Addiction, not what you think! Read the article

This is a _must_ read, let me know what you think?
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The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered and It Is Not What You Think

The new evidence will force us to change ourselves.
By Johann Hari / The Huffington Post
January 21, 2015

It is now 100 years since drugs were first banned, and all through this long century of waging war on drugs, we have been told a story about addiction, by our teachers and by our governments. This story is so deeply ingrained in our minds that we take it for granted. It seems obvious. It seems manifestly true. Until I set off three and a half years ago on a 30,000-mile journey for my book Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Days of the War on Drugs to figure out what is really driving the drug war, I believed it too. But what I learned on the road is that almost everything we have been told about addiction is wrong. There is a very different story waiting for us, if only we are ready to hear it.
If we truly absorb this new story, we will have to change a lot more than the drug war. We will have to change ourselves.
I learned it from an extraordinary mixture of people I met on my travels: From the surviving friends of Billie Holiday, who helped me to learn how the founder of the war on drugs stalked and helped to kill her; from a Jewish doctor who was smuggled out of the Budapest ghetto as a baby, only to unlock the secrets of addiction as a grown man; from a transsexual crack dealer in Brooklyn who was conceived when his mother, a crack-addict, was raped by his father, an NYPD officer; from a man who was kept at the bottom of a well for two years by a torturing dictatorship, only to emerge to be elected president of Uruguay and begin the last days of the war on drugs.
I had a personal reason to search for these answers. One of my earliest memories as a kid is trying to wake up one of my relatives, and not being able to. Ever since then, I have been turning over the essential mystery of addiction in my mind. What causes some people to become fixated on a drug or a behavior until they can't stop? How do we help those people to come back to us? As I got older, another of my close relatives developed a cocaine addiction, and I fell into a relationship with a heroin addict. I guess addiction felt like home to me.
If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have said, "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next 20 people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for 20 days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day 21, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means.
One of the ways this theory was first established is through rat experiments which were injected into the American psyche in the 1980s, in a famous advert by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. You may remember it. The experiment is simple. Put a rat in a cage, alone, with two water bottles. One is water. The other is water laced with heroin or cocaine. Almost every time you run this experiment, the rat will become obsessed with the drugged water, and keep coming back for more, until it kills itself.
The advert explains: "Only one drug is so addictive, nine out of 10 laboratory rats will use it. And use it. And use it. Until dead. It's called cocaine. And it can do the same thing to you."
But in the 1970s, Vancouver psychology professor Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently? So Alexander built Rat Park, a lush cage where the rats had colored balls and the best rat food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, would happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn't know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn't like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats had used. None of them died. While all the rats who were alone and unhappy became heavy users, none of the rats who had a happy environment did.
At first, I thought this was merely a quirk of rats, until I discovered that at the same time as the Rat Park experiment there was a helpful human equivalent taking place. It was called the Vietnam War. Time magazine reported heroin was "as common as chewing gum" among U.S. soldiers, and there is solid evidence to back this up: some 20 percent of U.S. soldiers became addicted to heroin there, according to a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Many people were understandably terrified: they believed a huge number of addicts were about to head home when the war ended.
But in fact, some 95 percent of the addicted soldiers, according to the same study, simply stopped using. Very few had rehab. They shifted from a terrifying cage back to a pleasant one, so they didn't want the drug anymore.
Bruce Alexander argues this discovery is a profound challenge both to the right-wing view that addiction is a moral failing caused by too much hedonistic partying, and the liberal view that addiction is a disease taking place in a chemically hijacked brain. In fact, he argues, addiction is an adaptation. It's not you: It's your cage.

