Radical Self-Love for Everybody and Every Body
Throughout this exploration of non-monogamy, I have learned that I am primary partner. We are always with us. This relationship we have with ourselves is the only one that is guaranteed to last for our whole lives.
As a fat person living in what can often feel like a sea of thinness and a thick fog of fatphobia, it can be easy to believe that your type of body is the only type that is not ‘normal’. But the truth is that there is no such thing as a ‘normal’ body, and the only thing that makes fat bodies feel more abnormal than thin bodies is the institutionalised fatphobia that tries to tell us our bodies are wrong.
You can’t educate with words which don’t mean the same thing or which are not culturally appropriate because it facilitates denial and makes re-education that much harder. As a movement, feminism takes on different flavours in different countries. That much is obvious.
Truth is, Hispanic is my ethnicity, Black is my race, and American is my nationality. I am a black Hispanic-American. When will [people] ever get that right?
I knew how to be an atheist, but I didn’t yet know how to be a better person than I was when I was religious. It was compassion that helped drive me away from the church—a devotion to ideas and people that I felt was impossible for me to reconcile with belief. It was respect for others that taught me how to use nonbelief as a tool rather than a weapon.
Regardless of faith, it is the compassionate and respectful that I consider the very best of humanity.
My history is dialectical: white power, white privilege, establishment/native, Islander, immigrant. I am the liminal space inbetween.
I don’t think that Black feminism is an infallible framework for understanding all experiences, or even all of my experiences. But I do think that it has provided me language and a framework for how I see and experience some critical aspects of the world. I think above all, it’s about riding for Black women.
Especially in public spaces, I’m overly conscious of the way my legs move or don’t move, how my feet slip off the footplates of my wheelchair, how my legs refuse to bend neatly and stay in one place. Depending on the shoe and my level of spasticity that day, I may inadvertently emulate Cinderella and lose a shoe or two along the way.
What’s different about my body though, is my skin and fat texture, and the smoothness of my flesh. I have a condition called Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome type 3, a disorder which causes the connective tissues in my body to be defective (such as collagen), causing a long list of issues, but from a looks point of view the result is that my skin structure is different, causing it to have reduced strength and stiffness.
Caring is a skill set. And it is a skill set that is not necessarily transferrable across all bodies. Different bodies have different needs—need to be cared for in different ways.
You don’t need to sacrifice your nonbinary identity to be sexual, because you do not need to perform gender during sex. There doesn’t have to be a male or female, dominant or submissive.
On the other hand, if men have difficulties in relationship—often because of unhealed early trauma, reinforced by learning to deny feelings—men are easily manipulated by the sexualized culture to seek closeness through sex. For some, it can become a compulsive acting out in the form of sexual harassment or abuse.
Like all mental illnesses, there is a stigma that surrounds anxiety that is unfair at best and downright harmful at worst. Maybe one reason why this stigma continues to exist is because most people do not understand the myriad ways in which anxiety manifests itself.
During my plantation tour, I learned some crucial lessons that I humbly submit, especially for the education of non-Black people, in remembrance of those enslaved. It is only by excavating these truths that American society can begin a truth and reconciliation process toward the ultimate dismantling of white supremacy.
There’s a level of manipulation behind the word flattering when applied to clothing that says: how you look is not okay but this garment will make you look better.
