https://misszoot.com/2022/01/24/on-grief-and-gag-t-shirts/

Here I wrote the about my relationship with books and how we’re doing better than every these days.

And here I wrote post #457 about how my mental changes are still shocking me as I move past the decades of obsessing over food/fitness and hating my body.

https://misszoot.com/2022/01/12/gross-injuries-covid-isolation-and-grief-induced-loneliness-arent-you-glad-i-am-back/

So many multitudes

Mindfulness did not cure my depression

On dress codes and body autonomy

Dismantling domestic expectations

The simplest of things

Wishing I could hug Kim of 26+ years ago

The Other Side

On Dogs and Driving

Grief is still weird.

On Being Creative When You Have Minimal Skills.

Be As Kind To Yourself As You Were To Simone Biles.

Personal Litmus Tests

Healing Yourself Is A Gift To The World.

Thoughts On The First Day Of School.

High On Body Autonomy

Click here to read the rest of this entry and to get to that one bonkers tangent…

READ THE REST HERE (Because I still don’t know how to import my subscriptions back to my new wordpress installation.)

“Being a human – an authentic human – is messy. Being sincere in your movements throughout life will never yield perfection because we are beautifully imperfect. But…it is in that sincere authenticity that we find the greatest connections of love and friendship. Without the messy awkwardness, our connections would remain at the surface. So, I accept the mess for the heart beneath it all. If I only walked through doors where I could avoid that messy awkwardness, I would miss out on the wonderful connections I have made with people in the last decade of my healing.”

Click here for the full post.

(Sorry to do this to my subscribers but I have yet to figure out how to get my subscribers imported into my moved site (back to misszoot.com) so for now I’m just going to have to use this method…a teaser post and then a link to my moved site. PLEASE BE PATIENT WITH ME!)

Simone Biles and I have something in common.

There’s this thing the internet and social media has given us that I don’t think gets talked about enough. It’s the ability to find common ground with people. And that - in and of itself is not such a challenge in the real world except in the two critical situations where the internet is a gift.

1) You have a trait - from silly to serious - that you think is isolating, or maybe is hard to talk about or maybe just something rare. I found this in everything from my fertility struggles of yesteryear to my love of school supplies. From my acute anxiety responses taking left turns to my obsession with YA fiction. Many things that I would have never found a lot of kinship with restricted to the real world, but on the internet I can keep myself surrounded in pockets of like-minded people.

2) You are finding a connection, big or small, with someone whose life you would have never overlapped with without the internet. Oh, a young black elite athlete heading towards the olympics? What would she and I have in common. OH YEAH, FRIED PICKLES. And while that is a silly example, there are plenty of not-so-silly examples. I’ve built friendships with people from all walks of life thanks to the internet, people I wouldn’t have found connections with trapped in my frustratingly homogenous neighborhood. I’m lucky that work and my kid’s school brings us into more diverse communities, but the internet has helped me cross geographical, economical, sexual, gender and religious barriers I’m not sure

The problem lies in the fact that these connections also work for dangerous communities who might have fizzled out if they had geographical or economic barriers before. And - these connections are open to people with terrible intentions. Like the time I wrote about how I hadn’t given my daughter a bath in 2 weeks and someone hypothesized that maybe - if that was the kind of mother I was going to be - fertility problems were a good thing.

But I really want to constantly remember the good. The connections I’ve made because of this blog, or because of Twitter or instagram, that have widened my world view and most importantly…made me feel less alone. I am never alone in the traditional sense, but sometimes my mental health makes me feel lonely. When I’m really spiraling I’ll often just throw something up on Twitter. Something I sometimes delete when I’m stable but which always helps me in the moment because I have so many Twitter friends with similar mental health challenges and so the echoes of “I’ve been there! It sucks,” or, “Hang in there! I know that pain!” remind me that while loneliness creeps into my bones in those moments…I’m never alone in what I’m feeling. Someone out there has felt it too, and has survived it to tell the tale.

I mean, Simone Biles now knows she has a 45-year old white lady in Alabama on her side about fried pickles. You know her life is better because of that.

“The first dress is really flattering. Wait. What do I mean by that? Do I mean it is slimming? Why is that automatically “flattering” and why do I care? The pattern is super-boring and I don’t love what it does to my boobs. The other dress on the other hand…completely highlights my belly, kinda makes me look pregnant almost, but it’s long and flowy and obnoxiously floral which I love and it’s loose so it’s cool and…I’m getting the second dress. OBVIOUSLY. “

This kind of thing also happens when I’m deciding what I want to eat. When you’ve grown up in diet culture and developed many of your relationships with food around weight gain and loss, it’s hard to sort out your motivations. I didn’t just start craving salads overnight because my body “likes salads.” But I did stop binging a gallon of ice cream before bed because I no longer demonized food and so I wasn’t classifying “good” days and “bad” days - allowing myself to binge on the “bad” days and purge on the “good” days. We’ve had a gallon of ice cream in the fridge for almost 4 months now. Do you know how long that would have lasted when I was suffering from binge-eating/running compulsions? ONE WEEK. POSSIBLY ONE DAY. I think about food when I’m hungry, that’s about it. This did not happen overnight, but once I started digging into my motivations around food and trying to toss out all of the shit programmed by diet and fitness industries…I found myself naturally eating more intuitively.