After the first phase of Rat Park, Alexander took the test further. He repeated the early experiments, where the rats were left alone and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for 57 days; if anything can hook you, it's that. Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked so you can't recover? Do the drugs take over? What happened is striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them. (The full references to all the studies I am discussing are in the book.)
This new theory is such a radical assault on what we have been told it felt like it could not be true. But the more scientists I interviewed, and the more I looked at their studies, the more I discovered things that don't seem to make sense—unless you take into account this new approach.
Here's one example of an experiment that is happening all around you, and may well happen to you one day. If you get run over today and you break your hip, you will probably be given diamorphine, the medical name for heroin. In the hospital around you, there will be plenty of people also given heroin for long periods, for pain relief. The heroin you get from your doctor will have a much higher purity and potency than the heroin being used by street addicts, who have to buy from criminals who adulterate it. So if the old theory of addiction is right—it's the drugs that cause it; they make your body need them—it's obvious what should happen. Loads of people should leave the hospital and try to score smack on the streets, to meet their habits.
But here's the strange thing. It virtually never happens. As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street users into desperate addicts—and leaves medical patients unaffected.
If you still believe, as I used to, that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street addict is like a rat in the first cage: isolated and alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like a rat in the second cage: going home to a life where she is surrounded by the people she loves. The drug is the same, but the environment is different.
This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about "addiction" altogether and instead call it "bonding." A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
I still couldn't shake off a nagging doubt. Are these scientists saying chemical hooks make no difference? It was explained to me: you can become addicted to gambling, and nobody thinks you inject a pack of cards into your veins. You can have all the addiction and none of the chemical hooks. I went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting in Las Vegas and they were as plainly addicted as the cocaine and heroin addicts I have known. Yet there are no chemical hooks on a craps table.
But surely, I asked, there is some role for the chemicals? It turns out there is an experiment which gives us the answer to this in precise terms, which I learned about in Richard DeGrandpre's book The Cult of Pharmacology.
Everyone agrees cigarette smoking is one of the most addictive processes around. The chemical hooks in tobacco come from a drug called nicotine. So when nicotine patches were developed in the early 1990s, there was a huge surge of optimism—cigarette smokers could get all of their chemical hooks, without the other filthy, and deadly, effects of cigarette smoking. They would be freed.

But the Office of the Surgeon General has found that just 17.7 percent of cigarette smokers are able to stop using nicotine patches. That's not nothing. If the chemicals drive 17.7 percent of addiction, as this shows, that's still millions of lives ruined globally. But what it reveals again is that the story we have been taught about the cause of addiction being chemical hooks is real, but it's only a minor part of a much bigger picture.
This has huge implications for the 100-year-old war on drugs. This massive war, which kills people from the plazas of Mexico to the streets of Liverpool, is based on the claim that we need to physically eradicate a whole array of chemicals because they hijack people's brains and cause addiction. But if drugs aren't the driver of addiction— if, in fact, it is disconnection that drives addiction—then this makes no sense.
Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction. I visited a prison in Arizona, Tent City, where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages (the Hole) for weeks on end, to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human re-creation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. When those prisoners get out of prison, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record, guaranteeing they will be cut off even more.
There is an alternative. We can build a system that is designed to help drug addicts reconnect with the world and leave behind their addictions.
This isn't theoretical. It is happening. Nearly 15 years ago, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. They had tried a drug war, and the problem just kept getting worse. So they decided to do something radically different. They resolved to decriminalize all drugs, and take all the money they once spent on arresting and jailing drug addicts, and spend it instead on reconnecting them—to their own feelings, and to the wider society. The most crucial step was to get them secure housing and subsidized jobs, so they had a purpose in life, and something to get out of bed for. In warm and welcoming clinics, addicts are taught how to reconnect with their feelings, after years of trauma. One group of addicts was given a loan to set up a removals firm. Suddenly, they were a group, all bonded to each other and to society, and responsible for each other's care.
An independent study by the British Journal of Criminology found that since total decriminalization, addiction has fallen, and intraveneous drug use is down by 50 percent. Decriminalization has been such a success that very few people in Portugal want to go back to the old system. The main campaigner against the decriminalization back in 2000 was Joao Figueira, the country's top drug cop. He offered all the dire warnings we would expect from the Daily Mail or Fox News. But when we sat together in Lisbon, he told me that everything he predicted had not come to pass—and he now hopes the whole world will follow Portugal's example.
This isn't only relevant to the addicts I love. It is relevant to all of us, because it forces us to think differently about ourselves. Human beings are bonding animals. We need to connect and love. The wisest sentence of the 20th century was E.M. Forster's, "Only connect." But we have created an environment and a culture that cut us off from connection. The rise of addiction is a symptom of a deeper sickness in the way we live, constantly directing our gaze toward the next shiny object we should buy, rather than the human beings all around us.
The writer George Monbiot has called this the "age of loneliness." We have created human societies where it is easier for people to become cut off from all human connection. The Internet offers only a parody of connection. Bruce Alexander, the creator of Rat Park, told me that for too long, we have talked exclusively about individual recovery from addiction. We need now to talk about social recovery; how we all recover, together, from the sickness of isolation.
But this new evidence isn't just a challenge to us politically. It doesn't just force us to change our minds; it forces us to change our hearts.
Loving an addict is really hard. When I looked at the addicts I love, it was always tempting to follow the tough love advice doled out by reality shows like "Intervention": Tell the addict to shape up, or cut them off. Their message is that an addict who won't stop should be shunned. It's the logic of the drug war, imported into our private lives. But that will only deepen their addiction, and you may lose them all together. I came home determined to bind the addicts in my life closer to me than ever, to let them know I love them unconditionally, whether they stop, or whether they can't.

