Break the Bone Cage

My name is Lyn. This body is a prison, let's tear down the walls.

[brainwashedrex]

You Don’t Look Anorexic

“You don’t look sick,”

like pain has a size

like an eating disorder can be quantified,

in whisper-thin ballerinas

with porcelain skin?

Stick-figure affluence on bathroom scales

measuring weights of bones,

lungs shrunk by cigarette binges

and perpetually untouched plates?

Is it the shaping of bones 

into edges like weapons,

replacing soft flesh

with skeletal chainmail?

The sharpening of spines

into a double-edged sword?

Or the splintering of hands 

into butcher knives?

Hollowed-out wings 

filled with granite and sand,

collarbones lifting ever onward?

Anorexia looked like

a swallow of death

an anaemic consumption,

a mother and father sitting on a cliff,

unable to reach down the canyon wall

helplessly watching

as we fall

loved ones slide into the pit

to rescue

but wounds fester

in their hands

and you don’t realize

because we’re led to believe

that “sick” has only one look.

[brainwashedrex]

Xtra Small

my body is complicity

your body another sweater

among many which do not fit me

your warmth welcome around me

your residue left outside me;

I drink your attention

and then purge it to

thin my waistline to 

fit your guidlines

I inhale smoke and tar and ash to

warm my body past its shaking, to

deplete its need

for a sweater

[brainwashedrex]

Her

I remember the night she came into our lives

as a storm drain,

dark and wet

spilling sewage onto the welcome mat--

a stain that never quite came out--

a stench which soaked into our shoes.

Sometimes,

I think that’s why she cleaned so much

as if perhaps she could scrub out

the shadow of fear she was

to the children of the man she loved

as if the windex could wipe away

her smudge on our porcelain life.

[prokopetz]

Team “not actually oblivious to flirting, just terrified of appearing presumptuous” represent.

[prokopetz]

“Yes, in the balance of consideration this person’s behaviour could certainly be interpreted as flirtatious, but it would be purest arrogance for me to just assume they actually meant what they said. I should gather more evidence. Forever.”

[devinchee]

Do you guys ever see your pet sleeping by you and just think holy shit holy shit this little animal feels safe enough and trusts me enough to be near me and fall asleep near me and just how fucking cool is that

[millennial-review-deactivated20]

[buttonpoetry]

I’ve known nights so cold the body is unlikely to bleed.

Michael Lee, from The Only Worlds We Know (via buttonpoetry)

[lambfleece-deactivated20210601]

[prsephonies-deactivated20200815]

when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest

[friedegg]

[friedegg]

[whats-your-name-man]

[anxietyproblem]

[fdsfjdsfjkf93723679267-deactiva]

[velaskies]

Memory

I started all of this only for you one could only hope you’d see the tide shift from one barren shore to another and take rest in the capital of my heart — an ocean where your spirit will swim forever

[bluestthingsonearth]

never been good at saying how i feel // never been too good a person // sometimes i think that in my rib cage is a engine // fueled by everything that’s ever happened to me // i wonder if that makes me a robot // i wonder if i’m less real than those around me // i’m wondering if i’m alive and if there’s something that makes me more real than others // and i think how funny it is to think like this if it wasn’t so sad // sometimes when i feel less real the engine in my rib cage sputters and hums // it’s wanting something bad to happen again to make me more real // if this is being human i want to be machine //

[creekfiend]

I wonder if people who get caught up in pushing for "more legal consequences" for people with "fake service dogs" know they're being tricked into chipping away at the ADA

The ADA is written like that on purpose. Our disabled activist elders were not stupid. They knew that the extremely lax rules might be easy to exploit and they made it that way anyway because they would rather have people exploit them than have ANY DISABLED PERSON be gatekept out of exercising their legal rights by being forced to jump thru hoops.

[creekfiend]

It's always going to be preferable to have some airhead lie about their little terrier being a support dog so they can get it on a plane for free than for ANY person who is disabled in ANY WAY to be kept from exercising their (STILL REALLY REALLY LIMITED, TBH) rights as laid out in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Always.

[brainwashedrex]

The solution to this is EDUCATION, not punishment, as always.

I was on a bus once and the driver said she never let any service dog on her bus unless it had papers/the owner could prove it. This is of course illegal, but nonetheless....could do way more potential harm for someone with a service dog than good for the bus.