And no weightloss! (A lot of people push “intuitive eating” because it will help you lose weight. Wanted to make sure you didn’t think I was one of those people.) Probably still gaining, I don’t know because I don’t step on a scale ever. Because who the fuck cares? Not this girl! (True story - they weighed me when I tried to give blood a few months and I was 200lb on the dot and y’all…I didn’t give two shits. Seriously. I actually was really proud because 5’3” and 200lbs would have been devastating to Kim ages 14-40 but Kim of 40+ gives no shits.)

All of this is to tell you that I’ve seen ascinating side effects of all of this Digging Into Motivations thing. It turns out, when you start training your brain to dig into your motivations, you might find a lot of shit rooted in unhealthy systems of oppression like misogyny or racism or capitalism or trauma. Here are a few of my personal examples.

I used to get really stressed out when the kids had friends over. Like…I kinda established that I do not want them to have friends over ever because it causes me so much stress. Do you know why it caused me stress? Because I would start thinking about all of these kids who live in these big nice houses and my house is small and often messy and we never have cool food or snacks and…and…and.

But it turns out, if you trash all of that shit rooted in programming from toxic materialism and extraction capitalism…you don’t care about what people think of your house. Because if they criticize it, that’s on them, not on you. And do you know what has happened? My daughter and her teenage friends regularly hang out at my house and I get to know them and they’re all fun and awesome and they love my house and don’t care if the bathrooms are dirty or if we have no food. They wish Rosco’s breath wasn’t so bad and that Zoomie wasn’t such a hyper freak…but they like it at my house. Even if they come from bigger, nicer houses. You know why they like it? Because we like them. Turns out, the most welcoming thing you can do in your house is simply enjoy the people visiting.

Here’s another thing: When Donnie went on sabbatical last year he started doing more housework. Something he has never ever ever done. At least in a long time. And do you know what I did? FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. I kept taking it personally, like he was telling me I was a horrible house keeper. I kept griping at him and getting upset and making BIG HUGE DEALS out of his sweeping or mopping like he had just verbally assaulted me in some way.

But do you know what all of that is rooted in? MISOGYNY! Turns out, I just felt like I was supposed to be doing that stuff like a lot of us think and if you can start to dismantle that shit you have more free time because A) you’re not mopping the floors so much and B) you’re not thinking about how you should be mopping the floors. And then your husband gets to break down some of his own socially programmed toxic masculinity and it’s a Win/Win for everyone!

There is so much shit I don’t do around the house anymore AND I LOVE IT.

One final area this Digging into Motivations has disrupted my old way of perceiving the world: Me as a People Pleaser. My “People Pleasing” is rooted in a lot of shit that I’ve had to dismantle in therapy over the years, but nothing has been as helpful as this pandemic where I was focusing on breaking up all of my instinctive habits. I do like to do things for the people I love, it gives me a sense of fulfillment and it’s the way I show my love to those people. But, it turns out that there’s a lot of shit I don’t love doing and so when something like that comes up and I start the Digging In process I conclude lately, Wait. I’m not doing this because I want to show my love, I’m doing it because I’m a chronic people pleaser sometimes putting my own needs behind another person’s.

For example - my husband recently was gifted a banana tree from a family friend. He kept forgetting to go pick it up. He said to me one day, “Since you’re going to be out and about if you could pick that up for me that would be great.” But you know what? I didn’t want to. My instinct was to say, “Okay,” but when I dug in I could see that I didn’t want to go to the house of someone I barely knew to pick up a tree that I didn’t even care about just because my husband hates running errands. So do you know what I said?

Brace yourself…it’s epically Non-Kim.

“I have no interest in taking on a task that has already been assigned to you.”

He didn’t really need my help, he just wanted my help. And it was to do a task that would stress me out. SO I DID NOT DO IT.

And on the opposite side of things, I’m serving my family more in the ways that actually fulfill me too. Spending time together, great conversations, fun spontaneous outings…which is still people pleasing, but more 2-sided than chores and errands.

It turns out, once you start Digging into Motivations in any area of your life…whether it’s distorted ideas around health or beauty, or toxic people-pleasing from being raised by emotionally unstable parents…YOU CAN FIND A LOT OF AREAS THAT NEED REARRANGING. It has been fabulous.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still depressed as fuck. I’m still a messy ball of perpetual anxiety. But I’m putting myself as a much bigger priority in my life. I’m trying to really learn what I need and don’t need, what I like and don’t like, what I want and don’t want. What makes me feel good, what makes me happy, what gives me purpose.

All because I wanted to stop obsessing over losing weight.

1. My Mom’s dog, Rosco, is old and ailing and now wakes up 100 times a night and so I don’t sleep well and so my mornings are not as full as creative energy as they normally are when I’m rested. He was never in good health and we have no idea how old he is, but his current sleeping patterns resemble that of a newborn and so I’m basically back living the New Mom, Bad Brain life.

2. Swim team is kicking my ass. I’m the “Parent Rep” which means - for our league - I’m in charge of everything that doesn’t fall under the coach’s purview. There has been a steep learning curve because - before this year - I had only ever sold concessions. And just in case you were wondering - there’s a shit ton more to running a swim meet/swim team than just selling concessions.

3. I’m still dealing with moving my blog. If you’ll recall, it kept getting hacked (real hacked, not “I clicked a bad link” hacked) and I couldn’t afford the security I needed while self-hosting. That’s why I’m writing here, it was a quick/easy/free setup. I have finally decided to just use Wordpress.com for hosting which gives me less control over the look/function, but more security. It took me ages to decide this after testing Squarespace and Wix, but I’m sticking with Wordpress. It’s all moved to it’s new location, but it’s a mess and the domain doesn’t point there soooooooo…when I have time to do “blog stuff” that tends to be what I work on instead of writing. Which IS NO WHERE NEAR AS FUN IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING.

