I feel kind of gross and preachy sometimes. Like I begin every one of these with “I couldn’t help but wonder..”

That being said, of course I’m gonna write another absolute. Aren’t I charming?

I have never been more sure–not about anything I’ve written–than I am about the following:

The things other people find beautiful about us are not the things we meticulously cultivate in ourselves. 

I’ve read and rewritten that line maybe 50 times this hour. For 49 of those rewrites, I used the word “usually.” That’s both super lame, and a cop-out. Because if I believe in this as strongly as I say, I might as well cut the disclaimers.

I needed it to sound right, though. Because this is my Everest, yeah? Other than perhaps being gratuitously dramatic, that is the most important, hardest-won thing I got for you. 

I am aware that I’m in my mid-(arguably early) twenties. I am aware that my clout is that of a newborn. But. I really am sure about this. 

I’m going to use “we.” Please take this as personally or as hypothetically as you wish. 

The things other people find beautiful about us are not the things we meticulously cultivate in ourselves. 

We want to be able to point to something, consistently, that makes us good enough. That makes us pretty or worthy or lovable or attractive or okay. It’s a lot about identity–but it’s more about being afraid. We are very afraid of not being in absolute control of how we’re being seen.

We want to see ourselves, first, before anybody else does. So we work really fucking hard to make sure that the parts of us we want seen, are without flaw. 

This was my body. This was being skinny–underweight–sick. For me this was being small. I ascribed meaning to my weight–this meaning was identity and safety both. 

I really believed that being thin was what was likeable and attractive about me, and so I worked excruciatingly hard to maintain it. I worked so fucking hard so that people would see that, and that only.

It’s silly and I get it and I really want to talk about it. It’s just that beauty is coming from some other place.

It feels sometimes like I’m doing an experiment: all other variables consistently perfect, what is likeable about me, if anything? And of course, all other factors aren’t perfect, all other variables are careful. 

If every single thing about me is meticulously crafted to fit the urgency I feel, I’m safe to be—safe to be. I don’t know. The rest? What even is that? If what’s left is the girl who is scared so she makes her body small, I don’t know if caution at the outset–as a control–is the right way to conduct this thing. 

What do you find beautiful about someone? Think about that, honestly. GIve it a good think. Because I’ve never said “a perfect looking X, a rippling Y.” 

I’d say, looking sideways at someone as they’re driving. Watching lights pass behind them. Watching them watch something else–the road, a book, my hand. I don’t know. 

I’ve written a lot about compliments–what they hold and what makes them good. Why some stick around. I’d amend what I’ve written in the past, because I was called beautiful in a way that I had nothing to do with. Not something I spend hours every day putting on or taking off. Not something I measure or make bigger or smaller. 

It was, “I love the way you stop using contractions when you’re speaking seriously about something.” 

This makes me cry, still. Because during the time I spent making sure what was being seen, was perfect, this small thing snuck through. And fuck all, it’s become so important to me.

Not because I need to hold really tightly to it, but because. Jesus Christ. Something I didn’t do on purpose is beautiful. 

It wasn’t my body. I was doing it right already.

Take care, you.

x.

Watching people drive the wrong way down my one-way street is perhaps life’s greatest pleasure. 

That, and getting on a plane with intent to cry. Intent to cry, airborne. Ordering a drink and becoming airborne, unexpectedly, drunk.

That and a sleeve of mosquito bites gone unnoticed until some days later, when there’s nothing left to think about. 

Nothing but life’s greatest pleasures. That this is good, good, good. To be sad all the way through–holy business, really. 

I shake my hands when I am about to panic, though they are steady now. I shake them hard and fast and usually it does nothing to help but I think, at least I’m trying. 

If I’m at work, an hour can go by without banking my mind. 

No memory of 40 conversations I surely had because, look. The receipts in the drawer have my name. Seven letters then eight more for luck. Telling me where I’d been–just there.

Let me know because I don’t–how it all gets better. A little at a time and then looking back, all of it. Because it does, truly. I’ve seen it. 