When I returned from my long journey, I looked at my ex-boyfriend, in withdrawal, trembling on my spare bed, and I thought about him differently. For a century now, we have been singing war songs about addicts. It occurred to me that we should have been singing love songs to them all along.

Being fat on the internet...

I couldn't've said it better myself, so I won't try! If you care about who I am, you'll read this:
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The Most Important Match Question on OkCupid

Fat Girls, Desire, Online Dating, and “Preferences”

A few weeks ago, online dating website OkCupid announced that paying users on the site could now “search” their matches by the answers they gave to the site’s user-generated match questions. These questions are as varied as “Have you ever had sex with a person within the first hour of meeting them?” and “Do you like the taste of beer” and “Do you often find yourself wanting to chuck it all and go live on a sailboat?” There is a lot of random shit people on OkCupid want to know about the people they might one-day marry/fuck/kill. (Or, you know, have an awkward date with and then never speak to again).

I’ve been waiting for OKC to allow users to search by match question answers for a long, long time. I used to spend hours manually scrolling through each potential match’s questions until I found out how they answered one question in particular. It goes like this:

Q: If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?

A:

-Yes, even if they were slightly overweight.

-Yes, but only if they were obese.

-No.

-No, in fact I prefer overweight people.

As a fat woman, it is basically imperative to me that any of my potential matches answer “No” to this question if I’m going to seriously consider meeting them IRL. What’s the fucking point, otherwise? (Warning: heartbreak and rejection ahead.)

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Almost as soon as OKC announced the change in search options, people on the interwebz began to consider what the change meant in relation to questions on OKC that address racial preferences in dating. Rehashing older discussions about online dating and race, Slate.com’s Reihan Salam penned a piece titled “Is it Racist to Date Only people of Your Own Race? Yes.” He concludes the piece,

To be sure, dating is about more than the sharing of bread, and OkCupid users who express strong racial preferences may well be doing the world a favor by being open and honest about their wants. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask those who do express such preferences, and those who live them in practice, to reflect on them, and on how there might be more to fighting racism than voting ‘the right way.’

I agree with Salam’s assessment that fighting racism, and other forms of oppression and discrimination, isn’t just about formal manifestations of equality like voting, but is also about our hearts, minds, and even what we do with our genitals. Far from being innocuous and purely personal “preferences,” who we date, love, live with, befriend, and fuck is extremely meaningful for how we organize social power, hierarchy, and affiliation. (This isn’t Rocket Science, folks.)

And that is part of why discussions about dating are so convoluted; desire and attraction cut to the heart of deeper, subterranean social meanings, ones we’re not fully aware of or able to negotiate freely and rationally. Who we desire to be, and to love, isn’t just a matter of individualist private choice in the way that the ideology of American free-market political liberalism leads us to believe. As much as online dating can feel like online shopping, neither activity is devoid of political meaning. Both activities are about creating human relationships situated within larger sociopolitical and economic systems that are beyond our control as mere individuals.

The links between a conservative political agenda and a notion of apolitical personal blame and responsibility is particularly salient when it comes to body size. As the report “Weighty Concerns” by Samantha Kwan and Mary Nell Trautner notes,

In Western cultures with an ideology of individualism, this belief that we can control our destiny, including our bodies, is deeply ingrained. Sizeist attitudes are particularly embedded in individualistic cultures such as the U.S. Work by social psychologist Bernard Weiner and his colleagues shows that fat stigmatization is more likely when individuals assign individual responsibility and blame to fat people, and Christian Crandall and his colleagues’ research further shows that fatism correlates with belief in a just world, the Protestant work ethic, and conservative political ideology (56).

Being fat is, in this frame of thought, an undeniable visible marker of an individual’s failure to live up to the demands of Western political ideologies of personal responsibility and self-empowerment.

While we all have both explicit and hidden (even to ourselves) preferences about who we date, the insistence that those preferences are merely personal, entirely apolitical, or that they are, somehow, our God-given right, belongs to the same genre of ideology as other salient conservative political myths that attempt to decontextualize individuals from their social surroundings; myths like the welfare queen and the pro-choicer who just loves murdering babies. To say that dating “preferences” lack political meaning, that they cannot be harmful because the intent of the individuals expressing the preference is not to cause harm entirely misses the point, which is that systems of oppression are systems and ones that replicate themselves through us. That is, we “inherit” these “preferences” and it is our job, if we are committed to progressive social change, to “work” on those inheritances so that our desires, and consequent “choices” align with the social world we want to pass on to others in the future. (Be the change, y’all. BE the change.)

