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Running Dysmorphic

Illustration by Jonathan Bartlett

Devin Kelly | Longreads | December, 2019 | 15 minutes (3,955 words)

I’ll begin this essay the way I introduce myself to a fellow runner when meeting them for the first time: By telling you that I’ve run two 4:48 miles back-to-back. That I’ve run five miles in 26 minutes, 10 miles in 55. That I’ve qualified for the Boston Marathon five times and ran my fastest marathon — 2:41 — into a headwind there in 2015. I’ll begin the essay this way because I don’t love myself, because when I see another runner seeing me I assume they see me the way I see me: all baby fat and bone stock.

I won’t introduce myself by telling you that, on days I don’t run, I have to do 200 sit-ups right before dinner if I want to allow myself to eat. That, in the times I’ve had company over or have eaten at someone’s house, I’ve done those sit-ups in other people’s bathrooms. Or that I’ve been known by roommates to, minutes before dinner, rush out the door and run for 15 minutes if I haven’t run at all that day. Or that in college, I bought a scale and a journal and weighed myself three times a day, documenting my weight to the decimal point each time. For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

I come from a family of runners. My uncle ran a four-minute mile relay split at the University of Missouri. My father ran three miles in 15 minutes as an AAU trackster in Western New York. My brother runs for a track club in Washington, D.C., and has plans to break 70 minutes for a half marathon. He will. Growing up, I ate the same things as my brother but never grew the extra inches. In fourth grade, my nickname was “Marshmallow,” my body Irish white and puffy at the edges. In fifth grade, that same body, some choice lost teeth, and an unfortunate haircut made my nickname “Gopher.” The next year, my brother ran the unofficial middle school record in the gym mile. I smiled through the nicknames and picked up running because I wanted to be like him.

It’s odd to have one of your coping mechanisms become the thing you abuse to seek approval. What I mean by coping mechanism is that I began running because I wanted to, and I kept running because it saved my life. In fifth grade my mother — an alcoholic, a bulimic, an addict, the most beautiful person I know — left my father and my brother and me. Those years, I ran often with a Walkman cradled in my palm so it wouldn’t skip on my downstep, listening to CDs I burned with odd, jangling, melancholic playlists ranging from Jack’s Mannequin to Joni Mitchell. I kept running because it felt good to run away from home and then come back on my own, with no one chasing me, all of it up to my own two feet, my own volition. I kept running, too, because I got less chubby and started to get fast. I kept running through middle school and high school because even after therapy sessions and basement meetings with children of alcoholics, the only time I felt in control of my own body and mind was out on the road, where there was no one to tell me to speed up or slow down other than myself.


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What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers. In a 100-meter dash, a difference of .1 seconds between two sprinters might as well be a mile. Watch any final kick of a mile race, and you’ll often see five or six runners separated by half a second at the finish line, spread all over the track. And consider how being one single second slower than someone else on each lap of a 5K track race means that you’ll be close to a hundred meters behind them at the finish, which might be the difference between being a professional runner and a nobody for the rest of your life. No matter how good you are compared to everyone else you’re racing, when you’re a competitive runner, you have no choice but to measure yourself by seconds ticking away on a stopwatch.

By the time I left high school, I was a decent enough runner to walk on to the track and cross country teams at Fordham University, where I reveled in comparative mediocrity for four years, never making much of a dent in the outcome of any race or meet. But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks. I wanted to be as good as I could possibly be, to reach my fullest potential. I did not want to be an embarrassment. But I began to feel like one. It started with pictures, when I saw the way my thighs loomed larger than the bare essential thighs of other racers. Why weren’t veins cascading down my legs like a map of rivers? I started to be afraid to take my shirt off on long runs when everyone else did. I began wrapping the towel further up on my torso, so no one would see the un-flatness of my lower belly.

For a long time I’ve told people that this was about running, that it was about feeling the breeze, beautiful and sun-scorched, for just a little while. But really it was about eating. And permission. And wanting a different body to do all that running in.

