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no one slaughter me right now ok I'm so flooded with stress hormones the meat would taste terrible

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Untitled, 'Not defined by what I lack (2023), one of the surreal images from the inner world of Russian painter, performance artist, and photographer, Ellen Sheidlin (née Elena Viktorovna Lyalina in 1994)

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honestly i feel like the idea of "social skills" is kinda stupid. like we're all humans and we're all social in different ways why does it need to be a Skill you can Get Good at. maybe i socialize in my way and you do it differently and the next person a third way. people can be sensitive, empathetic, sure, good at talking or reading body language maybe, but i'm really opposed to the whole deficit framing, especially when it's about autistic ppl

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top this bottom that we should all be focusing on what’s really important. #DRYHUMPING

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kinda fucked how a full-blown mental breakdown/ugly sobbing crying episode is supposed be like, all good for your soul and whatever but it always comes with insane headache/congestion shit. like yeah i scream-exorcised a rotting part of myself but at what cost.

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Wow

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things i've done more of since making this post:

make things (lots of plushies & rugs)

be kind (i think? i've tried?)

eat good food (lots more food freedom <3 but still a ways to go)

learn things (just life skills in general and ofc weaving and rug hooking and such, and picked up japanese again for a bit)

listen & make people feel good (i try to be there for friends and listen when i can - although i can still work on my listening skills)

discover new music (belle sisoski, melanie martinez, george michael, aurora, LOTS of vgm)

be weird: !!!! autism diagnosis, finally letting go of all the shame

things i wanna do more of:

laugh

make things

spend time with animals

be kind

eat good food

have sex

listen to people

learn things

make people feel good

discover new music

be weird

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the author's barely disguised longing to be a real person

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I've noticed a lot of things are only as bad as you give them the power to be. as in lots of things are generally agreed upon to be Bad because It's not how it's supposed to be™, but once you start to question societal norms a lot of things start to matter less and less

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man ok i gotta take a step back for a sec and acknowledge how well ive been doing. i havent felt this good since summer of 2023!! i just feel so at ease and content with my everyday life and just more Like Myself than ever

like.. it's summer, i'm moving out soon, my bf has been here for over a month and we've been spending a lot of quality time together, i'm working a job i love for a manageable amount of hours and i don't have to study or write in my free time anymore, i'm making it to the gym 4x a week and actually feeling ok about my body image (it's not perfect but i'm ok with that), working on lots of creative projects too (rug hooking, sewing, even some drawing again!) and i even got into a new Fandom (deltarune) which always feels so fulfilling and hasn't happened to this degree since patho in 2021 i think.

my joint and tendon issues have been getting better too and my stomach actually feels alright a lot of the time now (i still have flare ups but they don't seem to last as long as they used to)

i've also noticed over the past year since i started working at the rug workshop that my mood has been way more stable in regards to the seasons, like my seasonal depression in winter was way less noticeable than it has been in years and i don't idolize summer as much anymore; it's still my favorite but i'm not getting that sentimental melancholy feeling i'd always get when it ended because i know i have a good life rn and i feel like can take the cold now. wild what a strong foundation can do. (although i think the weight gain also helped with the cold)

and i've slowly started feeling less and less shame which is something i'd been working on for a while now, and it finally feels tangible! i think my autism diagnosis has really helped. i think i know who i am now and people have been telling me i come across as super self confident and secure in my identity. i feel very hopeful about the future of my self discovery and how i will develop

ofc i'm a bit apprehensive of being too optimistic bc i know hard times will come and i don't want to crash super hard when it happens but for now im just really happy with where im at

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please don’t feel pressured at all to answer this because i know it’s a complicated + sensitive question, but i’m very new to all this and have learned a lot from your antipsych resources etc and thought you’d be a good person to ask. how are you able to internally reconcile anti-fatphobia and it’s values with having an eating disorder that centers around weight, and wanting to lose/maintain a lower weight? i’ve found this to be incredibly hard to reconcile, knowing that i want to be thinner for a variety of reasons including my own internalized fatphobia, beliefs i haven’t unlearned about body, beauty, etc, as well as my own knowledge of how i will materially exist in the world if i am not a thin person? i do not want to be fatphobic yet to fully embody a liberationist view would also require giving up my ed, which is opposite to my own internal views but also is something that is very entrenched in my life. it feels very hard and impossible, especially because i’m just not ready for recovery yet. sorry if this isn’t a message you want to post/discuss :(

Firstly - I have a piece in @trans-axolotl's antipsychiatry zine that discusses thin anorexic/ed accompliceship in fat liberation politics - as soon as that's up I can add it to this message/send it to whoever wants it!

