All The Things I Hate: A Rant for Heather Armstrong
I’d like to give myself room to express some things that don’t fit under a single post header.
I’m hesitant to validate the word “rant” by using it here, because it’s almost always used when women talk for more than twenty seconds about something that bothers them. Emotions from woman person?! Disgusting. I’m not exempt from this societal conditioning, either. In one of my classes, we read this Heather Armstrong post where she vents about her shithole job, and I, feeling particularly relaxed that day, tittered and golf-clapped from my high horse but was like “wow. Relax, bro.”
Well, that’s over. Let this post serve as notice that my high horse ran away and exploded against a fence in a steamy, morbid firework of equine intestine. Yep. I’ll just start.
I hate that I have to give an explanation every time I don’t want to go somewhere with someone, and that “I don’t want to go to another fusion tapas bar with you” is never a valid explanation.
I hate that the same girl comes over to my neighbor’s place at the exact same time every night and announces that she’s “just dropping by”. I hate that the walls are thin enough to make everyone on our floor an unwilling participant in this facade.
I hate that the people who’ve now deemed the basic human interaction skills we learned in kindergarten to be “PC culture” are acting like thought leaders. Hey, have you guys heard about that thing where if you say something that offends someone, they might say so and even explain why?
Today, I watched a friend swipe left on someone on Bumble because they were “a little too thick” — here, he pointed with his dirty thumbnail to a flap of organ-guarding flesh sitting on the waistband of their jeans. I said nothing. I hate that I said nothing.
I hate that I definitely have every disease I read about on the Internet. I once spent four nights in a row researching Deep Vein Thrombosis after my feet felt slightly numb. I hurtled to the university Health Center in a panic, not sure why the “licensed medical professional” looked so nonchalant while I explained my symptoms with WebMD expertise. It turns out my ankle socks were too tight. He said stop wearing them. I took his advice for two weeks and now my Air Force 1s smell like corn chips. I hate that.
I hate that every time I think about writing something even mildly race-related for this blog, a part of me worries about what everyone will say. I hate that in a world where I have to scream to be heard, I chastise myself for screaming.
I hate that dinner every day is a battle. That a midnight snack is an entire network of grave decisions that have to do with what I ate that day, the stretch marks on my inner arm, or that thing my ex said about my upper back fat three years ago. That tonight, I stood in front of my fridge calculating the caloric content of a chocolate bar until it started screeching CLOSE ME in kitchen appliance morse code. I divided 263 by 6. Because I was going to divide this four inch by one inch sliver of dark chocolate into six pieces and make it last ten days, is what I said to myself.
And most of all, I hate that there is no movie about this. About how recovery ebbs and flows. How it’s not all sitting in the linoleum cafeteria of a teen psych ward, meeting a quirky cast of characters that will change you by the end of a heartwarming hour and twenty minutes. There is no middle-aged Jamaican nurse with microbraids to feed me through an IV, tell me about her home country in an offensively-over-performed accent, or show me through an award-winning monologue that I need to appreciate my young adult years and love my body. There is no movie about how sometimes, you have good days and you feel good and you walk around beaming and you use the past-tense when talking about ED and you think and smell and breathe recovery, recovery, recovery. And sometimes, you have less than good days when you hunch over a twin bed and try to breathe the normal way and not look in the mirror and wonder if your neighbors hear you and how this all started from looking for that pair of safe jeans. I hate that I hate myself on these bad days. That I call myself sick again, instead of calling myself living. Breathing. Trying.
But you know what’s true? Someone somewhere else is going through the exact same thing — cutting through this dense brush they call recovery without night vision goggles or anything. I don’t need a screen or a coming-of-age film to know that. And I never will. And that, if only for a second, is enough to make me not hate everything so damn much.
WFA: Breakfast was avocado toast, Dinner was salmon and eggs.
