Frozen

When your heart's too open

CN for cPTSD response, fatphobia, complex health

When you’re having a book commercially published, there is sometimes a PR person who arranges opportunities for you to promote your title. This will hopefully lead to more people knowing about the book, and perhaps purchasing it or telling a friend. An interview there, an article here. Every publisher is different and the experience varies.

I’ve written for The Guardian quite a few times, and it’s such a kick to get a byline there. Did I want to write for them? Sure thing! I sent through a bunch of pitches, and we settled on a piece expressing sadness that body neutrality hadn’t been a thing during my upbringing. A few days before pub date I sat down to bang out the 600 or so words, and although it was difficult, a bit like pressing on a bruise, it felt cohesive and had cool jokes about breakfast cereal. I was a bit over word count, as is my eternal dilemma.

Growing up so misunderstood, I have a propensity to over explain. I don’t want anyone to feel confused or misled. I know it’s overkill, but it’s difficult to work out what is too much and where is the sweet spot. We got there in the end after I needed to dig deep to access memory I’d built stone walls around for examples and ways of illustrating my points. It was a painful piece to write, exposing and bittersweet.

Nobody was holding a gun to my head. Plenty of people want to be published on this masthead (is it a masthead? I have no idea what that word actually means). This is what I write - things that matter and have mattered to me, with a hope to liberate others from confusion or distress, to contextualise and reflect a different perspective than the status quo.

On Sunday the piece went up, and I remembered as I was in the passenger seat with my family, hurtling along beautiful Djaara Country toward the Calder. We were heading a few hours south for a family birthday, and being squished in the car is tricky for my nervous system and physicality. It’s something I prepare for and bear the aftermath from. It’s not nothing. When I clicked through and saw the piece, my heart fell through the floor.

I’m writing this not to be pissy at my commissioning editor, who has been very good to me. I want to tell the story of compounding trauma and a physical body. A storyteller who wants very much to live deliberately and with care for myself and others. To raise my children to be sure of their place in every room, and to know that all bodies belong. Not everyone agrees, even though it’s true, that we are an ecosystem and bodies are going to have variables.

My body is unwell and the usual things that make bodies better will create further harm. There are so many intersecting challenges that I’m juggling in terms of physical and mental health that every move is a bit like selecting your next play in Jenga. Let me tell you a story to illustrate what that looks like.

On Monday last week I saw my physio, Jesse. I walked in and felt afraid and also ready to begin for the eight billionth time a process of strengthening my body through powerlifting. For the rest of the week after a very gentle reintroduction that I replicated once at home via a carefully tailored program that is safest for me, I felt terrified for my life between the hours of 1 and 5 am the majority of those nights. My nervous system had alerted me to the fact that something had changed (muscle was used, connective tissue was stretched) and my sleep became absolute bullshit. When my sleep is bullshit, movement is next to impossible. This delays the cycle from starting again.

No, I can’t do it anyway. It’s not a choice, it’s an outcome. This week at the physio I discussed my nervous system being unable to calm its tits, even with various medications and CBD oil and lavender and fucking whale sounds. Complex PTSD and chronic pain loops create hypervigilance.

What Jesse fed back to me was so positive. For a long time, the reaction would have been physical pain only (in my cogniscant mind). The emotional fallout, the nervous system going YIKES, would have been concealed by the physical. I was able to access the nervous system information, it was literal words instead of clouded over, too far down the tunnel to understand, data. This was a huge deal. Progress!

So when we start again, we need to factor this in. Be aware that my nervous system might crack ze wobbles. Plan accordingly. But how do you go sleepless for a week, to willingly wander toward increased strength? You just suck it up and do it. You kindly treat yourself with compassion and care. You cancel everything because you’re going to need a lot of scaffolding around this eight minute weight training workout.

I’ve done the program again, and this time - the third time - I rapidly felt good. Knees that wouldn’t, could. Concrete became liquid. The workout gave me energy and physical benefits for the rest of that day. Being who I am as a person, I want to go and do it 57 times this week, but I have to wait til Saturday or Sunday to do it again.

The starting over was necessitated by book touring stuff, which was so teeny tiny compared to most authors. It was three launch events, three radio interviews, one written interview and one byline. I didn’t attend any airports or travel across state lines. Being away from home was a lot more than I’m used to, and that took all my capacity. Conditioning declines as a result, I’m in the car up and down the Calder a lot, my body is impacted by that.

It is maddening beyond description that my mind is so active but my body is not. Can not.

But I digress. I clicked the article and saw an image of a headless femme bodied fat person, undressed, their arms crossed over their body. I know this stance because I’ve fallen into the trap of thinking I could conceal my incorrect shape from my tormentors. My shoulders are FUCKED from a lifetime of holding very still in this position. It is defensive and protective, and sitting in the passenger seat, I had a significant shutdown. A silent meltdown. In my mind was panic and danger and no, it’s wrong, it’s wrong, I have to say something but I’ve been so annoying and my word counts are too big and my body is too big too much too big too much, please, if they’d asked me I could have… I should have? How am I going to.. what can.. it’s Sunday. It’s too late.