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oh anon, i feel this so hard. you're not alone - i think pretty much everyone with a restrictive ed/bdd who has a radical left/body liberationist politic ends up feeling this way, and, of course, feeling an immense degree of shame and frustration that our most visceral lived experiences are at odds with our political commitments. i think about it every day. i will likely continue to, because the desire to be thin at all costs is irreconcilable with liberation for all people, including fat people. so, let's sit with the irreconcilability for a moment.

here is the reality: there is no good, "innocent," or morally "pure" answer here. we cannot and should not be obligated to "fix" our Mad relationships with food/embodiment for the sake of others. neither are fat people obligated to tolerate individual / collective / structural manifestations of antifatness, including those enacted by people whose food/body relationships are psychiatrized (that is to say, if i start talking about how i as an anorexic person "feel fat" around an actual fat person, they'd have every right to smack me upside the head). but part of being in community with other imperfect people under conditions of genocidal violence (against fat / Mad people and intersections therein) is learning about which allowances we can make, which actions we can take, in order to mitigate the harm we do to the people we care about. to employ a tired recovery cliche, the point is progress, not perfection.

here is another truth: every single person mired in a culture of fatphobia has shit to unlearn. for people who are not fat, the stakes of unlearning are even higher, given the structural rewards we reap from antifatness. this is true for any system of oppression. having an antipsych orientation to the idea of "disordered/disorderly eating", i think, has the potential to aid in that unlearning process, not because it means you'll magically "get better" in terms of your own relationship with food, but because it's a bit easier to notice the discourses of disorder that also violently impact fat people. the violence we face in the name of "restoration" and "recovery" increasingly impacts fat people as so-called "ob*sity" is framed as a biopsychological medical condition that must be "cured" via eugenics. shared disorderliness, even allowing for differences in privilege and access, can serve as a site of solidarity - even when our own experiences of disorder are fueled by an erroneous fear of "fat". there is also the important corollary that fat people with restrictive eating disorders, fat people who are terrified of fatness, also exist, and that a radical commitment to imperfection and partiality also benefits people who live in these seemingly-contradictory positions.

to sum, you/i/we don't ever have to recover. however, we can, should, and must fight for a world in which we and others could repair their relationship to food and embodiment if and when we so choose, on our own terms, in our own time, without medical paternalism. this world - a world in which we can eat or not eat what and when we want - is only possible under a paradigm of body/fat liberation. after all, the same systems that seek to eliminate fat people are the ones that seek to eliminate body Madness, to "fix" restrictive eaters through governing how we eat/move our bodies. on the days that it's difficult to imagine yourself as a direct beneficiary of fat liberation (as a fat person or potential fat person) think about the ways fat liberation is simply necessary to all other forms of liberation, including for Mad eaters. likewise, remember that your own personal feelings are in many ways irrelevant to that liberatory fight: what you do, who your accomplices are, and what we can collectively dream, outweigh (lmao) the painful thoughts we experience.

these thoughts, our bodymind relationships, our fears of food and fat, don't define us, even if they take up an outsized portion of our lives. there is always time and space to find community and fight for total liberation as our imperfect selves - everyone else is coming as an imperfect self, too. i think you'll find, as you enter more conversations with people doing this work, that even the "best" advocates share your/our ambivalences and fears, and may desire things that they'd never outwardly advocate for. people are complicated, and we're living in a world that makes living in a body horrifically painful. give yourself the grace to sit with your feelings, and give yourself permission to fight on another day without feeling obligated to "get better." what matters most is the care you're able to share with the people you surround yourself with, and the care you allow yourself to receive by people who love all of you - not just the polished, good-activist parts.

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baby i could treat you so good you just have to get past my strange and off-putting demeanor and my kubrick stare and my inability to behave like a human and the 40 layers of icy fortress walls i have up and answer my riddles three

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Whats up ladies i im several years behind

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anxiety will have you thinking things like "will everyone hate me if i order coffee at the coffee shop" and "will people think i'm crazy if i work out at the gym"