in high school, it was hard to find fault in being a captain on the wrestling team, being the anchor (ha!) of the team since heavyweights wrestled in the final match, and having a meet come down to your winning your match, or having a meet be out of your control at the end and having all but personal pressure taken off. My parents didn't make fun of me, but there was constant flow of different diets we were always doing. Both of them were fairly thin, minus my dad's beer belly, and my brother was neither thin nor fat, and my older sister was thin (always has been, still is) but all my family were insistent on how we were going to choose healthy lifestyles for me that would change me and my body. We tried the Protein Power Plan which was an early Atkins plan, more vegetables, more walking, running, tennis, baseball etc. The thing that they never seemed to realized was that I exercised all the time...constantly. We would ride bikes, go play tennis, play sports, run, etc. And in school, I was pretty athletic as well. Wrestling would later reward me for my weight, but even when I was heavier, I was still a decent soccer player, a solid baseball player, and perfectly good at gym sports in school. I don't have any recollection of any medical problems or vital-signs that indicate I was at risk in particular, only that I was being constantly reminded that I was heavy and that things should be done about it.
What no one ever really investigated were the sources of my stress and anxiety. It wasn't school. I liked school, or liked it well enough, and have always been decently rewarded for my work. I've always had friends and people tend to think I am funny (huge deal for a long time) and more recently, thoughtful (so much more important to me now). The stress was home. My dad's drinking, my mom's trying so hard to keep everything together, both of them spending all their time working, the constant fighting, the constant feeling that things were on edge. It's also true that lack of money led to a really poor understanding and application of healthy eating, but I was also hugely resistant to this as well. My mom cooked vegetables all the time and I refused to eat them. I absolutely ate myself into the body I had as a kid (and most of my adulthood) because I learned to eat my feelings, eat my stress, be sarcastic and detached, to take lots of risks in school, but to never actually care about the results of them. My family kept attacking the symptoms of my disordered eating, but not the roots of it.
So how does this affect me now? Well, you may have noticed that this story here doesn't automatically track with my body currently. It does, and I have the scars and pictures to prove it, but it always surprises people who just meet me and amazes people who have known me for years. For reference, at 6' tall now, I weigh between 160-65, which is how much I weighed in 7th grade, at 13 and 5' tall. So what happened? Well for one, I learned how much defensiveness I had built up into my body, my body language, my body presence, and my speech. I put a lot of energy into building an academic confidence, and did very little for personal relationships. Somewhere along the line I developed a pattern of hating myself, hating my body, taking it out personally and emotionally on my body through terrible eating, constant dieting. Alongside of this, my dad, who is the youngest of ten, and his siblings began getting sicker and slowly dying off. So far, three of my dad's siblings have died, and when my uncle Joey died, I made a decision to focus on health. Along this same moment, I had met someone online and in the weeks that preceded our meeting for the first time, I put myself to task to lose some weight, and of course met up with her 15 pounds heavier than I started. So I used the disappointment of that moment, plus the health of my dad's family, plus the wedding of my first girlfriend to take up changes in my life. I went vegetarian to add structure, I disengaged with people for a few months (yay summer in grad school!), and I began to read nothing about nothing but health, vegetarianiam and veganism, exercise, food ethics and the like and more or less flipped my entire life.
This was also about the time I probably stopped caring so much about the discipline of literature, and focused more on different sets of theories. I never really recovered professionally, because the more I would read about Queer Theory (and lots and lots of body theory by the way), Gender Studies, Critical Race studies, the less I saw connections with my own sense of literature. I probably should have dropped out before going ABD, but since I was so close, I persisted and ended up just never really producing what I had been focusing on or figuring out a new path. But because of those experiences I gained a much stronger foothold in the world and actually have begun in the last few years reconnecting with the human race and figuring out how to rebuild personal relationships that are based on mutual trust, worldview, vulnerability, care, and compassion. Do I think I still suck at them? Oh absolutely. Am I much better now than before? Also absolutely. Am I happier? Maybe...I hope so. I know that I trust my emotions now a lot more than I used to, and of course I feel them more. I know that a moment of compassion is a much more authentic and rewarding experience than a moment in which you legitimize a lack of compassion. Either is possible in a given situation. I know that when I confront the ways in which can still act reductively to people about their lives and experiences I am more hurt by getting called out than I used to be, but at least as much now for their being right as for the ego-slapping moment of getting called out. Has this created more shame spirals? Yep. Are those better than being a shitty person? Yep.