Still, Salam is right to point out in his article that people who are explicitly and openly discriminatory in their dating preferences may be doing the rest of us a favor by letting us know. I was really pleased when OKC announced the change in search options, in part, because I do want to check to see if my potential matches have publicly expressed dating preferences such as “I strongly prefer to date only people of my own race.” Overt, public racists like that have, quite simply, #gottogo. People who think that expressing a racial “preference” for their match is just a matter of personal choice are extremely unlikely to be a good match for me.

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To be honest, people who have high match percentages with me generally fit a certain profile: they like to read a lot; they’re politically leftist; they either went to college or are in college now; they probably like art, coffee, cooking, wine, or whiskey. They might write poetry or paint. They’re mostly young-ish, urban-dwelling, hipster-y types. Many of them are queer/of color/feminist. And they almost never overtly express racist/sexist/classist/homophobic sentiments in how they answer their match questions. And that’s rad for me.

But ask them the question about “obesity” and it’s fucking no holds barred. Time and time again, I’ll be excited about some Proust-reading feminist bisexual carpenter or some effeminate philosophy graduate student barista only to have my hopes dashed on the rocks of overt and unabashed sizeism. No fatties. As in, I won’t even consider dating someone who has a BMI of 30 or greater (the technical definitions of obese and dealbreaker).

The same people who are seemingly able to make the political connections (or at least try to make them, who want to make them) between desire, power, and race/class/sexuality/gender unabashedly refuse to do so when it comes to body size. And I never fail to feel surprised and disappointed about this. It doesn’t matter how many times it happens, it defies my expectations.

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By marking “No” to the question “If one of your potential matches were overweight, would that be a dealbreaker?” you are not saying “I love all fat people and want to fuck/marry all of them.” You’re just saying, “I’d consider going on a date with one single individual ‘obese’ person sometime in my life before I die. It isn’t out of the question that I might find a fat person interesting/sexy/romantically viable at some point, someday.” And, from what we know about how fluid human sexuality actually is, this seems like a pretty reasonable assumption that this will, indeed, happen, like, at least once.

But, admitting that you’re into a fattie, well, that’s not something most people want to do, because admitting that fact is incredibly stigmatizing. You might, like, get fat by association, or something. Your social prestige will plummet like tech stocks in 2000. Especially if you’re a dude.

I first learned this in the fourth grade when I asked out my first crush, Jake, on Valentine’s Day. Jake and I had been talking on the phone everyday after school for several months, doing things like playing our favorite songs for one another. He, like, GOT fourth grade me, or whatever. When I finally worked up the courage to ask him to be my boyfriend, officially, publicly, he told me he’d call me back with his decision. Jake called me back after a few minutes to tell me that he had consulted with his older brother, showing him my yearbook photo, and that his older brother had advised him against us going out, officially, publicly. It was a lesson on gender, desire, and social status for both of us. And, while the ins-and-outs of negotiating gender, desire, and social status in dating have become more nuanced as I’ve aged, in a lot of ways it feels like nothing has really changed. The details might be different, but being a fat girl who (sometimes) dates dudes is a lot like being stuck in the fourth grade, forever. (Total bummmmmer.)

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What’s fascinating, though, is that I sometimes receive messages from people expressing interest in me and when I look for the answer to the “obesity” question they have said they won’t date an obese person. This puzzles me a little, but I have a feeling I know what is probably happening. They don’t fucking see me as obese. Obese is bad, but they think I’m cool/sexy/interesting, so I can’t possibly be that.

This dynamic was recently driven home for me when I foolishly searched for the answer to this question as I was Internet stalking a real life friend/crush/hottie. He too had marked, “Yes, but only if they were obese.” I contacted him to tell him I had a hard time understanding how we could be friends and/or political allies given his answer to the question despite the many other ways we were clearly friends and political allies around issues of race/gender/sexuality/class. (I know, I know. Why bother? Glutton for punishment.)

His response? (WAIT FOR IT….)

“I don’t think of you as obese.”

Can you feel the harsh, hot sands of oppression brushing over you? As the fat girl dating monologue on Louie recently addressed, the fucking worst thing you can tell a fat girl is that she isn’t fat. Just don’t. PleasefortheloveofYahweh.

“I don’t think of you as fat/of color/gay/disabled/a woman” is one of the oldest fucking tricks in the book of false universalisms, right? The logic is this: X form of difference is treated as something bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross in society. I don’t think of you as bad/abnormal/undesirable/gross, therefore I do not think of you as X. X remains squarely unchallenged as a stigmatized/minoritized identity and the power hierarchy replicates itself, but you get a free pass as an individual (which is supposed to make you feel special and good). Difference is erased and assimilated back into the idealized norm of white/straight/male, etc.