I’d just like to know how this happens, so as to induce it. Pitocin for an anxious girl seeking self acceptance without the laborious expulsion of a fetus. 

Because sure, I am okay. But I am also desperately in debt to all the time I’ve spent feeling otherwise. In debt to myself, really. A bitch of compiling interest. 

There are lots of beautiful people. There are many brilliant writers. 

There are so many blondes with bangs and big eyes that type for hours then backspace. 

However, it is perhaps life’s greatest pleasure to one day know that even so, it is my difference that I genuinely like. 

For all the times I’ve been made to change, wished to change, or otherwise, there exists now an equal amount of desired continuity. In the person that I am, in the people that I love. And a love for all of that.

So I suppose. Life’s greatest pleasure can be sitting here on the porch. Watching confused drivers.

Sitting here self medicating because damn–I just can’t get enough of me. 

Take good care.

Al. x

Build the parachute as you’re falling, right? This is what we’re doing. We’re terrified–we learn how to be, all the time, terrified. 

I’m thinking first of plumes. These were the feather accents on the hat of every marching band hero. Decorative, uniform embellishment. Evil, sadistic nonsense. 

The most inane bit of high school suffering–and I wore one atop my head every Memorial Day for four years. I played the flute, and man. I played the flute so badly. 

But hey. We build the parachute as we’re falling, and we learn to make a joke about it. We learn to laugh at our heads before the feather pokes our eyes out.

We adapt to the feeling of falling.

We’re made to build the parachute as we’re falling, and what’s more, to build it with what now appears to be a gum wrapper. 

But what now? When we are too old or too sincere to make a joke about it. When the illusion of safety shatters–when we are completely exposed in our inability to slow down. What then?

Like now, see. We’re staring down the effects of irreversible damage. The world will look impossibly different in ten years–in ways that are terrifying and in ways that look a lot like an ending.

I am a dramatic, sentimental bitch, but it isn’t poetic bullshit when I say the ocean is burning. 

Dear reader, we aren’t building a parachute anymore. We’re just plain falling. 

I’ll abandon the metaphor here, though this is consistently how I feel. I’ll leave it because it isn’t helpful–intense fear leads (me at least) to inaction and to despair. I don’t really know what a writer’s (let alone a mediocre peanut butter girl’s) place is in this conversation.

To make an unhelpful metaphor about how we as a species adapt to the feeling of falling–to the feeling of panic? This isn’t helpful, and I hesitate to call it art. But this is how it feels right? Just falling and knowing the ground is there but not being able to quite make it out. 

I don’t know if there is an uplifting edge to this thought. Something about plumes I think–about how we wear it well. Like, we have to, right?

We have to live through this fear, because what else is there? It’s absolutely ridiculous–all of this. It’s silly and devastating and unavoidable. It’s heartbreaking but.

We wear it anyway.

Something like that.

I love you. So much.

-A

I’m depressed, right? I lay awake at 3 am and think all hard and nihilistic. And of course it’s ridiculous–it’s funny to me that I think I’m alone at times like this. This isn’t new to me–it’s not new to you either, dear reader. 

This has been our experience forever, and honestly, shitting on that just isn’t interesting. It isn’t interesting to lean into the notion of cynical detachment as the only way out of hurting.

Irony is not for me. It doesn’t help.

It seems to be our initial reaction to pain, though. And it makes sense. Detached irony to numb out the 3 am panic–easy enough. 

However. It encourages us to hurt ourselves–more importantly though, it encourages us to hurt each other. 

So not ironically, but sincerely. I’ll try to explain where I am right now. I hope this helps someone, somehow. It helps me, at least.

I don’t know how much to share with you, dear reader. Though I hope you’re out there somewhere, my gut tells me I’m talking to myself, who (let’s be honest) is kind of a bummer.

Still, I am hesitant to be wholly open.

See, I want to be reassuring to people who are hurting—to myself. I want, if nothing else, to remind us that there is some other side to eating disorders. To depression. A side where there is less pain, and pain less often. 

That, even so, this is all fantastically hard. 