I think the end result is that I have been teaching for a while, from small children in summer camp, to high school, to college, and I can only imagine that right now is the best shot I have at facing that task, hearing what every one of my students brings to the classroom, and actually serving them, or doing my best to serve them, than ever before. And at the same time, I have had to learn to quell my own self-hatred that I felt was embodied in my larger body outwardly. It's been a struggle to allow for compassion when someone is struggling with weight and not to just say, Hey, why don't you just fix it? Like I did. or to assume that because someone has a larger body that they must be unhappy. We live in a society that emphasizes small bodies, lies about the role and effect of stress in our lives, and hides behind veils of health when talking about how our bodies are affected, placing all the pressures of bodies onto personal choice. Had I not struggled with my weight, I might have gotten to this place of compassion and understanding earlier. It's pretty underwhelming to tell someone about this and have them rightly say Welcome to the human race. But I can't choose my struggles. Plus, and this is actually my favorite part, I still have a worldview shaped by a more or less amiable self-loathing and self-conscious fat teenager, and that makes me effing hilarious. So when I think about how much negativity I stored somatically in my body, I have to resist the urge to just feel happy because I am thinner and how excited that is for me, but at the same time, it's really fascinating how I can almost read the larger body I once occupied as literally carrying the stored excesses of stress and anxiety in the form of fat. I think, whether consciously or not, was why I made myself tie my new view of the world to mental and emotional health as much as to physical health, and why I have made myself also work on my personal orientation to other people. I think this has made it so that when I meet others I am much more capable of compassion and empathy and kindness than I was ten years ago. And because of all the work I ultimately had to put into where I am now, I like to afford people the benefit of the doubt when I come across them as well sometimes even thinking that they are already where I want to be. I have to resist that too since that is a way of limiting their own being.
Imperative to any understanding of how I read the world is maybe to start at the current version of me. I am a more or less straight, white, cis-gendered, atheist but raised in a Southern Baptist household, male with some economic privilege based on my education, but from a home that split the difference between lower middle and lower socioeconomic class. To all of those, I am also the kind of person who spent many years trying to get comfortable with being able to use words like cis-gendered and not make it all about me, or to begin to process that how white privilege functions is not the same thing as being privileged. My defensive hackles had been up for a long time about several of those terms, and it took some introspection, some dialog, and a fair amount of humility to get there. And despite all that, I am still kind of a jerk sometimes. Part of my defensiveness comes from the misunderstanding that happens with a lot of people, that because I have experienced struggles, therefore I can't have also experienced privilege. It's funny how only privilege can really allow you to say that without seeing the flaw in that thinking. I was once out with a friend who is black and proudly told her that I had called someone out for white privilege recently. She let that linger for about two seconds before explaining to me that being able to call someone out for white privilege with the littlest of social or professional negative consequences, also white privilege. So obviously, like everyone, I realized through that moment that the work of me is never done. But to the original frustration, it was also clear to me that I saw the world through a clear frame of struggles, ones that I wore and experienced through my body, for which I still have scars, and one that absolutely factors in almost every moment of my life.