4. Being a working-outside-the-home woman is an adjustment. I am working part time at a library 30 minutes away and I love my job but that is now 20 hours a week that is not mine, so to speak. And while I definitely had plenty of time that wasn’t mine when I was taking care of Mom, it was more spread out instead of 4+ hours chunks of time in a day. And…I don’t get home until 6:30 some nights. I felt like this week I finally started feeling like my body and mind had adjusted a bit. I’m going to bed later which is not helping the sleep problems, but I do think I’m getting used to it.

5. My mental health has been…scattered at best. I definitely have more good days than bad now which is good. But I still have really low lows. And while some types of “lows” make me a non-stop writing fountain…these types of “lows” do not. They make me a non-stop despair fountain. Which is not as fun.

6. I started playing PokemonGO again because Wes started playing and so we do a lot of that on our free time and it’s as awesome as I remember. He and I struggle the most finding things to connect over and I’m so glad we found this again.

All of this is to say that I’m getting into a groove again. We only have one home swim meet left and now that I’ve done three, they take less out of me in terms of time and stress. There’s only 2 meets and one city meet left in the whole season. I’m definitely on the downward slope of the climb of the season and I’m feeling okay about it. I definitely think there are people that are annoyed by how much more they had to do to help me…but considering I took the job when the person who was supposed to couldn’t do it…and no one else answered the call…and so I had ZERO training…people are also being forgiving in their annoyance.

Side note: My specific brand of anxiety combined with being an ACOA (which makes me a bit of an approval-seeker/people pleaser) means that when I feel like I’m a burden I feel crushing shame. Like…if I have to “bother” someone to help me - like with this swim team stuff - I beat myself up over it FOR HOURS OR DAYS OR WEEKS OR MONTHS OR YEARS. And since I walked into this swim position with no useful skills it has been a summer of me needing to burden people with requests for help/info non-stop and OH MY GOD, the shame spirals have been out of control.

But it’s almost over and so I need less help and so the spirals are fewer and things are feeling less overwhelming. I’m getting the hang of my new “schedule” with work and I’m learning how to use evening hours like I used to use morning hours which is strange. I still don’t know what to do about Rosco, I’m scared to take him to the vet again because every time I expect the announcement: He is in pain, every day is misery. I’m basically Scarlett O’Hara-ing the whole situation and every day I put it off until tomorrow.

Hopefully I’ll be getting my rhythm back with writing again soon. Maybe even at my new (and final home?) which will be the old URL but an entirely different virtual location in the ether. The blog is moved, but the hacked links are still throughout the content so cleaning that up is going to be an undertaking of epic proportions that I’m dreading.

Thank you for your continued patience. I have a lot more to write about now that I’ve unlocked the floodgates so I’m looking forward to getting back into the groove.

And now? NOW I AM EXHAUSTED BECAUSE I HAVE NO TIME.

I took a major volunteer job (In my defense I did not know how major it was when I took it but that’s another entry for another day) managing my son’s swim team of 100 swimmers and I now have a part-time job working at the library. Between the two at least 50-60 hours of my week are occupied. I was up at the pool last night until almost 10pm wrapping up a meet that was rescheduled from a rained out event last week and that was after an 8-hour work day.

But I looked fucking adorable the whole time though. Look at this picture E took of me at work yesterday!

I get up early still but my “blogging” time in the morning is “swim team time” as there are emails to answer and meets to plan and trophies to order etc. I also have been going up to the early swim practices so parents can ask me questions or bring me paperwork. All of this on top of Donnie starting his full-time remote job as well so to say I’ve been a little frazzled is AN UNDERSTATEMENT.

But Cute! Don’t forget cute!

To illustrate, I’ve been writing this piss-poor excuse for a blog post for two hours but I keep getting emails or I keep remembering things I need to do and so I keep stepping away and then getting distracted 3-4 more times before remembering: OH YEAH! I HAD A THING I WAS WRITING!

I’m here. I’m too busy. I’m happy but also depressed (IYKYK) which is better than only depressed. I’m still anxious as fuck and grieving but I love my job and I’m slowly but surely learning the ropes in my volunteer role so I’m good even when I’m bad.

I just wanted top pop in and say, “I’m here. I’m frazzled. I’m cute.”

Talking to myself under my mask when I'm in public.

When I first started wearing a mask early in the pandemic, not many other people were doing it yet. There was no mandate, the CDC has just started telling people to wear masks after that initial instruction not to. I was VERY self-conscious wearing the mask (my how times have changed) and to cope with my anxiety, I would talk to myself softly/quietly under my mask. This is a trick many with anxiety learn: When you vocalize, you can only worry about the one thing you're talking about so it calms the 1,000 other voices down momentarily. Writing does the same thing. They both force you to focus on *one* thing which - for an anxious brain - is a relief. Especially if you can make that one thing a coping response and not just a worry spiral.

So, I would just keep saying to myself, "You take care of your Mom in poor health. You're wearing a mask for her. You're taking care of your Mom in poor health. You're wearing a mask for her." Out loud, but softly and barely moving my mouth so that through my mask --- YOU COULD NOT TELL A THING. And this worked miracles for me. It turned out to be so handy of a way to calm an anxiety spiral, that I started talking to myself under my mask to get through any anxious moment in time. If I was worrying about something political or some sort of current event, if I was worrying about something going on with my kids, I would just get my groceries and talk to myself as I walked around the store...using my calming tools or coping mechanisms that I've learned in therapy; or I would simply repeat one of my mantras I use to reassure myself. There are a lot of tricks I have up my sleeve for when I'm spiraling and almost all of them have a, "Talk To Yourself" variation I can use, but I usually do them when I am alone, like in the car driving.