I don’t feel good, and I think this is my attempt to talk about that. About the fact that this is really fucking difficult—life after recovery. Endlessly worth it, just hard sometimes. 

What’s harder still, I’ve found, is to truly talk about it. To recognize all this pain without detaching from it. 

People find a way however, to get at the pain—to really fucking speak about it. And this is really something.

I try consistently and clumsily to do the same.

I hope you understand that just because I’m hurting, doesn’t mean all this hard work meant nothing. I’m almost sure it meant something.

It meant something, right?

I went on a walk yesterday. 4 miles around a very dark Boulder. It was 9 or 10, and I was remembering all the times I’ve felt worse than I do now. What I found was–we just kinda get through it, you and I. We come out maybe a little fucked up, but mostly just glad it’s over. 

We find some other side. We find it when we choose not to detach. When we sit begrudgingly through the filth we spew at ourselves. 

We find some other side, and it’s better.

I’m in the filth now, but some other side exists. 

I’ll meet you there. 

Okay. So. As we all know I’m quite behind the throbbing pulse of popular culture. Not saying I’m cooler than you (I am) just that I am severely out of touch with like, a lot of it. 

And this is mostly by choice–I am very very tired of The Age of the Pretty Girl. I’m very tired of feeling the need to look a certain way all the time–that if I don’t, what I say will hold no weight. 

You may be saying, “Oh my god that isn’t true at all.” And that’s very sweet of you. However.

Allow me to direct your attention to my most clicked essay in all 4 years of writing this thing, by about 200%. It’s called “Confession” and it’s about struggling to connect with the faith of my childhood. Cool, right? Nah. The title photo is a picture of my ass in bike shorts. Dunno why i did that, really. Was feeling myself that day, maybe. Or was giving God a little, “Up yours.” 

My most clicked essay is the one where I show ass. And I get it, it’s a great ass. Like, killer. 

This fact is just information–and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. I’m going to keep writing and having a great ass and the pulse will continue throbbing somewhere that I’m mostly unaware of. 

Sometimes though, things are popular because they are good. And this is dope, right? We can all share in appreciating the same thing. It’s exciting and encouraging and I genuinely enjoy this phenomenon. 

Shared hatred can have a similar effect–just perhaps a more violent one. Sometimes shared hate incites change, and other times it forces those unwilling to listen to double down in anger. Mostly though, I think it does both quite messily.

The point of all this, dear reader, is first to tell you about something popular that I liked. Then, to tell you why I liked it–why I think our shared appreciation of this good, popular thing is both powerful and affirming.

Promising Young Woman. 

I’m not going to spoil anything for you, because if you haven’t seen it, I genuinely want you to watch it. I also want you to keep reading this, so worry not. There will be no spoiled plots here.

However.

I am now going to speak about sexual assault. So feel free to stop here. I won’t be mad. I adore you. 

–

–

–

Promising Young Woman is a dark comedy, and yeah. I did laugh. I laughed in recognition and disbelief at the anger-and-vulnerability-balancing-act that people who live with trauma must perform. 

I laughed at the absolutely fucking infantile way that people tend to react when faced with the reality of their own actions. I laughed because I’ve seen it. So, so many people have seen it.

I have not been able to stop thinking about this film–genuinely. I think this is because it’s not about revenge, really. It’s about asking people to recognize what they’ve done–to just fucking say that they were wrong.

I understand the desire to seek this particular kind of closure.

Here’s why.

–

–

–

I was barely 21 the last time I blacked out. It was August and I weighed less than I had in elementary school. By a lot. 

I was so excited to be able to live my life, for however brief a time, finally away from doctors and strange, performative group therapy. 

This time would in fact, be very brief.

Regardless, I went out with a friend; I got drunk very quickly; most of the night is lost. 

However:

I remember throwing up in an unfamiliar toilet. I remember laying down on an unfamiliar bed. I remember being unable to lift my head, or even speak, for some time.

I remember two men, both strangers, one of whom had begun kissing me. Me–who had lost the ability to turn away.

I heard from some distance the second man. “What are you doing?”  He was asking his friend. His friend–the boy kissing what were supposed to be my lips–replied, “What? I’m not doing anything.”