Years before, in high school, my coach had told me I could stand to lose a few pounds. Then, in college, one of my teammates said, “You’re not fat, you’re just …” before trailing off. I began to understand a few things. I looked in the mirror and saw someone society might’ve deemed as lean or athletic, but someone who was too big, too thick around the bones to be taken seriously as a competitive college runner. I understood, too, that this was an issue the women on my team, and women all around the county, faced daily. I knew female runners who were anorexic, bulimic, the subject of harassment from runners and coaches. I understood all this but also didn’t know what to do with it. I was never satisfied in a terrible way. Nights of impromptu diets, nights of less food, nights spent running secret miles around the block. Nights like this, willed against my body, willed for my body, until I looked in the mirror and saw six hard lumps protruding out of my abdomen, then immediately wished that they were more pronounced, that a creek bed ran between them. I bought a scale and began to measure myself daily, but even then I did not know what to do with this information, with all these numbers. Where was the lowest point I could reach? What was ideal? When would it stop? I didn’t know where to put it. I wanted to put it down, but I couldn’t. I still really can’t.

Those years, I learned to introduce myself among runners before anyone else did, so that they would not have to make any sort of judgement audible. “I’m the fat one,” I’d say. Or I’d grab a fist of lower belly and say, “I gotta lose this! I know it!” I didn’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable with the unsaid. I wanted them all to know that I knew whatever I assumed they were thinking. I wanted everyone comfortable with my knowledge of my inadequacy. And that’s not to say that my teammates were even remotely mean to me. Some of them are still my best friends. I love so many of them dearly. But at a high enough level, even if you’re not very good, you learn to unthink your love for yourself. It’s the bane of being a human. If you’re smart enough to observe the world around you, to overhear one stranger’s snide comment to another, to see the person on the train deleting photos of themself from their phone, you can make the mistake of assuming another person’s judgment even if it’s not really there. The world is cruel that way. It doesn’t promise anything but delivers everything instead.

The idea of believing in your own negative self-image as a route to self-betterment is fundamental to the American experience. I think of faith and the way the church and the state have never really been truly separate in this country. Humble yourself before the Lord, the scripture says. Without you, I am nothing, I once prayed. In America, that you can take many forms. Wealth, power, style, a new body. It is part of some collective understanding here that there is always something more to be other than ourselves. It is told and untold. It eats away at the image in the mirror. I look so hard some days to see someone other than me. Because I want to. Because I need to.

What they don’t tell you about competitive running, though, is that you are often reduced to the most specific of numbers.

But what is the end goal of self-improvement? My answer now is different than it ever was. Years ago, I would have rattled off a series of numbers. Finishing times. I would have told you dreams and ideas. Jobs. Now, my answer varies. Some days, it’s simply I don’t know. Some days, the hardest thing to do is to forgive myself for being myself. America makes this hard. America, where you manifest destiny. America, where you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. America, where you suck it up. This America of no pain, no gain. This America of contradiction, this America of dissonance. This America where our mythological origin story begins with work ethic and ends with a shame we lodge deep inside our collective heart and never acknowledge.

After college, I went to graduate school to become a poet and fiction writer, which was not something I explored a lot in college, where I never took a single creative writing class. I leaned into the idea of this new identity pretty hard, while still holding onto my identity as a serious runner. What that looked like was objectively weird. I took up smoking and drank pretty heavily. I stayed up late with my friends after class and sat in backyards and ripped through packs of cigarettes and six packs of beer and stumbled to the last train back to the city in those first hours of morning. Then I’d wake up, make coffee, and run. I was training for my first marathon and putting in 70, 80 miles a week of running. I’d do workouts on the treadmill between classes, then light up a cigarette the moment I left the gym. I wanted to be both reckless and fit. I wanted to say fuck you to a world that said I had to change things about my body and myself in order to be better. I did not want to fit into a prescribed mold. I relished when people would ask the question you smoke … and run?

This stroked an ego that had never been stroked before. In college, even running at a highly competitive level, my mediocrity was front and center. I would line up to race a 5K on the track knowing that I would not win. And then I’d finish in the middle or the back, walk off the track, and notice all the things that were different about the winners than me. They were always taller, skinnier. They walked lightly along the surface of the earth like angels. And I’d pinch my own thighs, find the fat in me, and want to slice it off with a knife.

But I still loved what it felt like to race. To really be out there, in that liminal space between the moment a stride is taken and the moment just before it lands, the crunch of cinder under my feet and the blood hot in my cheeks.

But with this new identity, I could be a hard-living, hard-running rebel. I could deny my past and honor it too. If I didn’t look like a runner, I could look like a writer. In fiction workshops, I learned that the reader delights when the distance between the expected outcome of a story and the actual outcome of the story is the greatest, or when the distance between the expected tone of the content of the story and the actual tone of the content of the story is at its highest. Think of Barthelme’s “The School,” that wacky story of hyperbolic events spinning out of control told in the flattest tone possible. As a person, I wanted to inhabit that distance of expectation versus reality. I wanted to be a walking fucking delight.