I started school when I was 4, with an October birthday. I was intended to graduate in the class of 1999, but when I was in third grade, I started slipping, especially in reference to handwriting and spelling. At the about the same time, my home life was starting to get fairly hectic. I know that my dad lost his job, and money was tight, and so he started drinking more, and more consistently than before. It was decided with my ok, to go back to the second grade where I wouldn't be the youngest anymore. My parents were fighting all the time, discipline had flipped on us with only one parent, my dad, doing the physical side of it and my mom yelling, lecturing, and crying. In this kind of toxic environment, and this one of the few times I've ever called it toxic, I started gaining weight, lots of weight, and really quickly. I remember weighing 80 pounds in second grade, 110 pounds in third grade, and so forth. I know how much I weighed 7th and 8th grade because I wrestled, and we were weighed every day then. For reference, in 7th grade I weighed 160 pounds, in 8th grade 175, and 9th grade I weighed 205 pounds, but luckily by then I had grown taller and was much more balanced than before. For the rest of high school, I was at my current height and weighed 260-275 pounds. So starting in 3rd grade, this became my new reality. In terms of home life, my parents stayed together, and times were sometime better and sometimes worse. Finances definitely stabilized when I was in middle and high school and my dad was working two jobs, my mom three.
My weight though became a constant part of my life from then on out. I always played sports, soccer as a kid and wrestling throughout middle and highschool. One reason I chose to wrestle was because it was the one sport where my dad couldn't be my coach, something I always resented about soccer and basketball as a kid. The other reason, one that was also true about football to some degree, was that there was a feeling of belonging because of the role I filled in practice and during matches. As much as I hated myself and my body in high school, it was hard to find fault in being a captain on the wrestling team, being the anchor (ha!) of the team since heavyweights wrestled in the final match, and having a meet come down to your winning your match, or having a meet be out of your control at the end and having all but personal pressure taken off. My parents didn't make fun of me, but there was constant flow of different diets we were always doing. Both of them were fairly thin, minus my dad's beer belly, and my brother was neither thin nor fat, and my older sister was thin (always has been, still is) but all my family were insistent on how we were going to choose healthy lifestyles for me that would change me and my body. We tried the Protein Power Plan which was an early Atkins plan, more vegetables, more walking, running, tennis, baseball etc. The thing that they never seemed to realized was that I exercised all the time...constantly. We would ride bikes, go play tennis, play sports, run, etc. And in school, I was pretty athletic as well. Wrestling would later reward me for my weight, but even when I was heavier, I was still a decent soccer player, a solid baseball player, and perfectly good at gym sports in school. I don't have any recollection of any medical problems or vital-signs that indicate I was at risk in particular, only that I was being constantly reminded that I was heavy and that things should be done about it.
What no one ever really investigated were the sources of my stress and anxiety. It wasn't school. I liked school, or liked it well enough, and have always been decently rewarded for my work. I've always had friends and people tend to think I am funny (huge deal for a long time) and more recently, thoughtful (so much more important to me now). The stress was home. My dad's drinking, my mom's trying so hard to keep everything together, both of them spending all their time working, the constant fighting, the constant feeling that things were on edge. It's also true that lack of money led to a really poor understanding and application of healthy eating, but I was also hugely resistant to this as well. My mom cooked vegetables all the time and I refused to eat them. I absolutely ate myself into the body I had as a kid (and most of my adulthood) because I learned to eat my feelings, eat my stress, be sarcastic and detached, to take lots of risks in school, but to never actually care about the results of them. My family kept attacking the symptoms of my disordered eating, but not the roots of it.