[starlitstory]

there are days where i wish i could melt into my poetry. sit in the middle of four walls of words and let the letters fall into my arms. watch as the rhymes take away my heart for safekeeping and the lines wrap around my head like a flower crown. its easier to breathe when the metaphors dance out of your chest. like how i wish i could spend the whole day lying in a meadow of meaning. floating in an ocean of emotion. where all the fleeting feelings are outside, not in. because everything is a little less overwhelming from a distance.

— S.Y. // breathe it all in, write it all out

[timemachineyeah]

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

[heavyweightheart]

This casual rant is like a primer on weight science. Amazing. I second their book recommendations, and would add to the list Body Respect by Drs Bacon & Aphramor, Body of Truth by journalist Harriet Brown, and What’s Wrong with Fat? by UCLA professor of sociology Abigail Saguy.

[brainwashedrex]

The Hunger (TRIGGER WARNING: Sensitive eating disorder topic for those who struggle with restriction)

after a while, the hunger changes.

at first, it’s sharp and determined. it comes barreling at you and hits you full force in the stomach. it is angry. it knows what it wants. it is disruptive; you notice it. this hunger is hard to weather, but more rewarding in what feels like the success of ignoring it. it hurts. and it hurts wonderfully.

but then it changes. soon after you notice how hard it is to climb the stairs at school or work. soon after you first feel how tiring it is to get up. the hunger--your brain--no longer can send signals that are too hard to maintain. it needs you to know how hungry you are. and so it uses its energy more efficiently; it infects you with a new hunger. 

in some ways, this is easier to ignore. it is less rewarding to ignore, because it does not fade. it is the ache of hunger flooding through your body and trying to remind you, spread across your whole being, to please feed yourself. this is a distress signal. this is not the body saying you are losing weight. this is the body panicking because the source of nutrition it knew is no longer predictable. *all* your body knows at this point is that it literally needs food in order to function and it is not getting them. and if it doesn’t get them soon, your body will be damaged. 

because when you have passed exhaustion and reached the dull ache of hunger, your cells are eating themselves. your body has begun to cannibalize itself in an effort to survive--otherwise you would literally stop functioning. you wouldn’t have the energy to breathe. 

so desperate is this situation to the body that i maintained this hunger--this deep, aching feeling through my body, begging me for nutrients--for months after finishing refeeding, multiple times. my brain and my body could no longer rely on the steady source of nutrients they had always had since i was born. so they kept this deep hunger around, to convince me to eat constantly; even after i had eaten, when my stomach felt full, I still felt hungry. I drove myself mad. It was almost unbearable. Everything in my head saying I shouldn’t eat and everything in me trying to attach myself to the “anorexia” label, which came with this unspoken belief that you did not like or want food. That was never true. I wanted to diet at first but when I was sick, I was terrified of food. I couldn’t function because I was always thinking about it and around it I wanted to melt. Secretly I loved food. I was supposed to be anorexic--so I told myself I was wrong for wanting food. for loving food. for enjoying food. 

when i got past my compulsive fears, when i was able to eat despite them and put them in the back of the CBT bus, metaphorically speaking, i told myself i was wrong for no longer being afraid. i wasn’t “recovered” but i wasn’t “anorexic” if i liked food. and i was attached to being anorexic. i was so afraid i would be exposed as someone who didn’t really have an eating disorder; that i had been lying all along. because i do in fact like food. because even during my worst point the truth is that i did eat. it was little enough with enough exercise to almost kill me, but i ate. 

but i really wanted food. i always loved food. and i was hungry even after i gained weight so i worked to make myself avoid food even when i was actively enjoying it again. when i brought it back into my life, i still loved it. i just compulsively avoided it. i was obsessively afraid of it. it was so easy: figure out the things you need to eat. measure them out, but just take less. less of the fats. less of the carbs. smaller snacks. then everything is safe. then i have something to focus on, to keep my mind off of the impending doom of my world. the thing in my head is afraid of losing its title over me. somehow, without an eating disorder, i won’t be protected. i am too afraid, without it to control me. 

I’m still afraid of that. my pain is validated by my continued diagnosis as anorexic. not only is it validated, but it is channeled, it is controlled, it is measured and monitored. i still have a hard time accepting myself as anywhere near recovered or normal. i’m so scared to let go of this title i’ve held for so long. this title that gives me access into a whole new realm of pain and expression. this title that allows me to entertain my twisted fetish for reducing bodies to ash. even watching others reduce their body to ash, somehow, is addicting.