The world often asks too much of us, and then we ruin ourselves to be approved by the world. And I think the most sinister aspect of this is that the world’s asking doesn’t often look like asking. In college and after, nearly every time I heard a voice inside my head telling me to lose weight, I couldn’t actually find the voice, or the mouth it came from. The source of that voice was removed, like an elaborate form of money laundering. The voice was there in the way people fawned over the veins bulging out of a distance runner’s calves. It was there when I overheard another runner say, “Damn, man, you look fit” to someone whose ribs were rippling out of his skin. It was there in comment sections and internet forums, as people picked apart even the bodies of professional runners.

And the same could be said about my new identity as a writer. No one ever told me I needed to smoke, to drink myself toward a twilit stumble every other weeknight. But it was there in the packaging, wasn’t it? It was there when I fell in love with my favorite poet, Larry Levis, his eyes catching mine from the book’s back page through a haze of black-and-white smoke. Or watching an interview with Baldwin, seeing him deliver something searing before pausing to smoke, knowing he had the audience. Or the great stories of the great drunks, or the great stories we thought we told while greatly drunk.

It’s about identity, isn’t it? All of it. It’s about the fact that this life is not comfortable if you’re aware of your own your-ownness. It’s about the comfort of ritual, and sometimes the comfort of demands, about what it feels like to see someone else’s structure then to mold yourself to fit into it. It’s about not wanting to be judged. I wanted to set myself apart but also be a part. I wanted to say I’m one of you to as many people as I could because I was scared of being myself.

I ran my fastest marathon during those grad school years, when I was drinking and smoking more than I ever had or would in my life. I don’t know how, or why. I wouldn’t recommend it. I was also losing a bit of myself, every day, to ideas of who I should be and my desire to both inhabit those ideas and deviate from them as much as possible. I was a tourist in my own life.

Today I am six years removed from my last race as a collegiate athlete and probably 20 pounds heavier than I was then. Maybe 30, I don’t know. I don’t let myself buy a scale. I still look at myself in the mirror every time I take a shower. I turn and turn and see my body in the light. I push the belly around, pull it down, try to find the body I used to have. I am trying to learn how to be proud. I don’t really know how. No one ever taught me. This is part of being a man in America. My girlfriend, coming back from a run of her own, will often mention how she passed a man while running who then, upon realizing he had just been passed by a woman, sprinted past her. This happens to her at least once a week. It’s sad to live in a world where vulnerability is still widely seen as weakness, where the things men are taught to be proud of are often the things pushed outward and not turned inward.

The violence of shaming someone is so often a result of distance between what you see in front of you and how you feel inside. I know this because I shamed and still shame myself. I am concerned with the violence of men. I am a victim of my own masculinity, which is as dark and deep as the surface of a lake stretching out in the middle of the night. The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like pull yourself together, or make better choices, or I did it, why can’t you. Shame neglects the work of understanding. Shame is waking up in the morning to see the lake in daylight and saying it looks too far to cross. The potential for understanding is the rowboat moored along the shore. In America, especially, there is a long line of men sitting on the beach, taking photos of the lake they’ve yet to cross. I am with them, too, waking up each morning to get in the rowboat and begin anew the long, relentless journey of learning to love myself. Some days I don’t even try. Now, more than 15 years after my mother left my father and brother and me while struggling with addiction, I want to hold her and say I don’t get it, but I do. How hard it must have been, how hard.

I still turn to running to find solace, because it’s the only place that offers it for me. Frustrated, tired, stressed — the first thing I think to do is lace up my shoes and go for a run. Out there, years of practice have allowed me, no matter how I look, to maintain some semblance of control over my life. I can speed up and slow down. I can have an easy day or a hard day. I can push my own threshold of pain, dial back, and push it again. I imagine this kind of feeling is not limited to running, and certainly not limited to the physical. I think of dancers, those who meditate. That sense of carving a world within the world that you know just a little bit better.

The shame of obesity, the shame of addiction. The shame that sounds like ‘pull yourself together,’ or ‘make better choices,’ or ‘I did it, why can’t you.’ Shame neglects the work of understanding

Two years ago, my friend Matt convinced another friend, Nick, and me to sign up for a 50-mile race. It was uncharted territory for the two of us. We had run marathons together, but 50 miles seemed daunting, too great a task. I’ve written about that day before, how the unimaginable distance leveled expectation. It was the opposite of the Barthelme story. Because it was so outlandish, the only way to approach it was in the most ordinary way possible: step-by-step.