“What? I’m not doing anything.”

I was utterly absent. I could hear these boys speaking but could not stand to leave. 

I figured I was dead. I figured that I was dead and that this horrible face–this wretched man’s face–would be the last thing I would ever see. 

My friend, my beautiful, lovely friend, found me. She got me home. Somehow somehow somehow, in a way that I don’t remember, and In time enough. She got me home.  

I woke up shaking some hours later. Afraid. Very much so.

I blamed myself, of course. I blamed myself, not thinking for a moment how the wretched face I couldn’t quite remember belonged to the person deserving of the blame. 

I am realizing only now, years later, that I have been angry for a very long time. 

I am angry that at my most vulnerable, I was taken advantage of. I am angry that this story is one that so fucking many people relate to, that this isn’t uncommon or surprising. That this won’t shock whoever’s reading. Not even a little. Not at all. 

I am angry that I am considered incredibly fortunate because it could have been much worse. I am angry that some will have stopped reading by this point because I am telling a story they’ve already heard. 

That they have even grown tired of. 

Stop reading. Stop reading if you want, but remember this: we have all lost the ability to turn away. 

How old were you when you learned to cover the top of your drink with your hand to avoid being drugged? How old were you when you started carrying mace?

13? 14? Younger?

The morning after it happened, I told a friend of mine why I was afraid to leave the house that day. He was livid, and he was wrong. Why was I telling him this; why would I have gotten so drunk? These are the questions he asked, not, “Allison are you okay?”

I was to blame, he was saying. It was my fault. 

I wish I could have said this then, but I’ll say it now–more for me than for him. 

I had been afraid all my life. I had been afraid and cautious and unbelievably guarded from the moment I understood my body. 

There is something deeply, frighteningly wrong here–with the fact that a single moment of vulnerability in a life marked by extreme caution was immediately met with this. This wretched face. The response, “What? I’m not doing anything.”

“What? I’m not doing anything.”

It wasn’t my fault. Dear reader, it isn’t your fault. Their immorality is not the fault of your vulnerability. Their immorality is never your fault.

This is their fault. 

And whoever they are, I want them to know that. I want them to recognize that.

I love you, dear reader.

For resources and advice:

Call 800.656.HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member from a sexual assault service provider in your area.

Wake up obscenely early. Think about a boy, get sad but not unbearably. Brush teeth. Don’t floss because you “forgot.”  Shower. 

Maybe choke up after shampooing–you thought again about all the places you’d rather be than a shower in Boulder shared with two other women. 

Wrap your hair in an old tshirt and sit down on your bed to write something very important. Fall back asleep for an hour and fifteen minutes. Wake up, cuss, take your hair out of the tshirt. Tame it.

Pick an outfit. Look at your body in dismay, and pick a different outfit. Do it again. After the third outfit, return to the first and convince yourself you look hot. Find your purse. 

Walk. It is important as an unemployed person that you walk. If you cannot have a job, at least you can have a great ass and chiseled calves.  

Check your email on the move, just to be sure nothing has changed. Listen to “New Partner” by Palace Music and feel kinda numb about the whole “trying your best” thing.

You start to sweat at this point. It’s hot and you’re at altitude–you are used to this. 

You drop the first of many resumes at a pasta place on the corner of 10th and Pearl. A bald man rushes forward to shake your hand. It’s clammy and you fake a smile under your mask. 

He takes you to a corner booth and asks you questions which you answer exclusively with lies. “I want this job because serving is fun and rewarding,” you say, though the answer is more about knowing you’ll make good money because you’re kind and tippers respond well to that. 

“What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?” He asks. You respond, “Just get through it, because I have to.” Which is the first honest answer you’ve given him. 

He shakes your hand again, and you wonder if people should still do that after all this time. 

You do this four more times, with varying degrees of disguised self-hatred. You pass the strip club you were once in heavy email correspondence with until the audition seemed scarier to you than eviction. You buy a dollar slice of pizza and eat it while walking. 