But for the last 14 months? I've been able to do it WHENEVER I WANT.

So yesterday at Target when I was shopping for a printer which I desperately need for the 5,000 things I have to print up for swim team...I was whispering to myself under my mask, "No one dies if you can't figure out how to print the labels for ribbons on site at the swim meet. Worse-case scenario, you recruit your teenage daughter and you two can stay up all night label ribbons by hand. Nothing catastrophic will happen if you can't figure this out.

This is called the "worse case scenario" exercise. When you're worrying about something relatively benign (not life or death related) you work through what will actually happen if the worse-case-scenario occurs and it forces you to realize - Wait, even that isn't *that* big of a deal. All things are survivable.

So, if you see me wearing a mask in public from now until the end of time...it actually might not have anything to do with physical health or contagions or even politics or supporting science...it may simply be because I'm spiraling and I need the mask to cover that I’m reciting mantras/practicing coping mechanisms that would otherwise scare people if they could see me talking to myself.

Now, before this story gets out of hand let me spoil it and tell you:

1. I did not join the convent. (What? I don’t know how well everyone here knows my history!)

2. This “decision” lasted less than a week and I’m not sure if anyone else even knew. Well…maybe my Dad told his sister who was a nun, I think I recall that.

Also…for the record, I know there is a difference between a Catholic sister and a nun but the average non-Catholic person does not and I am afraid if I say “I wanted to be a sister” it could carry 100 different unintended interpretations so we’re sticking with “nun” - pedantic Catholics be damned.

Where was I? Oh yeah, an atheist who once wanted to be a nun.

And yes, I have said before that I prefer “secular humanist” but for the purpose of this essay “atheist” packs more of a punch.

So…I was 17.

(Back to the story. Again.)

I was a senior in high school and I already knew what college I wanted to go to because I chose it the way most high school kids choose: The one that had the best dorms. I knew I was going to major in Math because I was good at it and I liked it, but I had no idea what I wanted to do with a math degree. Or what I wanted to do for any job ever.

I found myself drowning at a few points in the abstractness of my future. I kept getting into these spirals of thinking of all of the decisions I needed to make about my future and then considering the roads I could end up on and the places they could take me and the thousands of obstacles along the way that could trip me up and I was struggling to breathe…constantly. I had no language to talk about my worry…I just knew it was really disruptive and I felt like I needed a solution: STAT.

Enter: The convent.

It hit me one day: WAIT. If I accept a lifetime of service to the Catholic church…I never have to make another decision again. They would basically decide everything for me! All worry erased!

Let me tell you all of the reasons why this was dumb and proof my anxiety was out of control that the convent seemed like the solution.

1. I had already started questioning the religion…a lot. I went to a Catholic school and we had religious classes and I spent a lot of them debating dogma, questioning interpretations of scripture, and just being a contrary ass.

2. I liked making out with people.

3. I honestly…anxiety aside…did not like being told what to do. I got Saturday detention just because I found uniform restrictions ridiculous. I had my blue shirt and my khaki pants, WHY DID IT MATTER THEY WEREN’T THE SPECIFIC UNIFORM STYLE/BRAND?

Do you see the problem? The girl who didn’t like being told what to wear suddenly wanted to join a convent?

I think my Dad understood all of this. This is probably why he didn’t seem to be too fazed by my “decision” to join the convent.

And of course all of those things hit me…like probably 24 hours after I verbalized my decision. But man…I have such vivid memories of the feelings of worry and anxiety (that of course I couldn’t describe) during that time and the very real but very weird sense of relief that descended on me when I said to myself: BUT IF I JOIN THE CONVENT I NEVER HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS STUFF AGAIN. I mean, there are days I’m worried about my current future and I think back to the relief that decision gave me and wish there was a way to bottle that into a pill. There are medications that help my anxiety…both as a general condition and a situational response…but nothing makes it fade as completely and quickly as that moment it hit me that I could make a decision that would take all other decisions away from me.

The phrase “relief washed over me” is not descriptive enough. The (albeit temporary) relief that decision gave me did wash over me…and took with it every morsel of worry and anxiety and flushed it down the drain to be rushed into the sewage system far away. After I made that decision it was like an immediate shower that cleansed me of all of my anxiety and I stood there liberated from the pain all of that fear of my future had caused my soul.

I was talking to someone who left the convent a few years ago. She was just discussing her decision to leave and she said, “My mental health was not stable enough to keep with that specific manifestation of my calling.” And you know what? I’m certain if I somehow made it to the vow ceremony, I probably would have found the same thing. It’s like when people think marrying a person who is abusive will somehow make them better. The Church and I had a terrible relationship, just because they could have provided me stability did not mean they would have been good for me over all.

So I’m really glad I realized that giving up making out with people would be too difficult.

I wish I had found a way to talk about my brain and the pain it put me through during those days, so maybe I could have found help outside of bonkers life choices. I wish I could recreate that temporary relief I felt when one decision seemed like the solution to all of my worries. I wish I had even the language to explain some of the emotional and mental pain I was in back then.