Since that day, I’ve run multiple ultramarathons, as well as two 24-hour races. They are the only places where I feel at home in my body, where judgment feels unnecessary because of the absurdity of the task. There is a sense with ultramarathons that the further out you go, the less you carry with you to be measured by. Yeah, there are people racing these races, but if you go to any ultra-long distance race, you will find that the majority of people don’t care about the veins bulging out of your calves or whatever rippled leanness you present to them, whatever beautiful and rounded edges. Mostly because everyone is banded by a sublime weirdness. If you run long and far enough, you’ll find something good in yourself and see something good in someone else. The thing is, this isn’t even that strange of a concept, because life is like that, too. All these people. All different. All on the start line of today’s morning wearing different things and being different heights and sizes. It’s not really a cliché so much as a fact. It’s difficult enough, life is. Who cares what you look like doing it?

The word endurance means, quite simply, to suffer without breaking, to continue on. It boils down to the Latin word durus, which means hard. To be without pliancy. Which is interesting because of the way so much of endurance, to me, is to bend without breaking. I think of James Wright’s collection of poetry The Branch Will Not Break and how the title is referenced at the end of his poem “Two Hangovers,” as the speaker gazes at a blue jay alighting on a branch:

“I laugh, as I see him abandon himself

To entire delight, for he knows well as I do

That the branch will not break.”

There are a million branches we each stand on over the course of a given day. A lot of us are standing on branches held out by people we will never meet, people with power behind certain doors, people who want us to buy their shit. I think those branches break. I think those branches break often. And I think the same people who make those branches make other branches to catch us when we fall. There are other branches though. The start line of an ultramarathon is a kind of branch. It’s sturdy, too. Not because the people standing on it are light, or especially fit, or anything other than human. It’s because they are human, and they recognize their own absurdity, and they revel in it, and they give themselves permission to find joy.

The Greeks had their own word for endurance, hypomone, which appears frequently in the Bible and is often translated as endurance or steadfastness, but literally means to bear up under. I find this more agreeable. It is the bearing that remains a constant for each of us, but it is also the bearing that takes on different forms. Bearing can look like bending. One who bears a load on their back must stoop to tie their shoe. Bearing assumes a constancy that is not in the rock-hard, unbending quality of the spine, but a constancy, simply, of the bearing itself. We bear and bear and bear.

To recognize each person’s individual capacities for endurance is, I think, one way in which we can create a world that relies more on generosity than judgment. In what ways can we recognize the race we are each running, on our own separate tracks that have no specific shapes, where there is no such thing as time, no such thing as an Olympic record? It is the exactness of time that destroys us. It is the way time has been commodified. It is the how-much-can-you-fit-in. It is the way, when you begin talking about how much you can do or how much you can consume, you begin to think of how to alter yourself so that you can do and consume more.

What I mean to say is: My better is not your better. I want to say it to myself in the mirror, to the face that looks back at me and says you’re not fat … you’re just … I’m working on it. So much of life is about what you give yourself permission to do or don’t do, and how that act of self-permission leads to joy. This requires the discernment to know what joy is, or how it feels, and in what ways it is true. Both of these acts — permission and discernment — take a lifetime to learn. And the choice to learn requires its own lifetime. It goes on, this work. It endures.

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Devin Kelly is the author of In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen, (published by Civil Coping Mechanisms) and the co-host of the Dead Rabbits Reading Series. He is the winner of a Best of the Net Prize, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian, LitHub, Catapult, DIAGRAM, Redivider, and more. He lives and teaches high school in New York City.

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Editor: Krista Stevens
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Rural California Feeds the Nation, But Too Many Rural Residents Can’t Feed and House Themselves

AP Photo/Jae C. Hong

If you eat California lettuce, broccoli, or strawberries, chances are it came from the Salinas Valley. Situated in Monterey County, south of San Francisco, this so-called “salad bowl of the world” boasts an $8 billion agricultural economy that feeds America, but low wages and a dearth of low-income housing make it extremely difficult for many families to house and feed themselves. In Salinas, almost half of all elementary school students are homeless. For The California Sunday Magazine, Brian Goldstone profiles one family of five to tell the larger story of the many families who sleep in their cars and shelters, and the people who try to help them. Both parents work. Their three children attend public school, but a cascade of events left the family living in their minivan. There are a number of services to help the working poor here, but official definitions of homelessness are so skewed that many people in dire need cannot access these resources. Many families find help at the Family Resource Center and from school teachers like Cheryl Camany. “In Monterey County,” Goldstone reports, “approximately 8,000 schoolchildren were homeless last year, more than San Francisco and San Jose combined. For many of these kids, the safest, most dependable part of their lives is the school they attend.”