In this particular case, the use of the term “obese” causes some real trouble. There is simply no way to make the term “obese” sound like it isn’t the worst fucking thing on earth in our contemporary cultural climate because it is a medicalized term meant to signify abnormality, disease, and unhealthiness. We see “obese” people as immoral, unhealthy, lazy, gross because that is part of the built-in definition of the word. Who would want to date someone who is all of those icky things? You could basically re-write the answer “Yes, but only if they were obese” to read “Yes, but only if they were abnormal, diseased, unhealthy, lazy, gross, and immoral.” You can’t really blame people for clicking that answer when you put it like that, can you? (Well, yes, I can, but I expect people to be less fucking idiotic. This is the root of all my disappointments in life, I’m aware.)

As my friend/crush/hottie explained to me, he thinks of “obese” as a health determination, but he doesn’t think of me as unhealthy. But the thing is, I’m still fucking obese. “Morbidly” so by BMI measures. And I have no interest in pretending that I’m not, even though I also consider myself to be reasonably ethical, healthy, ambitious, and appealing. And that’s what I told my friend before I abruptly ended our conversation to go to the gym. (Ohhhh, the irony. Sort of.)

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What makes the question about obesity as a dealbreaker such a good barometer for my potential matches is that it’s a really good measure of whether a match GETS IT, or predictably, disappointingly, boringly doesn’t. By “it,” I mean roughly whether they get how the personal and political are intertwined when it comes to love/dating/sex and bodies/body size, whether they want to get it, whether they’re even trying.

Besides all the obvious political connections to be made concerning the overlap of sizeism and other systems of oppression, like racism, colonialism, and classism, on the more “personal” level, I want to know they “get it” because I need to know that anyone I’m going to be involved with is going to come to bat for me as a fat person. Are they prepared to “come out” as fat girl lover/fucker? Are they prepared to deal with street harassment if we go out in public together? Are they willing to fend off the idea that they’re settling for me? If they’re a dude, in particular, is their masculinity fucking secure enough to handle this jelly and all its social significance? Will they help me navigate a social world in which my body opens me up to unique forms of both fetishization and objectification and sexual violence and abuse? Can they handle the criticism they might receive from their friends, their parents, and society as a whole?

I, frankly, have no time to waste on dating people who aren’t down to rumble with me around this issue on the daily, because this shit is part of my daily reality. And, that’s what people do when they care for each other: they show up, they speak up, they fight for you. They stand by you. Sadly, it seems, there are a lot of people who just can’t hang, not because they couldn’t, in theory, but because they don’t even want to try. They “prefer” not to.

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This is not an essay I ever wanted to write. In fact, I’ve been actively avoiding writing this essay for weeks and passively avoiding writing it for years. There is nothing more unappealing than being a bitter fat girl in our culture; this is made abundantly clear to me every time a well-meaning friend tells me to be “more confident” or to “lower my standards” or when people explain to me that there is nothing different about my experience of love/dating/sex than a thin person’s. This shit is hard for everyone, they reason. And they’re right: it is hard for everyone, just not in the same ways and not with the same social meanings.

It’s been made even more clear that I shouldn’t be writing this essay by the way that fat girls are silently pitied or cruelly mocked as the butt of the joke in popular media, but never, ever get to tell the truth about our own experiences in way that feels complicated, nuanced, and authentic to us.

And it is made clear by the way that talking about fat, and being fat, especially on the Internet, opens one up to some of the most harsh and degrading backlash imaginable. It’s made clear by the way I can never read the comments section on any article about fat or fatness without feeling like I want to die. It was for this reason that my mother expressed fear when I told her I was writing this essay; could I handle the responses I would get? she worried. Well, Mom, I’m afraid, too.

Ultimately, that’s why I had to write this essay, the one I didn’t want to write, the one I’ve been avoiding; the cost of not writing it, of letting other people narrate my experience for me using words and storylines that feel alien and alienating, became too great.

I’m a bitter fat girl. And I have good reason to be. Fuck me, date me, love me, anyway. Prove to me you’ve got what it takes. Show up for me, show up for the struggle.

Lisa C. Knisely Published on May 26, 2014. All rights reserved by the author.

Why I can’t be an advocate.

I have a wealth of experiences, a gift for language and insight, and an engaging speaking mannerism.

I am a woman described by professionals in the industry as someone who “must be listened to."

I am a force to be reckoned with when prompted with questions regarding change and identifying the gap in services offered.

But along with that, I am a single mother, on disability, hardly making financial ends meet and not making a single dream for myself a reality.

Speaking at a National conference on homelessness solutions and prevention was a wonderful experience. I was treated like a VIP — because I was one of the ones with the knowledge that service providers were thirsty for… however, it didn’t get _me_ anywhere.