Alas…I can’t change the past. But I can be grateful that 17-year old Kim didn’t take that decision any further than isolated conversations with her Dad and her guidance counselor. The atheist inside her was waiting to get out and that would have been a lot more awkward had she taken a vow to serve the church.

OH MY GOD. I’m looking at that picture and realized: We also became people who put their coffee and sweetener in their own glass jars. I swear the rest of my kitchen doesn’t look like that. Just the coffee area. This picture is so embarrassing. This is this shit the kids on Tik Tok mock in middle-aged white ladies. AM I A KAREN?

Anyway…things have changed a lot, is my point. Like…I know they have for everyone, but I just keep finding the realizations startling. I feel like every inch of my life is different from this time last year. From the mundane like the new showerhead in Donnie’s bathroom, to the complex like new boundaries in decades-old relationships. Even E moved closer to us in the last year, which we love but still…ANOTHER NEW THING.

There is not one section of my life that I can not examine and find a change. It’s unsettling at best…and at worst?

I don’t know, y’all. I like order in my life. I like to be able to describe things and predict things and plan things. When things change this much over every area of my life…I just feel out of sorts constantly. Like…yes…there’s a new normal for all of us to find, but can I not at least have some of the old normal to hold on to while I settle in to the new normal? I need something stable and stagnant to brace myself against while my world settles back into place and THERE IS NOTHING HERE THAT ISN’T NEW.

Not even my blog is safe. It got hacked repeatedly and so I had to start writing over here so I can figure out what to do with that mess. WHAT EVEN IS SUBSTACK?

We had family over this week for Wes’s birthday and we were discussing that it was probably Christmas 2019 when the full group came over last and so much around our house has changed in that time. Donnie has built us an outdoor paradise with swings and stained glass and beautiful oak leaf hydrangeas and an outdoor TV and…well…you get the point.

But we’ve also changed things a bit inside, both of the kid’s rooms have become teenager rooms, we even painted Wes’s last summer. Donnie and I have switched desk areas, we have a baby gate that protects the sliding glass door now because right before Mom died Zoomie busted through it trying to get to something outside. We have a new TV, we have some of Mom’s old furniture, Donnie is growing 4 avocado trees. There’s hardwire internet in our bedrooms and grounded outlets in most of the house.

It’s so much new stuff that I think Donnie spent most of the birthday gathering giving everyone a tour of all that had changed in almost 2 years.

It’s just new, new, new…everywhere I look.

And it all hit me that maybe this is part of my feeling of unsettled despair lately. That there’s just so many changes in our lives and maybe I just need something to hold onto that feels familiar. Hell, I’m not even sure that I feel familiar anymore. I am a very different person than I was this time last year. I’m setting boundaries. I’m standing up for myself. I’m sitting here writing this post while Donnie does dishes and no part of me feels guilty that it’s him instead of me even though what he’s scrubbing is his favorite pot with the crust of the dinner I burned in it two nights ago. So, literally my fault and he’s cleaning it and I don’t feel one ounce of guilt or obligation to get up and finish it for him.

(If you’re a long time reader here you know that…my friend…is fucking progress.)

And all of the changes are good! I mean, aside from the dead Mom of course. (Too soon?) But really…I am happy with all of the new and different it just…I’m just unsettled. I just keep coming back to that word. Like every day I’m just bouncing around in this haze of new challenges and new environments and new situations and a new me facing them all and no amount of bullet journaling will save me.

But I’ll keep trudging forward trying to find things to keep me stable while the new me adjusts to the new normal at the new workspace in my newly formatted family and my new job and my stupid new fucking glass coffee jars.

I got unsolicited weight loss advice yesterday.

And while I appreciated the friend’s vulnerability in sharing what has helped her in her journey to self love, I had to tell her, “No thanks” because I’m dealing with reprogramming my brain and I have to avoid ANYTHING that might talk about weight loss and since the website for this program had giant fonts/banners solely with messages about losing weight, I didn’t think that wold be great for my mental health.

This has happened a lot recently. People reaching out to give me advice I didn’t ask for about weight loss/fitness/health. I think people assume I want to lose the weight I have gained in the last 4’ish years. Why else would I keep getting unsolicited advice about diets that worked or podcasts about weight loss or fitness apps?

With this specific recent exchange I asked myself: Did I post something on the internet that might have been interpreted as wanting to lose weight? BECAUSE I NEED TO CLARIFY THAT SHIT, STAT.

I do this every time I get unsolicited advice. I look at things I posted and wonder what I said that indicated I might need “help” with things surrounding my weight because I do not want to give off that message. I want to give off the opposite message: That I love this body no matter what it weighs.

But truthfully, the only thing that I think is causing the onslaught of unsolicited weight loss advice is: I got fat.

I think the general assumption is if you gain weight that you probably want to lose it. But here’s the thing…

I do NOT want to lose the weight I gained.

Sometimes I say stuff out loud as a mantra to convince myself of something I don’t fully believe yet. Sometimes I write down things I want to believe someday but don’t quite yet. But let me tell you: That statement right there? There is no wavering. I say it with the more conviction than I say anything else. I have no desire to lose the weight I have gained.

As someone who spent the better part of ages 14-41 trying to lose weight…this is a HUGE change in my life. FOR THE BETTER. And it is not a change that I waver on. There is no part of me that longs to be thin again.

NO. NOT AT ALL.