Camany’s ability to call attention to the scale and consequences of student homelessness had recently been paying off, and the mandate taken up by the resource center was being embraced by others: pastors and city leaders, school administrators and teachers. “There’s so much injustice outside these walls,” said Maria Castellanoz, a third-grade teacher, “but in my classroom, I make sure every student is treated with the dignity they deserve.” Over time, she had come to recognize the signs of homelessness among her students without them having to say anything. When she spotted a kid hoarding snacks underneath his jacket, she brought him extra food the next day. When students nodded off in class, she let them sleep, tutoring them later so they wouldn’t fall behind. All this had altered her understanding of what teaching should look like and what a school was for.

But there’s only so much a school can offer. It can’t give families apartments, or money, or jobs that pay a housing wage. It can’t pass stronger tenant-protection laws or prevent exploitation by unscrupulous landlords. Oscar Ramos, who heads the elementary teachers union, told me that he feared the long-term effects of such widespread volatility — that this “toxic stress,” as pediatricians have termed it, would leave its mark on the physical and emotional health of his students well into the future. “The more I learn about what these kids are carrying,” Ramos said, “the more overwhelmed I get.”

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Checking in on the Masculinity Crisis

Richard T Nowitz / Getty

Kelli María Korducki | Longreads | December 2019 | 14 minutes (3,786 words)

 

Not long ago, I noticed a woman reading Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life at my Manhattan yoga studio as we both waited for our Ashtanga class to begin. The sight took me aback. Despite the 2018 book’s many weeks as a nonfiction bestseller, I’d somehow never considered that the scope of Peterson’s audience might extend beyond sulky white men who like to outsource their thinking. That it might include women with the disposable income and leisure time to spend their Saturday afternoons doing sun salutations, whose lives probably look a lot like mine.

Peterson, a once-unassuming psychology professor at my Canadian alma mater (I’d never heard of him during the years we were both there), has emerged in the last few years as a puzzling figurehead among men’s rights aficionados and self-help enthusiasts alike. Wielding a trademark pastiche of literary references and cherry-picked sociological data points, his writing and, to a greater extent, public lectures broadcast via YouTube deliver what is, for many in this age of ‘toxic masculinity’ and #MeToo, a reassuring story: that men are natural rulers, white privilege is a farce, and if millennial men would just make their beds and assume their kingdoms, we’d all be better off.

Peterson speaks to a constellation of loosely connected concerns that have, in the last several years, dominated popular discourse on where boys and men fit into a society in which gender norms play less and less of a role in determining how people fit together. Conversations about rape culture and damaging gender constructs take place alongside global reports of female students outperforming their male classmates. We hear of a workforce that, at least in theory, rewards the “soft skills” women are purportedly socialized to possess. Meanwhile names like “Dylann Roof” and “Elliot Rodger” have become shorthand for an epidemic of male isolation and rage. A New York Times story that followed shortly after the deadly February 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, included the observation that “about the only thing” nearly all U.S. mass shooters have in common “is that they are men.” Read more…

In Praise of Del Amitri’s Album Waking Hours

Photo by Ian Dickson/Redferns

Alex Green | The 33 1/3 B-Sides | Bloomsbury Academic | September 2019 | 10 minutes (2,044 words)

 

At Passover dinner in April 1990, our Seder came to the pivotal symbolic moment where we poured a cup of wine and opened the door for the Prophet Elijah. As if on cue, in walked a guy wearing ripped jeans and a black mask, holding a shotgun. It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured him. I’d always thought skinny, long hair, a beard, maybe a robe…

“Sorry to barge in like this,” the guy said, “but we’re going to be taking some shit.” Then he whistled out the door and in walked an identical masked intruder with an equally menacing shotgun. The two of them tied my family up and then proceeded to ransack the house right in front of us, pulling out drawers, throwing around dishes, and kicking over plants as they searched for anything of value.