I didn’t share the article. I’m usually so fucking proud to have a byline in anything, it fills me like champagne fizz and all I can feel is radiant joy. I wrote a thing! It was published! This is my job! I am so lucky! But I twisted round in tentacles inside myself of how to broach the subject, how to ask for it to be different. Another person shared the article and tagged me, so I shared that to my stories on Instagram. Not many people would see it, which worked for me. My DM’s then had friends asking wtf was with that picture, was I ok? Someone else had said oh I saw that picture and didn’t bother clicking on the article, but now I know you wrote it I read it and it’s so good! Another person thought it looked strong and serene, which was a valid perspective. I was probably overreacting, that’s generally what I do…

But no. It wasn’t safe for those words to land under that picture, not for me. The image told people about defence and shame and fatness and why bother to wear clothes, we can see that you’re wrong shaped anyway. Let’s strip it all away so we can really look at what we’re dealing with, that you’re forcing us to reckon with. Gross. Your presence offends us, and we will make you pay. Not only does your shape inform us that you are selfish, but also greedy, ill-mannered and of lower than average intelligence. You are taking resources from those who have normal bodies. Correct bodies! Do you have any idea how many resources you selfishly take in medical settings? It’s perfectly acceptable for us to tell you how worthless, ugly, in the way and out of place you are, because you started it by being this way. And on, and on and on.

Show me a person living in a larger body who hasn’t faced a lifetime of this and I’ll posit that we’re looking at a plump leprechaun. All of this has been waded through, reframed, healed from. Recontextualised. I look back at my peers, my tormentors, and wonder if they had any idea that we were facing the same enemy. Couldn’t we just be soft and gentle with each other and make it through childhood as a team? There are too many people who hate their bodies at all ages and sizes, too many still impacted by the voice inside of them that wormed its way in from advertising and cultural mores and Very True Facts that You Are Bad because Your Body is Wrong.

A friend very kindly wrote words for me to send when I shared how afraid I was in my meltdown, and I sent them to my editor on Monday morning. The publication responded quickly and yet I was stuck in concrete. I could not reply. I could not engage, or face it again. I’d already bared too much of myself. I was sick of talking about myself and my pained and insane body that I love and protect with all the energy I have. Couldn’t we talk about something else now?

Eventually I asked bestie Jess to help me because I was stuck, and they did so just by reading that message. It helped me open my laptop and send some headshots for them to choose from. In moments, the article’s image was my face in the sun, wearing a keffiyeh with the pre-bushfire lush greenery of Leanganook behind me here on Djaara Country. Probably an annoying leftie image to some but one I like very much. I look like I feel inside in this photograph by Amy Woodward. There’s no masking or defending myself, only facing the light. Completely unafraid.

What happened next felt like a garden hose being unkinked and oxygen flowing through my body again. Everything had been leaden and heavy, painful and stuck. Now I could make dinner and get my kids into baths and monitor iPad time and give cuddles and actually be present in the moment. The 31 hours prior, I’d been without that. All because an image that didn’t match the words I’d contorted myself to get onto the page had been published alongside it. I’d disappeared to a safe place, although it was agony it was less troublesome than fighting an impossible spirit of the stairs from decades past.

Triggers are everywhere. For those hours I was eight layers deep away from now and other people. I was holding everything still as I could to make sure there was no other reason for anyone to strike out at me, or to send me away or laugh bitterly at me if I thought I belonged with the group. It’s a deep and gushing wound that probably will never heal over completely.

I’m devoted and committed to ensuring as many children as possible receive different messages than that. That they have a chance to call in a belief in themselves and their place based on a story they held in their beautiful chubby little hands a long time ago.

Some phenomenal collage art from a young person at the Djaara Country launch for My Body is my Home at Castlemaine Library. Beci Orpin has created some worksheets with some key shapes from the book for kiddos to explore paper collage with.

OMG BANANA CAR! Artwork by a wonderful kiddo at Melbourne Writers Festival storytime at State Library Victoria

When I look at the image now that was originally placed with my words, I can see that it’s beautiful. There’s no denying it. It just doesn’t belong with the piece. What I saw was the person’s body language, how exposed they were, and that they weren’t worthy of having a face. Because once you’re clocked as being a fat person, you lose your identity, your humanity. You’re just a suck on resources that better people should have instead of you.

Now I am there, face and all, every messy complex part of me showing up. It’s been a hard week, and I’m treating myself gently in the aftermath. I appreciate your patience if you’re waiting for a response from me, because I’m heading out of office for a bit to soothe that inner child who had a bit of a fright and needs to feel safe and sure again.

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While I was writing this yesterday, a friend delivered this sweet little guy to my house in a gift bag with a card. I sometimes find it difficult to open gifts, to register that they’ve been given to me. It can take days or hours to turn toward generosity coming from outside of my family. Late last night as I was doing all my faffing around to get ready for sleeping (meds, cpap bullshit, final correspondences of the day, etc) I looked at the little bag on the bedside table. I felt so full to the brim of too much everything, unprocessed flotsam and jetsam. It felt risky, because when you’re a host for complex trauma everything has the potential to set off some strange and frightening chain reaction. The eight minute workout resulting in a sleepless week, for example. Good things, banal things, all can be weaponised by memory and wiring.

This is the cute little guy from My Body is my Home, and J P is stitched onto their feet. They have pink hair like me and on the back are the words “one of a kind”. The card was personal between us, but suffice to say I felt safer and seen as a person with a face who matters and belongs. I am deeply grateful and my sweet little guy will come with me to the sea to help me finish my book next week. This is a project I started a few week’s after my father’s death, five years ago today. What is time (rhetorical).

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There are a few new folks here since Sunday, welcome! Thanks for following along. Paid memberships are never expected and always gratefully appreciated. Please do me a solid and do not pay for a membership if you are experiencing financial stress! I’m glad you’re here.

All my love, JP