I may struggle to love this body sometimes, but I hated my body all of the time when I was constantly trying to lose weight. AT EVERY WEIGHT. I took “before” photos when I have weighed 140lbs and 110lbs. I was never satisfied. I was always trying to get thinner or more muscle definition or better quads or defined arms or skinnier and skinnier and skinnier…because I hated my body at EVERY SIZE.

So there is no part of me that wants to lose weight ever again. Or really do anything to change what I see when I look in the mirror. I want to learn how to dress that body. I want to learn how to style that body. I don’t want to change that body.

Here is what I my personal “health” journey is currently: To love the body I have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. To love myself every second of every day. If I am doing something active, it has nothing to do with what my body looks like. As a matter of fact, I stopped using the word “exercise” completely because it has so many connotations around dieting. Instead I use words and phrases like: Being Active, Movement, Nature Bath, and Adventures.

The only reason I once in awhile still struggle loving this body is because of all of the programming done living in a society that defines beauty and health in very strict fatphobic parameters. We live in a culture where everyone is trying to not be fat - like being fat is the worst thing a person can be. Even our medical professionals have been biased against fat people. Here’s a great article that breaks down all the ways we’ve been misinformed about weight loss. So, from bad medical understandings of weight, to beauty and diet industries that profit off our self-hatred…we are all raised with the same (implicit and explicit) anti-fat bias. The same anti-fat bias that means everyone assumes the person who gained weight wants to lose it.

So basically every time I’m given unsolicited advice I have to remind myself: This person is not trying to hurt you by assuming you need help you didn’t ask for. They have also been programmed in the same fat-hating culture that you grew up in.

The other things people are assuming is that my weight gain and my depression have a causal relationship. I think because I’m so open with my mental health struggles and it’s so obvious I’ve gained weight…people like to assume one caused the other.

For the record, when I say “people assume” it’s because someone actually said this to me. I think the exact quote was “I struggled with depression after I stopped running and gained weight too…” I was not lying when I said I’ve been getting this kind of “advice” a lot.

There’s these misconceptions about mental health and fatness:
1) If you’re depressed, then you just need to eat better and exercise more and then your mental health would improve.
2) If you’re fat you are surely depressed.

People assume either I’m depressed because I gained weight or I gained weight because I’m depressed. And let me tell you - there is definitely a correlation, but not a causation.

Let me break down my life for you in gory detail, okay? Because I just want people to understand the journey that could lead a person to be more depressed and more fat, but the two not have a causal relationship.

I felt into a depression in 2016 after the election. This comes as no surprise to anyone who was reading my blog back then. It was a whiplash type of downward spiral that disrupted all of the balance that I had achieved with my mental health since my Dad had died in several years earlier. 2016, coincidentally, was also my peak running year. Before the election I had achieved my 110K goal and had PR’d a bunch of races including getting the elusive sub-2 hour half marathon time.

Note: My mental health was not balanced before the election because I was active and thin. My mental health was balanced because I had spent the previous years working through a grief therapy program and worked through a lot of childhood grief from abandonment issues with my Mom so Child Kim was finally healing.

What I had yet to address was Adult Kim. And the 2016 election simply shook the balance which caused a depression and that depression forced me to do a lot of introspection. You see, Adult Kim had been told in earlier years that she showed signs of body dysmorphia and a binge eating disorder but Adult Kim needed to heal Child Kim because the grief was drowning her in the moment and so she pushed the Adult Kim things to the side.

So, when my mental health began to slide in 2016, it was Adult Kim who was deteriorating. That meant it was time to face all of Adult Kim’s problems now that the foundation of a healed inner-child was strong.

The work was slow, the learning was painful. I had to look deep at the habits I had developed in my fitness journey and start to face the pain behind them all. I often joked about sneak-eating a dozen donuts in my car, but that was no joke. That’s a Binge Eating Disorder. The “purge” part of my cycle was running 25 miles the next day. I also was obsessively tracking calories and miles in my damn bullet journal. But most importantly: I hated myself every time I looked in the mirror. 130lb Ultra Runner Kim looked in the mirror and hated herself. I felt like I looked gross and ugly and fat and terrible and just wanted to keep losing weight. Hello Body Dysmorphia!

Adult Kim had some work to do.

But I really didn’t start understanding the effects of these issues until around 2018 when I got started getting a clear view on what obsessing over weight loss can take from a person’s joy of life. I had been obsessing over my weight under the guise of “improving my running” for years and with experience and therapy and studying and shifting perspectives I got a strange outside view on what that obsession caused me to lose: I was never fully present at mealtimes with friends because I was always thinking about calories and how many miles I might need to run to negate the meals/beers. Food was not something I enjoyed completely because all I could think about was how it balanced out with my running. When I wanted something that wasn’t “good for me” I would sneak and binge a lot of it (making myself sick) and then drown in shame later. And then I would look back at the Kim who binged all of that and be so disappointed in her. I started to see all of these habits for what they were: HATING MYSELF IN EVERY MOMENT OF EVERY DAY.

2018 was also the year I lived off and on with my Mom and I got a very clear view of what happens to someone who never faces their own demons or never works to heal the things that cause them to self-sabotage. Her demons were very different from mine, but the way she obviously struggled with self-loathing was eye-opening because it was like I could see what the manifestations were of that untreated self-hatred.

So I really think my “healing” started in 2018 and every year since I’ve gotten better and better.

I’ve also gotten fatter and fatter.

And while I’m healing a big part of my soul with giant doses of Radical Self Love, I’m still often depressed as fuck and I still suffer from anxiety disorder because…

My brain chemistry is off! Just like it’s always been off!