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Bully for You

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Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2019 |  14 minutes (3,476 words)

A few years ago I wrote an essay about my best friend having a baby and my inability to handle it. I wrote about the almost familial closeness of our friendship, about my difficulty parsing what we actually were (friends? more than friends?), and ultimately about the impossibility of accepting someone else getting in the way. I’m not going to relitigate the piece, that’s not what this is about, but I continue to stand by any writer who is sorting themself out in their work and who is self-aware enough to acknowledge their part in their mess. No one else did; I got about 600 comments, pretty much all of them negative: “Want to feel creeped out? Read this. So many issues in one person.” What I remember most, though, were the writers, more famous than me — one of them very famous — dismissing me — not my work, me. What the fuck was I even talking about? Who does that? Fuck no, they don’t want to read that. (Like I was some ancient untouchable, like I was contagious.) Almost all of them were women; all of them known for writing, among other things, about the intricacies of their lives; all of them claiming to make daily work out of forging a space for marginalized voices. But this, a woman wrestling with her feelings about another woman, seemed to be where they drew the line. I wasn’t a murderer, I wasn’t a psychopath, I wasn’t a white nationalist, I wasn’t a criminal, I wasn’t even a cheater, for God’s sake, and yet one of them was offended enough to actually block me on Twitter: “Wow, this is such selfish bullshit.”

Women may be encouraged to bleed out onto the page — there’s a reason the personal essay boom was predominantly populated by them — but it also opens them up to deeper cuts. Not only are they dissected in a way men are not, but the response to this writing, by people of all genders, skews more emotional as well. The motif is so well established by now that it’s almost a rule; at the very least it should be anticipated. And yet, the recent unprecedented pile-on of women writers hectoring a former university student who dared to critique a popular young adult novelist had one of these women telling me, “It never crossed my mind that people would look her up or harass her. That is … bizarre and wildly inappropriate.” 

In 2015, I didn’t expect most people to engage with the mechanics and anatomy of my writing, but I did expect the writers to. I was surprised when they didn’t. I was surprised that it all came down to a headline: This woman abandoned another woman. That I had spent months dissecting 14 years of emotions — that I had distilled them into 2,323 words — was beside the point. The point was that those writers were Good People, and Good People don’t abandon friends, much less friends who are mothers. I was not a Good Person, so there was nothing to consider beyond that. This is where being a writer, any artist really, can be at odds with being a human. Ideally, you meet the artist, the work, the ideas with no judgment. In reality, you meet them with yourself and all the limits of you. In this instance, that also entailed the particulars of being a female writer, which are very different from those of a male writer. Women not only have to withstand all the obstacles faced by every artist in a world that does not value art, but, within that, in a world that also devalues them as women, and therefore their — our — stories. They can’t just write, they have to fight to do it. And as subjugated populations have throughout history, they group together for strength, in order not only to defend themselves, but also other women who can’t — other women they choose, with whom they have a moral affinity, who are deemed worthy of representing their gender. 

This is the powerful woman’s fundamental hypocrisy. Not every powerful woman, but a healthy number. As aggressively as she clears a space for women she approves of is as aggressively as she rejects women she doesn’t. This isn’t so much about who she dislikes, though there’s that. It’s more about women she believes are espousing views that conflict with The Cause of Women™, which is what she and her circle are determined to protect. It’s understandable, yes, but it’s not excusable. A slew of apologies followed the YA mess, with all of the writers making the right sounds, but that was unsurprising. They think, they analyze, they write a good game, the best game, but their actions don’t track with their words. They say they are defending young women’s interests as they attack a young woman. They say they want women to be unlikable, but spurn them for that very same thing. “I am not a politician or a priest or a rabbi,” Roxane Gay, one of the YA supporters, wrote to me. “I’m allowed to make mistakes.” Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but who gets punished? Read more…

Thou Shalt Not Mess With a Mom in a “Mamacita Needs a Margarita” Sweater

Waltraud Grubitzsch/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Proud, bold, feminine yet threatening, and frequently touting alcohol use and caffeine dependency, the slogans American mothers plaster on their shirts, mugs, and sweaters broadcast their identities as exhausted super-women, as well as their need for recognition and connection. For The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino explores what she calls “sassy mom merch,” which has proliferated in our era of Etsy, Amazon, and social media, but whose spirit Tolentino recognizes from her years eating at Cracker Barrel as a Texas youth. Where does the desire to wear the slogan “This mom runs on caffeine, wine, and Amazon Prime” come from? What does this #momlife phenomenon say about being a woman in America? As one successful t-shirt maker told Tolentino, “When you put out a little signal on a shirt, like, ‘I’m struggling too,’ it starts a conversation. Anytime I wear something like that, I always have people comment, or I get those random smiles. It’s sort of like when you’re nursing in public: someone gives you a smile and a thumbs-up, and you know you’re O.K.”