I know that people on the ground, those with the new coined term of “lived experience”, need to have a voice — they need to have a seat at the round-table discussions, because they are the ones who KNOW what is needed.  I know this, and it seems that policy makers are possibly coming around to understand this.

But it _takes_ from me, and doesn’t GIVE to me in any fashion.  I might get a meal or an experience out of it, I could possibly add it to my resume… but to what effect?

It is taxing and triggering to relive and re-share my story over and over again, so that others can understand _why_ these changes are so important.

But I don’t get a special title. I don’t have a career out of it. I can’t ever actually _better_ myself by this advocacy.

I have dreams, aspirations and goals in my life that I can’t take steps towards when I am so extremely tired after all this advocacy work.

I was at a story-telling workshop today. I loved every moment of it. It made me want to get back involved with some of the advocacy work I was doing before, but recently gave up. Only it won’t get me and my life and my daughter any further ahead than we are now.

Maybe it could make a difference to the policy, to the bottom line — maybe it could affect change that would matter to LOTS of other people — maybe it is in the act of selflessness that true change happens.

Maybe. But all of that maybe-ing doesn’t keep food on the table and a smile on my face.

I need to work on me and my goals, not the society around me and it’s goals.

I don’t believe that to be the full truth — I think society needs to be taken care of first, so that we might ALL work on our own goals … but I’ve been killing myself for two and a half years with it, and I can’t right now.

2015 is the year of ME.  2015 is the year of fulfilled goals!

a torn journal entry

Writing this in my journal makes it seem so final. Not writing it doesn't make it any less real, but the act of recording it for my future self hurts somehow -- gut-wrenchingly so...

Somewhere between Jan 5th and 17th, Matthew passed away.  No idea how to deal with grief & loss.  Do I find a counselor somewhere?  Going to talk to Lane about it, but she doesn't really fill that role any longer.  She is an ODSP worker now. 

 I guess the reality of Matthew was always kind of silly.  How he found me with a format.  How he planned to maybe move up here, but didn't want to get a passport.  How very different we were.  But then he quit smoking for me & then that turns out to be what killed him.  It's not my fault, I keep saying.  Not that I believe it.

a torn journal entry

pencil seems like a perfectly fitting medium for where I'm at in my world/lift right now.  Fluid, transient, impermanent ... in flux.

I gave up on WAWG Survivors before I even really began. I've quit SOS Advisory. I'm uncertain where I stand on SAGE Advisory, I stopped SACHA Crisis Training.  I'm done my BED course & I'm not exactly sure where the whole 1 in 4 thing stands.  I'm not sure where Matthew and I are at after being down there for NYE ... I am having fun in the fet community and trying to keep a nice home for Kyla and I.

That's about the extent of it.  & Dan is just another 'play partner' in a long line of them.

CJH :)?

cont'd

I think I'm happy for once ...?

I'm not really sure I have a point of reference.  I felt kind of like I'd found 'home' when I was in California, but we both know how THAT turned out.  So Avalon House is starting to feel like that. And I've kinda latched on to Robyn & Jason & I don't exactly know why.  I'm slightly flying by the seat of my pants. I'm taking strange risks with pain. Why does being hurt feel good? Self-flagellation? Do I feel that I deserve it?  I don't know.

I'm happy-like, maybe, is a better truth.  But happiness feels elusive and close?! :)

Real people are hard to spot.

11:45pm
01/13/15

What the heck is "thin privilege"?

Zow.... ! This is a great post. As a matter of personal note, I often respond to people who post fat pride at the expense of skinny shaming -- that's not OK. We don't become stronger by knocking others down; we all must rise up together against our mutual enemy -- whoever "they" may be. 

Read on!
---

Let’s Talk About Thin Privilege

October 25, 2013 by Melissa A. Fabello

Source: About-Face

I am five-foot-four, 125 pounds.
My measurements are 36-28-38.
I wear size medium shirts, size seven jeans, and (in case you were wondering) size eight shoes.
I have never walked into a clothing store unable to find items in my size.
I have never been asked to pay more for a seat on an airplane.
I have never had someone dismiss me as a dating prospect based on my body type, nor had someone scoff, openly, while watching me eat French fries in public.
I have never experienced a doctor dismissing my concerns with a “lose weight, feel great!” remedy.
And I can open an article with my measurements without fear of judgment.
I walk through this world as a thin person.
And as such, I have never experienced fat discrimination.
That said, I want you to know two things:
1. I am writing this article from a privileged perspective; and
2. I am not here to damn, guilt, or embarrass thin people.
But I think we need to have a talk.
Because it’s so easy to fall back on tired old excuses for why we’re not privileged – and I see this a lot when the topic of thin privilege is broached.
 “How can I have thin privilege? I feel like shit about my body all the time! That’s not privilege! Besides, someone called me out on my ‘chicken legs’ the other day, and how is that different from calling someone fat? And I’m only thin anyway because I have an eating disorder, and trust me, that is not a privilege.”
And I hear what you’re saying.
But I think it’s time for us to look at these excuses (and how they don’t hold up in the grand scheme of things) a little more closely.