You get home then. It’s late afternoon. Your back hurts and your hips hurt and you wonder why it is that your body always seems to hurt. 

You open your laptop and decide you do have something important to write. That this is your life currently, and you aren’t really that ashamed of it. 

You’re a writer and a student and a friend and a lover and an unemployed girl in her 20s. It’s probably fine, you think.

Love you, dear reader.

Good luck. 

I think earnestness is just about all I have in writing. I could write a thousand words–all ironic–I don’t, though. Other people do that better than I ever will. 

I’m good at earnestness, and I’m cool with that. See, I like the person that I am. I mean it, too. Myself–not painted or promised or particularly beautiful–is someone I’ve come to like better.

The ability to love oneself though. Shit, game over. If I love myself, I don’t have to lay palms up with some kind of pathetic hope. I don’t. Because unpainted unpromised, fuck all.

Thing is, I am not afraid of being alone, I am afraid of being mistaken for someone who does not like herself–someone who lives in her body, only, instead of her mind–the mind that writes to you. The mind that tells you it’ll be okay because I have to believe it, and do. 

And it will be okay. This true thing doesn’t feel possible, but it is. And to get a good long look at that–to really see it–that’s the end, really. An impossible, true thing. Like being inherently lovable. Like the shock of that. 

It is the end, really, of all the faces I give myself. It is the end of starving and the end of sleeplessness at my own hands and the end, thank fuck, of needing so badly to be someone beautiful before anything else. 

How exhausting. How incredibly boring. 

And hey, I’m not there. But I like myself enough to say so. That’s kinda hot, right?

If, dear reader, you are still reading, sorry for the sentimentality. Be it ovulation, or the warm weather, this is me right now. 

Oh well.

Love ya. 

I’ve been playing a lot of chess recently. 

Before you resort to name calling, sweet reader, know that I am at this time between jobs, and semesters. I have an interview next week, and my life is decidedly NOT in shambles. 

So yes, I can be cool and also play a lot of chess. In fact, I find these things to correlate. 

Anyway. I’ve been playing a lot of chess, and thinking a lot about en passant. It’s a silly French chess move where you snag a horizontal pawn. 

I’ve been walking a lot, too. For hours. And I’ve been thinking about public privacy–being just someone in passing.

Somehow, I’ve realized this is the trick of it all–to move through and be on my way like it’s a novelty to be a stranger. Because it kinda is. It kinda has to be.

Public privacy is a beautiful thing, which is the conclusion I think I settled on. The acceptance of nearly universal anonymity is a weird gift.

I’ll explain why before I’m all the way off the rails into poetic nonsense. 

Going to the grocery store without needing to small-talk with each, solitary stranger, is excellent. We accept the privacy of strangers to such a degree that it almost doesn’t matter that they’re there. Or that we are. 

Public privacy, man. It’s necessary and weird and can get depressing if you’re not very careful—hence my decision to call it a gift or whatever.

Something is happening right now, though–public privacy is dissolving. We are so ready to not be anonymous to each other–so ready, right? To be publicly together. 

It’s “horny summer vibes xd” and I’m annoyed as I always am with everyone involved in that marketing. Probably I’m bitter though; I miss someone specifically far and will wear a mask in grocery stores forever.

For your sad, beautifully formed writer,  it is “chess and contemplative walks xd” right now and honestly, not so bad. 

To be someone in passing is not so bad, either. Catch me walking by looking cool and anonymous.

I’ll look out for you to be doing the same. 

I love you, dear reader.

See ya round. 

As a kid I never had growing pains. And this makes sense right; my frame is small. Still, this has always kind of pissed me off. 

I grew up nice and slow then stopped, which honestly is a little bit of a bummer. I sometimes feel  like I got gypped–like I never had the hard-won satisfaction of growing a body. 

But then I remember–oh yeah–I built an entirely new body in my 20s, so fuck all that. 

And woo boy did that hurt–emotionally yeah whatever–but I mean physically. My body ACHED. My arms, legs, back–it all hurt like hell. 