This is another thing I think people forget. There’s a lot of healing that can be done with therapy and lifestyle changes and that’s important, but my brain chemistry is still off just like it was when I was running 70 miles a week and weighed 130lbs.

That’s probably never going to change and that is okay.

What is not okay is hating myself, so I practice Radical Self Love. I don’t worry about losing weight. I don’t even worry about gaining weight except for the practical side of needing new clothes. I recognize that I am a soul and a spirit more important than a body and while I want to love this body and take care of it, I’m not going to assign some value to it defined by industries that only profit if we hate our aging faces and our gray hair and our flat butts and our stretch marks and our muffin tops.

So I just simply wanted to post my story as an example and a reminder that people who gain weight may not want to lose it and people who seem fat and depressed can still love their lives and love themselves. I saw a tweet this morning that was something like, “If you woke up as the version of yourself you want to be, what would be the first thing you do?” and my honest-to-god thought was: This is a bonkers tweet. Why assume I’m not currently the version of myself I want to be? I am always the version of myself I want to be aside from the periodic struggles with loving myself and so I guess my answer is: Love myself as I am?

This showed me how much I have changed. I was always on a journey of “self-improvement” or “betterment” and while I definitely have habits I’m trying to work on, they’re rooted in love of my current self. And it may seem like a small change to some people but to me? It’s huge.

Also…just in case my rambling wasn’t clear…Offering unsolicited weight loss advice to a fat person, especially if you’re a skinny person, often times comes off as Concern Trolling and I would just like people to stop doing it.

The answers are: Because society told me fatness was ugly and I would never ever talk to anyone I love like that.

With just that little bit of space to dig into the negative reaction to myself, I shattered the foundation of it and could begin to build something more positive and more stable instead. Something built on truths. You are deserving of love and respect because you are human and imagine the beauty of a world where we all loved ourselves radically. It starts with YOU.

Once I started that habit in response to my negative tone towards my body and my appearance, I found it grew into every area of my life where I start to critique habits or behavior. For example, I was sending a “professional” email recently and I was using a lot of exclamation points to demonstrate enthusiasm. Then I started criticizing myself for that because we often hear that women do this kind of thing and men don’t and so I thought, Uggg…I need to tone that down a bit.

But then I pushed back on that. Why do I need to tone it down again? Because some random article or tweet or Facebook post pointed out that it’s something women do and men don’t. But…why does that mean I have to change it? Doesn’t the excess exclamation points feel more sincere? Don’t I want to be sincere? Why dampen that instinct just because someone pointed out that men don’t do it?

And I left the exclamation points because…what is the downside? Someone gets annoyed by my enthusiasm? I mean…I AM ENTHUSIASTIC. Why don’t I not try to damped my positive traits just because there’s some sort of societal response that tells me that positive trait is bad. LET US CELEBRATE ENTHUSIASM IN THE WORKFORCE!

I just like that there’s now this instinct to push back on the voices in my head that try to get me to correct or change things about myself. Other times that new instinct helps me reframe something away from the point of view of a negative criticism. Like when I’ve dropped a ball or forgotten something I’ll always beat myself up about it by saying things like, You are so scatterbrained. You really need to fix that because no one feels like they can depend on you. But maybe the right framework is to come from a place of support and love instead of criticism. You tend to be thinking about 100 different things at any given moment, are there any rituals you can set up or habits you can nurture that will help you keep track of all of those things? Can you work on recognizing when you might need to say, “No,” to something in order to keep yourself from feeling so overwhelmed in the future?

Because obviously no one is perfect, but framing everything around the idea of “improvement” or “correction” does not foster the foundation of radical self love. Instead I need to love who I am and therefore sometimes find better ways to approach things that honor who I am. And on the surface it may just seem like semantics, but if you are someone prone to negative self-talk then you know that semantics are important. For me…negative self-talk builds negative self-perception. I beat up on myself all the time which means I spend a lot of time wallowing in self-disgust and and self-hatred this is not something I want to honor. I don’t want to continue to feel unworthy of love. I want to change that about myself.

(Do you see what I did there?)

Radical self love teaches us to honor everything about ourselves, except for our tendency to hate ourselves.

That one has to go.

I’m not someone who likes folding clothes. I used to just wad up categories of clothes into their drawers when they were younger. The shirt drawer. The shorts drawer. Etc. No folding or rolling, just cram it in and they consistently grab what is on top every time.

But as they got older it seemed like they had different systems that made sense to them for organizing their clothes and so I just started bringing them their clothes in a basket after I did laundry. Then I would nag them for days about putting them up. And then I would get frustrated because: Are the clothes in the basket clean or dirty? NO ONE KNOWS.

So I give them a basket of clothes and they just live out of it in forever.

Now, sometimes my daughter likes to put her clothes up because it helps her find things. But not Wesley. He lives out of that basket every day and never even entertains the idea of putting his clothes up. He puts his dirty clothes in a pile in the corner to keep them separate and you know what? I DO NOT CARE. No nagging from me. No irritation from him. If it works for him? IT WORKS FOR ME.

We never have company so I no longer do that thing where I look at my house with the eyes of someone worried what guests might think. Instead, over the past year, I’ve prioritized function over everything else. “Oh…Kim is snoring which keeps Donnie awake and therefore makes her sleep poorly? Well, let’s throw a mattress on the living room floor and let that be where Kim sleeps!”