So how does this affect me now? Well, you may have noticed that this story here doesn't automatically track with my body currently. It does, and I have the scars and pictures to prove it, but it always surprises people who just meet me and amazes people who have known me for years. For reference, at 6' tall now, I weigh between 160-65, which is how much I weighed in 7th grade, at 13 and 5' tall. So what happened? Well for one, I learned how much defensiveness I had built up into my body, my body language, my body presence, and my speech. I put a lot of energy into building an academic confidence, and did very little for personal relationships. Somewhere along the line I developed a pattern of hating myself, hating my body, taking it out personally and emotionally on my body through terrible eating, constant dieting. Alongside of this, my dad, who is the youngest of ten, and his siblings began getting sicker and slowly dying off. So far, three of my dad's siblings have died, and when my uncle Joey died, I made a decision to focus on health. Along this same moment, I had met someone online and in the weeks that preceded our meeting for the first time, I put myself to task to lose some weight, and of course met up with her 15 pounds heavier than I started. So I used the disappointment of that moment, plus the health of my dad's family, plus the wedding of my first girlfriend to take up changes in my life. I went vegetarian to add structure, I disengaged with people for a few months (yay summer in grad school!), and I began to read nothing about nothing but health, vegetarianiam and veganism, exercise, food ethics and the like and more or less flipped my entire life.
This was also about the time I probably stopped caring so much about the discipline of literature, and focused more on different sets of theories. I never really recovered professionally, because the more I would read about Queer Theory (and lots and lots of body theory by the way), Gender Studies, Critical Race studies, the less I saw connections with my own sense of literature. I probably should have dropped out before going ABD, but since I was so close, I persisted and ended up just never really producing what I had been focusing on or figuring out a new path. But because of those experiences I gained a much stronger foothold in the world and actually have begun in the last few years reconnecting with the human race and figuring out how to rebuild personal relationships that are based on mutual trust, worldview, vulnerability, care, and compassion. Do I think I still suck at them? Oh absolutely. Am I much better now than before? Also absolutely. Am I happier? Maybe...I hope so. I know that I trust my emotions now a lot more than I used to, and of course I feel them more. I know that a moment of compassion is a much more authentic and rewarding experience than a moment in which you legitimize a lack of compassion. Either is possible in a given situation. I know that when I confront the ways in which can still act reductively to people about their lives and experiences I am more hurt by getting called out than I used to be, but at least as much now for their being right as for the ego-slapping moment of getting called out. Has this created more shame spirals? Yep. Are those better than being a shitty person? Yep.
I think the end result is that I have been teaching for a while, from small children in summer camp, to high school, to college, and I can only imagine that right now is the best shot I have at facing that task, hearing what every one of my students brings to the classroom, and actually serving them, or doing my best to serve them, than ever before. And at the same time, I have had to learn to quell my own self-hatred that I felt was embodied in my larger body outwardly. It's been a struggle to allow for compassion when someone is struggling with weight and not to just say, Hey, why don't you just fix it? Like I did. or to assume that because someone has a larger body that they must be unhappy. We live in a society that emphasizes small bodies, lies about the role and effect of stress in our lives, and hides behind veils of health when talking about how our bodies are affected, placing all the pressures of bodies onto personal choice. Had I not struggled with my weight, I might have gotten to this place of compassion and understanding earlier. It's pretty underwhelming to tell someone about this and have them rightly say Welcome to the human race. But I can't choose my struggles. Plus, and this is actually my favorite part, I still have a worldview shaped by a more or less amiable self-loathing and self-conscious fat teenager, and that makes me effing hilarious. So when I think about how much negativity I stored somatically in my body, I have to resist the urge to just feel happy because I am thinner and how excited that is for me, but at the same time, it's really fascinating how I can almost read the larger body I once occupied as literally carrying the stored excesses of stress and anxiety in the form of fat. I think, whether consciously or not, was why I made myself tie my new view of the world to mental and emotional health as much as to physical health, and why I have made myself also work on my personal orientation to other people. I think this has made it so that when I meet others I am much more capable of compassion and empathy and kindness than I was ten years ago. And because of all the work I ultimately had to put into where I am now, I like to afford people the benefit of the doubt when I come across them as well sometimes even thinking that they are already where I want to be. I have to resist that too since that is a way of limiting their own being.
VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
soulclapping:
Hahah....a whole lot of this is just about feeling schlubby....so it works.
annalee:
That was so good to read, it made me feel really optimistic! Thanks for sharing it.