Social media exacerbates two competing impulses in the performance of one’s everyday self: aspiration and honesty. Women, in particular, find these impulses rewarded on the Internet, where the ever-present cultural interest in female desirability and failure—in encouraging women to balance atop pedestals in part because it is satisfying to watch them fall off—is codified in the form of public comments and likes. My colleague Carrie Battan recently wrote about the rise of the “getting real” moment for Instagram influencers, in which women who have built their public identities on meeting an ideal version of womanhood offer a moment of catharsis to their audience: all of this is constructed, they say, and it’s anxiety-inducing, and there’s so much that you don’t see. But this form of expression doesn’t seem to cut back on aspiration so much as complicate it—women are now encouraged to be both very perfect and very honest at once.

The mom-centric Internet has been working out this tension for almost two decades: so-called mommy bloggers turned aspirational honesty into a profitable genre long before Instagram existed. (Quite a few of the best-known mommy bloggers have since upended the lives that looked so perfectly-imperfect-but-mostly-really-perfect, getting divorced, or leaving their religion, or both.) Social media and smartphones have brought motherhood real talk to minimally hierarchical online spaces, such as Facebook groups and messaging apps like Marco Polo. “People ask for support, people talk about things that might be embarrassing elsewhere,” Heather Plouff, an Etsy seller in New Hampshire and a mother of three, told me. “The hashtag #momlife is this big community, where we’re all a little sassy, and we love our children, but we also know that children can be a real pain in the ass.”

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A Beautiful, Rugged Place: Erosion of the Body

Photo by Jerry Zhang, Book Cover from Sarah Crichton Books

Terry Tempest Williams | Erosion | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | October 2019 | 39 minutes (7,820 words)

 

“We are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence.” —Virginia Woolf, The Waves

 

We had just celebrated my father’s eighty-fifth birthday. Louis Gakumba and I were driving back up to Jackson Hole. My husband Brooke texted me, “I love you. Pull over to the side of the road. Call me.” I knew it was Dan. I had been thinking of him as I was mesmerized by the immense cumulus clouds building in the west.

“Is Dan dead?”

“Yes.”

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The Backcountry Prescription Experiment

Illustration by Natalie Nelson

Mathina Calliope | Longreads | December 2019 | 13 minutes (3,134 words)

In 2014 my doctor took me off the antidepressant I had credited with making life okay for the previous 16 years; at 41 I was trying to have a baby with my boyfriend, Inti. I didn’t get pregnant, but this story isn’t about my failure to become a mother. Instead it’s about how a break from my meds led, ultimately and circuitously, to another kind of birth; to a different life for myself.

My doctor’s orders seemed rash. Going off antidepressants is fraught, especially since so many people who want to stop taking them have been on them for so long. New guidelines are emerging that acknowledge this danger; a 2019 study in The Lancet Psychiatry recommended patients taper “over a period of months and down to amounts much lower than minimum therapeutic doses.” But my doctor was nonchalant. “You have something to be happy about now,” he quipped. “You’re trying to have a baby.” Skeptical, but with a tendency to assent to authority figures, I followed his command to stop cold turkey.

Wellbutrin (bupropion) had helped me leave a stifling marriage (though this story is also not about that). It let me dance salsa two to four nights a week through all my 30s. It gave me the energy to earn an MFA. It fueled ten-mile races, half marathons, and a marathon. It supported me throwing myself a 40th birthday party, my favorite night of my life. And the drug helped me have the clarity to see sweet, steady, easy-going Inti — my dear friend of 11 years — as more.

If the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent?

In addition to trying for parenthood, I had recently changed almost everything else about my life. In 2013 I had asked Inti to be my boyfriend and move in. To save money toward a house, in summer 2014, shortly after I quit meds, we put my place on Airbnb and went to live with his mother and brother. That fall I achieved a promotion at work, but the role presented unexpected challenges — not least the fact that the job itself, the career even, was not fulfilling. For the first time in more than a decade, anxiety appeared. The usual infelicities of intergenerational living — different standards of kitchen cleanliness, for example — set me on an edge that felt unwarranted. Fortunately my usual yoga, running, and dancing did a lot of the heavy lifting Wellbutrin used to do. Things were rocky, but they weren’t bleak.