Grievances vs. Oppression

Let me start off by saying this: Having your feelings hurt sucks.
And I would never tell you to just “suck it up” or “get over it.”
Because yes, sticks and stones may break your bones, but damn it, words really can hurt you. And so can the general attitudes and behaviors of others.
I’m not here to tell you that your personal grievances don’t matter.
Rather, I’m here to put those feelings into perspective.
Because personal emotional impacts simply are not the same as oppression.
Oppression involves “the systematic subjugation of a group of people by another group of people who have access to social power, the result of which benefits one group over the other, and is maintained by social beliefs and practices.”
In other words, oppression is a special kind of problem.
Here are four reasons why:

1. It is pervasive.

It is woven throughout social institutions, as well as embedded within individual consciousness.
For example, if you make a “fat joke,” everyone around you is going to understand it – because the cultural belief that fat is something to laugh at is widespread.

2. It is restricting.

Structural limits significantly shape a person’s life chances and sense of possibility in ways beyond the individual’s control.
Take a look at these examples of thin privilege. By virtue of not having access to these privileges, the lives of larger people are limited.

3. It is hierarchical.

Dominant or privileged groups benefit, often in unconscious ways, from the disempowerment of subordinated or targeted groups.
Think of the example that I gave earlier about not being passed over as a dating prospect. I benefit from fat discrimination because I’m more likely to have my OKCupid message opened since I have ‘Thin’ or ‘Average’ checked off in the ‘Body Type’ box. I’m more likely to get a date.

4. The dominant group has the power to define and name reality.

That is, they determine the status quo: what is “normal,” “real,” or “correct.”
Take a look at (almost) any store window mannequins or fashion magazine. If thinness is heralded as the status quo, then that continues to put thin people in positions of power when it comes to determining what “average” (or “preferable”) is.
When you have hurt feelings – legitimate as they are – it isn’t the result of subjugation.
The negative attitudes toward you as a privileged person aren’t pervasive, restricting, or hierarchal.
You aren’t losing out on anything just because someone’s words, actions, or beliefs had an emotional impact on you.
And when you move past it – even if it takes years of work, which it very well may – that’s it. It’s over.
Oppression doesn’t work the same way.
Oppression never goes away because everywhere you go, everything you see, and everyone you know reiterates and reinforces it.
And that’s a significant difference.

But Thin People Can Hate Their Bodies

I made a video this summer called ‘How to Get a Bikini Body.’ It repeated the oft-seen-on-social-media body-positive mantra “Put a bikini on your body!” theme.
And people were quick to comment that my message lost its meaning because my body adheres to societal beauty standards. “Easy for you to say,” they said.
And this pissed me off.
Because I wanted to be like, “Well, thin people can hate their bodies, too, ya know! Just because you think it’s ‘perfect’ doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle with it!”
But then I realized that they were right.
Because here’s the thing: Can a thin person have body image struggles? Can a thin person be at war with their self-image? Can a thin person hate to look in the mirror?
Absolutely.
And does that suck?
Absolutely.
But the difference between these negative feelings and fatphobia is this: The only person worrying about whether or not I’m meeting beauty standards is me.
And that’s not the same for fat folk.
When you’re not thin, other people on the beach actually do take offense. When you’re not thin, people really do think that you shouldn’t be in a bathing suit. When you’re not thin, people really do make your body their moral obligation.
And while your internal struggle is real and significant, the point is: You might hate your body, but society doesn’t.
That’s thin privilege.

But—But—But—Skinny-Shaming!

Before you worry that I’m going to disregard or otherwise undermine the bullying involved in skinny-shaming, let me reassure you: I’m not going to do that.
Let me address here and now (and loudly) that no one should ever be shamed for their body. I believe whole-heartedly that the body-positive community needs to be open to all body types. And absolutely, it is problematic that people engage in making fun of thin bodies.
I would never tell you that jabs at your “chicken legs” or insinuations (or outright proclamations) that you must have an eating disorder aren’t hurtful or that their effects aren’t far-reaching.
Because they are.
But what I am going to argue is this: As horrible as skinny-shaming is (and it is!), what makes it different is that it does not involve a pervasive fear or hatred of thin bodies.
And while its personal effects are certainly influential, it is not restrictive on a social level.
Let me be clear on two theories that explain how skinny-shaming is fundamentally different from fat-shaming:

1. Skinny-Shaming as a Response to Fat-Shaming

Have you ever heard the supposed-to-be-empowering phrase “Real Women Have Curves?” What about the cringe-worthy assertion that “Only Dogs Want Bones?”
Thin people aren’t really crazy about these. Obviously.
Real women are such because they identify as women, curves or not. And referring to someone’s partner as a dog just because they like someone’s body is degrading. Right?
Right.
But these types of reclamations of fat pride wouldn’t need to exist if fat-shaming wasn’t a thing.
These types of phrases and attitudes were born of a need to say “I’m beautiful, too!” They’re responses to social norms.
And while you can argue that they’re misguided, they’re actually challenging fatphobia.
And while you certainly shouldn’t encourage them if they feel like put-downs, what you need to remember about these phrases, in the words of Lindy West is, “’I’m proud to be fat’ is still a radical statement. ‘I’m proud to be thin’ is the status quo.’”

2. Skinny-Shaming as Rooted in Sexism

It’s absolutely true that regardless of what our bodies look like, society polices them.
And that’s because patriarchal structures benefit from this policing.
And arguably, skinny-shaming is rooted in this type of sexism.
Society wants you to recognize that being thin is “in” – but not too thin, not that thin – because the goal is to keep you insecure.
Take a look at any tabloid cover.
The “So-and-So Has Cellulite!” headline is right next to the “Does So-and-So Have an Eating Disorder?” story. And they both convey the same message: “Ew! Gross!”
For fuck’s sake, we just can’t win.
And not to go all conspiracy theory on you, but that’s exactly what they want.
They (and you can insert anyone you want here for “they” – society, the media, the dieting industry, the executive board for Patriarchy, Inc.) want women to continue to chase after unattainable goals.
But the difference is that the discrimination that fat people experience is at the intersection of sexism and fatphobia.
That is, there’s another layer to it.
So while, yes, shaming anyone is wrong and bad and sexist, fat-shaming is rooted in extra factors that skinny-shaming is not.
So they’re not the same.

Well, I Have an Eating Disorder, So ‘Privilege’ Doesn’t Apply to Me

The blog This Is Thin Privilege details, “When we explain that thin privilege exists despite eating-disordered status, we’ve had thin people with [eating disorders] take offense.”
And I get why that is.
Because having an eating disorder is serious.
And when you feel trapped in and controlled by your body, when you’ve reached that level of self-consciousness, when you’re suffering every single day just to make it through, it’s unlikely that you’ll feel like you’re experiencing privilege.
Because an eating disorder feels like a curse.
But, as This Is Thin Privilege explains, “I think it’s important to note that disability is its own underprivileged status, and in this case, thin people with [eating disorders] are conflating the oppression they feel for lacking able-bodied privilege with a negation of their thin privilege.”
That is: The marginalization that you experience as a person living with an eating disorder is a result of the disorder, not a result of your body.
You experience illness. You experience stigma. You experience symptoms and effects of your disorder.
But that doesn’t negate your thin privilege.
A Man of Color can experience racism and still benefit from his male privilege. An able-bodied woman can experience sexism and still benefit from her able-bodied privilege. A poor white farmer can experience classism and still benefit from his white privilege.
A person with an eating disorder can experience ableism and still benefit from their thin privilege.
Being marginalized in one area doesn’t negate your privilege in another.
—
Privilege can be a difficult thing to talk about. It’s easy to feel defensive when you mistake someone’s asking you to check your privilege for their making assumptions about your life.
But the bottom line that we have to remember is this: Are my negative experiences related to my body grievances, or are they pervasive issues on a societal level?
And if you have your thin privilege in check, you’ll be better able to recognize that most of the time, these issues fall into the former category.

.

Melissa A. Fabello, Managing Editor of Everyday Feminism, is a domestic violence prevention and sexuality educator, eating disorder and body image activist, and media literacy vlogger based out of Philadelphia. She enjoys rainy days, Jurassic Park, and the occasional Taylor Swift song and can be found on YouTube and Tumblr. She holds a B.S. in English Education from Boston University and an M.Ed. in Human Sexuality from Widener University. She can be reached on Twitter @fyeahmfabello. Read her articles here and book her for speaking engagements here.

a torn journal entry

Well ... I made it to 34. I certainly once thought I'd never see the other side of 24.  Fancy that.

Take stock:

   I feel alone more than any other sensation in my world. 

   Like no one knows me.

   Cathy and I are more apart than together & I miss her.

   Tara & I haven't seen e/o in FOREVER & she has a new baby. I lust her.

   Phil and I are more close than apart & I'm not sure what to make of it all.

   Ngozi.  I love her. I'm glad the Universe tossed me a deep/strong friendship for once.