My body was repairing and rebuilding muscle–I had none (as I was a noodle ass bitch) so naturally this was a big task. But listen if we are talking ass, “noodle” isn’t right. It was two deflated balloons. Pancake ass. Straight up popped and hanging. 

Worry not dear reader we got air now. But please do know that gaining this weight was a big job for the old donk. 

Anyway, as my body hurt my mind got clearer. Clear enough, I guess, to begin to appreciate the inflating (inflation?) that was going on. 

I remember–and I promise this is true–sitting in group therapy (in treatment we had group therapy every day after lunch) talking about body comparison. 

I was deadly insecure, see. I had gained the weight by this time and was feeling like a fresh fawn. Ass was inflated. Tits had emerged. Wobbly legs. Whole deal.

I could no longer hide under baggy clothes. That shit was getting snug and I was genuinely terrified of how my peers would see me–that they would be confused as to why I was there. I felt sincerely huge, though to be clear I wasn’t. This is absolutely a normal stage of recovery absolutely worth pushing through. 

We talked about body comparison a lot, naturally, as I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. On this particular day, dear reader, we were taking turns speaking to our experiences when the young woman (just barely 18) sitting next to me chose to speak. She said, “I struggle a lot with comparison. I mean, look at Allison’s ass.”

Never did I think I’d hear these words, and from an anorexic no less. In literal rehab. My ass was called out, and I had a choice. 

1. Be offended and internalize that as a jab at my body fat percentage.
2. Say thank you.

You bet your fine ass I said thank you.

Growing pains can look a lot of ways, dear reader. Any way you slice it, my ass is just fine, and so are you.

I love you big time. 

Take good care. 

A.

Even though I’d die several times over for Adrien Monk, I resent his character something fierce. Obsessiveness and observational genius don’t go together for me, and they never have. When I am preoccupied with a thought, which I most always am, I am distracted. 

I struggled with OCD as a kid. I have never spoken about this because it did not—and still doesn’t—show up in me in the ways that people have come to expect. I did not have many physical compulsions–they were mental. I’ll try to explain. 

If I was not reminded of my relative safety incredibly frequently, I lost track of it. It was just, gone. I would then need to find things–compulsions–that make the worry drop to a survivable level.

And I always did. Even at great detriment to myself. 

These “things” evolved into adolescence and then adulthood in a way that looked like self preoccupation: weighing myself, and body-checking mostly. Observing myself in the mirror from various angles to assess the fat or lack thereof somehow made me feel safe. Safer at least. For a very brief time. 

These were the only ways I could get away from a scary thought. In this case, the thought was that I’d gained weight. This thought meant that I was ruined. That I was unlovable. That all had been lost. 

That I was wholly and assuredly not okay.

A crock of shit, I know. But for some reason this was the fear that made sense at the time. It filled the hole that was left by years of compulsive worry. It was a deep hole, see. And not a fun one.

For years and years I followed this pattern. Have the scary thought–feel afraid–body check—brief relief. 

I was profoundly unhappy.

I am so afraid of the person who believed in this fear so deeply. I am terrified that these thoughts were real to her–that they were the controlling force in her life. This person genuinely frightens me. 

It was me, though. It was me the whole time. Somehow somehow somehow. 

Dear reader, you know those moments when our minds just kinda leave us?

Does it feel like paralysis to you too? 

I don’t know when we won’t be afraid anymore, sweet reader. But I do think we’ll find something steady. And I do know that there’s another side somewhere. I see it, and I feel it. I think I do. My hope is that paralysis is somehow replaced by a Herculean act of decision making. 

That I will keep going. That we all will. 

And I am. I really am. I am eating and working and cooking and studying. I am spending time with my roommates (I am still not fully vaxxed) and I have a fucking incredible guy in my life and all of this is care. 

The thought that I deserve none of this is terrifying. But the possibility that I will be okay–that I’ll be safe no matter what–is there too

That I’m okay, really. At the end of the day. Even if I was paralyzed by fear and got nothing done and my body feels messy or I have acne scars that other girls don’t have. That we are okay.

We’re safe. 

Dear reader. Here’s your reminder. We’re just fine.

I love you.