A year after going off the drug, I was not quite depressed, but also not quite the same person I had been on the meds. It had become clear pregnancy wouldn’t happen without heroic measures we were disinclined to take. I grew restless and cast about for something meaningful, something, perhaps, to fill the hole I expected a baby would have filled.

Inti and I moved that January 2015 into a posher-than-necessary apartment of our own, and, with no fetus to protect, I started drinking wine socially and coffee daily again. Circumstances evened out and anxiety dissolved. Depression remained at bay, too, so there seemed no need to restart Wellbutrin. Still, something was off.

Although millions of people take antidepressants and are helped — saved, even — by them, psychoactive substances were not, in fact, first used to treat mental illness but to alter one’s state of mind, going at least as far back prehistory (e.g., chewing coca leaves). It was only later and “serendipitously,” as author and MD Marcia Angell writes in a 2011 New York Review of Books article, that scientists realized such drugs altered brain chemistry. They then hypothesized that since, for example, Thorazine, which helped patients who had schizophrenia, lowered dopamine levels, maybe a surplus of dopamine caused the condition. Similarly, since antidepressants increased serotonin and helped patients with depression, perhaps a serotonin shortage caused depression. “Thus, instead of developing a drug to treat an abnormality,” she writes, “an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug.”

Psychologist Irving Kirsch writes in his 2011 book The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth that double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of antidepressants show the drugs to be infinitesimally more effective than placebos. In other words, although many people attest to the medicines’ good, they may in fact be responding only to the placebo effect. Jerome Groopman, an M.D., notes more recently in the New Yorker that clinical trials have “stirred up intense controversy about whether antidepressants greatly outperform the placebo effect. And, while SSRIs [selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors] do boost serotonin, it doesn’t appear that people with depression have low serotonin levels.” (Bupropion is not an SSRI; rather, it inhibits the reuptake of norepinephrine and dopamine.)

And if so, I wondered, who cares? The placebo effect is real. But if the drugs didn’t fundamentally change my depression, did they, instead, by altering hormone levels, merely mask what might be a treatable source of discontent? What if my problem was never my brain chemistry to begin with? What if it was my life?

One day shortly after moving into the nice apartment, I ditched work for a day hike on the Appalachian Trail, where I met a couple of backpackers who were walking the whole thing, 2,189 miles from Georgia to Maine. I admired their audacity, and the man told me, “It’s never too late.” I had never backpacked, so I almost laughed out loud. But the idea took hold.

Day hiking had always induced unequaled tranquility, in short supply in the prior year. Surely full-time forest living would do more of the same. I had read and enjoyed Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, Wild, and Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods. Theoretically I was a fan of nature. All reasonableness to the contrary, I decided to try it: A thru-hike. I would quit my job, put my furniture in my parents’ basement, break the lease on our apartment (Inti would wait for me in the house he owned with his mother), and spend from mid-April 2016 until whenever I finished, sometime in October, living in and walking through the woods. It was preposterous.
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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

NEW YORK, NY - JULY 15: Protestors left Amazon boxes on the ground in front of an Amazon store on 34th St. on July 15, 2019 in New York City. The protest, raising awareness of Amazon facilitating ICE surveillance efforts, coincides with Amazon's Prime Day, when Amazon offers discounts to Prime members. (Photo by Kevin Hagen/Getty Images)

This week, we’re sharing stories from Will Evans, Tomi Obaro, Rachel Morris, Maya Kosoff, and Michelle Delgado.

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Why Mr. Bauer Didn’t Like Me

Illustration by Alice Yu Deng

Blaise Allysen Kearsley | Longreads | November 2019 | 8 minutes (2,056 words)

I always wanted to be liked by everyone’s parents. So with my No. 2 pencil, I wrote a note that said:

Does your father like me?

I passed it to my friend as I walked by her desk — I’ll call her Margaret Bauer. In fourth grade we sat in small groups, clusters of three desks pushed together in the shape of a T. Margaret sat one cluster away from me. I could see her from my desk, with her bushy, light brown, shoulder-length hair in two ribbon-braided barrettes framing her pale pink cheeks, and I waited anxiously for her to write back. When she walked by and handed the note back to me, it read:

I don’t think my father likes you, but my mother does.

That Margaret said her mother liked me was a consolation, but not much. Mrs. Bauer was nice to me but she always seemed a little less friendly when her husband was around.
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