FM Weekly 4.49

1 April 2024

Dear readers - Many apologies that this issue is delayed. As many know, I’ve been struggling mightily with long covid brain fog as well as possibly some other cognitive changes. In trialing medications and some new rehab approaches, these efforts have led to challenges in my ability to focus, work, and “keep up,” generally speaking. A recent revelation is that multi-tasking is particularly difficult, which makes email and this newsletter especially mentally tiresome, despite the joy I have in its completion. I am still recovering and improving, and finding significant relief in brain protective and brain supportive strategies. I write all of this mostly to say that I hope the grace and kindness you might afford me as I recalibrate to my capacities is the same that you give to yourself in whatever your struggles might be, because as I reflect on the grace and kindness I might afford to any of you in a similar situation, this should be the same I might allow for myself. Perhaps that continues to be the hardest challenge of all, for any of us. Thanks, truly.

…

content notice for this issue: genocide in Palestine, African enslavement and the erasure of Black midwifery, stealthing, sexual assault

written off the cuff late March and minimally edited to share here.

my body’s experiences borne onto skin and its stretch marks are never more visceral to me than poolside.

as I appreciate the space I inhabit and walk proudly, arms rushing by my sides, flush with a life of allowing my own soft animal of a body to love what it loves,* I can’t help but notice the others’ of the others.

never have my contours felt more corporeally realized. something about this age, or something about what changed for me and the world around me, so quickly and so slowly, over the last four years.

so much skin bare, to feel the air and the sun and the water. so many memories of poolsides when I was younger, witnessing those around my mother’s age,** finding myself suddenly here now, less skin showing than then but somehow feeling more exposed. the gift of being young, never believing I might one day have a softer and looser belly, hips and thighs that shake unapologetically with each step, and a relaxed air of not caring. in my youth such unfluster seemed like something between enviable coolness and embarrassing unawareness about how one looked. but oh did I have it all wrong: we of this age and beyond do not care about what anyone else thinks about how we look while perhaps still thinking all of these other things about ourselves. what a circular trap set, and by whom. maybe the better question is to understand how to turn that ruse into romances, of soft animals and their loves.

I remember my first bikini, a first swimsuit memory as if I’d never worn one before that day. In the dressing room, the focus was less on the experience of confidently showing more skin and more on the apparent importance of how my body fat - specifically around the sides of my belly - looked and bulged and was unflattering. not my focus certainly, because how could I have known it should be having never worn a bikini before, but, of course, because of others, of course, it quickly became all that my attention could grasp, of course. and it still is.