Also? I like to do art. Sometimes I paint, a lot of times I like to just doodle in my bullet journal…but I’m less likely to do any of it if my supplies are put up some place. If they’re out, I’m more likely to use them. So, when I took over the desk in the living room (Donnie is taking the bedroom work area so he can close the door during work hours) I kept my art stuff out on the desk even though this is the common area.

Now, the problem with all of this is EVERY. SINGLE. BIT. OF. IT. DRIVES. DONNIE. CRAZY.

Donnie is not looking at the house through the eyes of someone worried about what people think, he is looking at the house through the eyes of someone who doesn’t like clutter and the miscellaneous laundry baskets and mattresses and art supplies are DRIVING HIM CRAZY.

It turns out, we lined up perfectly when I was constantly hiding the “ugly” stuff because we were having company come over. And now that I’m all, “Fuck it. This is my house and I just want it to function for me and my family,” Donnie is like…WAIT. BUT IT NO LONGER FUNCTIONS FOR ME.

We’ve been working on compromises. We bought a rollaway bed, but right now it’s also cluttering up the place because I have to replace my daughter’s mattress with the mattress on the floor because it’s better and that’s just a big hassle and I’m worried the rollaway bed won’t be as comfy so I’m putting it off. We’re also looking for a cart or something that will fit under the desk for my art supplies.

But this is all so weird! Donnie and I have been together for 20+ years and we’ve always aligned with domestic stuff. I’ve never felt like we were having to find compromises like this but now that I stopped caring about my house being some weird version of “Show Ready” and caring more about function, turns out our natural preferences for order don’t line up.

If you and your partner have conflicted ideas of domestic order/standards, how do you function? THIS IS KILLING ME. JUST LET ME DO WHAT I WANT IN MY HOUSE.

(He’s thinking, “THIS IS KILLING ME. I CAN’T LIVE IN THIS CHAOS IN MY OWN HOUSE!”)

Any tips or tricks for compromising around domestic preferences for order/tolerance for chaos?

This is not because I don’t like my job, I do...I like it very much. I get be around books all day, checking them in and out and pulling holds. I get to put together kits for crafts for kids and help people print things. (Oddly, a service I’ve been using my own branch of the library for since I printer died at my hands a few months ago.) I get to research books to use for the Storytimes I’ll be leading and I get to open up packages of new books to put on the shelf. I love it all so much!

But still…Leaving my house for 5 hours every day for a job (1 hour of that is commuting, it’s on the Southwest corner of my county, 20 miles from my house) is not something I’m used to by any means and so I feel zapped. The birds woke me up this morning. I never sleep later than the birds. Never.

I also thought it would be a good idea to schedule the kid’s vaccinations this week after work so last night I didn’t even get home until 8pm and y’all…some nights that’s my bedtime! Of course I needed to wind down and so Donnie, Wes and I turned on Legally Blonde which I haven’t seen in years. (I’ve seen the musical twice, however, it’s one of my faves.) “I’m just watching this until I feel like I can fall asleep.”

We finished the whole movie. I STARTED A MOVIE AT 8PM ON A WEEKNIGHT AND THEN I FINISHED IT. This is about as far from Normal Kim Behavior as you can get.

By the way…did you catch that up there? My kids are getting vaccinated! I signed my 15yo daughter up as soon as the Walgreen website opened up so I took her last night, but my 12yo wanted one or two more days to brace himself as he’s not a fan of shots, so he goes tonight. I can not explain how happy my daughter was. There was absolutely no hesitation. As a matter of fact, she got the alert that places were setting appointments for ages 12-15 after I had already gone to bed Wednesday night, but she texted me anyway and I got up and scheduled her right then.

I just hate so many people have anxiety about getting the vaccine because every shot someone I love gets, reduces my anxiety 10-fold. We are so close now to living in a full-protected household. Protection from something that has killed almost 600,000 people in this country so far. I’m just…beside myself with relief. By June 18th my family should be fully vaccinated and then…we might eat inside a restaurant for the first time since March 2020.

Maybe. It will take awhile to ease my anxiety a bit about doing anything normal I guess.

So, Friday of my first week working, the week my kids get their first doses of the vaccination, and the week the CDC told us all we can be unmasked if we’re vaccinated. What a weird week that sets a whole new future in front of us.

My husband starts his job a week from Monday. He installed the last outlet and closed the last open circuit from the house re-wiring project yesterday. All of the circuits in the bedrooms were mixed together so while upgrading the wiring, he separated them which made the project take another day or two but now every outlet in every bedroom is grounded. You don’t realize how many things have 3-prong plugs until you don’t have 3-prong outlets. We also have hard data lines in all of the rooms so if you have a stationary setup you can avoid using the Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi is also moved now to a more central part of the house so the overall internet experience is going to be 1,000 percent better which is good since Donnie’s livelihood will depend on it.

He should be getting the tech from his new job in the next few days and then his home office transformation will be complete. By the time the kids are fully vaccinated and we go out to eat for the first time inside a restaurant in months, our lives really will feel different. We will be toasting in a new future that feels entirely uncharted.

If you had asked me in March of 2020 if the pandemic would change our lives I would say, “I’m sure it will,” because it felt so huge. But I could have never predicted all of the different roads we would end up on during the course of the next 15 months and sometimes - when I sit back and imagine our future - I get a little bit of whiplash by how different it looks from how I thought it looked when I moved Mom here in March 2020…at the beginning of the pandemic.

Here’s to settling into the new future and trying to find time and space to mourn the people and paths lost, while being grateful for the opportunities and improvements we stumbled onto along the way.