“Sam, how can you preach all this stuff about loving yourself while changing your body? Isn’t that what your transition was about — rejecting your body?”
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Body liberation, to me, isn’t about the body as much as it is the systems of power that lead us to disconnect from and reject our whole selves. Our bodies, and how we treat them, are a window into that bigger struggle.
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We have to unpack the mental baggage and emotional trauma that comes with being told to change our bodies in order to conform to an ideal — because holding up certain bodies as aspirational is what gives them power, and what leads us to relinquish our own power in favor of chasing what someone else has.
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Accepting that I am #transgender and taking steps to embrace my authentic self, while rejecting the powers that be that insist that transgender bodies are inherently less than, is a radical act of self-love. Self-love isn’t about accepting what is — it’s rejecting the societal messages that favor certain bodies over others, and then radically accepting how our bodies and our lives change as a result.
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So when I gained weight in ED recovery by rejecting internalized fatphobia that told me to deny myself nourishment? That was an act of self-love. And when I pursued gender-affirming surgery and hormones by rejecting internalized transphobia? That was, yes, self-love.
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Sometimes self-love involves changing your body, and other times it is about resisting the urge to change it. The difference comes down to power: are you relinquishing your personal power in order to conform to systems of power? Or are you reclaiming your personal power by resisting those institutions that dictate certain bodies are “lesser”?
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However your body does or does not change in the process, liberation is at the core of love. A thinner body was never going to liberate me, any more than rejecting my transgender identity would have. We take back our bodies by liberating them from toxic conditioning — and the journey to get there will be unique for each and every person.
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This is why body positivity cannot be apolitical. There is no self-love without interrogating the systemic origin of self-hatred.
It happens without fail, every time: Someone in eating disorder recovery tries to talk about how adopting veganism fueled their eating disorder, and a bunch of animal liberationists barrel in to tell us that sharing our stories is hurting their cause.
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Yes, veganism is a movement centered around the ethical and just treatment of all forms of animal life. But anything that involves limiting one’s dietary choices can be dangerous for someone with an eating disorder — and a lot of the culture around veganism uses language that mirrors harmful attitudes embedded in diet culture. No matter how pure your intentions, your movement is being used as a gateway to lethal mental illnesses — and without having THAT conversation, out in the open? It will continue to be misused this way, because those struggling will do so in silence.
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People in recovery need to have the space to talk about the myriad ways eating disorders have manipulated seemingly moral choices and turned it against them. We need space to talk about how we put ourselves in harm’s way without realizing it, convinced we were doing the right thing. And yes, we need to talk about how the inflexible, moralistic language of many vegans made us feel as though we had to choose between our mental health and our moral integrity.
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If that conversation makes you uncomfortable? Don’t participate. It’s as simple as that. There are many other spaces for you where you can talk about veganism. But do not deprive people in recovery the chance to process the struggles they’ve endured, and how their fraught relationship to veganism became a vehicle for their disorder.
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FYI: Your movement’s PR is not more important than the lives being lost to eating disorders, which are among the most lethal and pervasive mental illnesses today. Recovery communities deserve to own every part of our stories, and for many of us, veganism was (and for some, still is!) an important part of our journeys.
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Veganism is not safe for everyone. And not allowing this to be acknowledged means more people battling these illnesses will be fearful about opening up around their struggles, and will be isolated from the support they need to recover.
Since you died, I haven’t been able to stop sending you messages. They’re less frequent than before, but I think I get scared that you’ll somehow evaporate if I don’t keep reaching for you — not unlike how, when I let myself get distracted for too long, they kicked down your door in a failed attempt to save your life.
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I’d always thought you and I would fight this together. I imagined us burning the stigma down to the ground, and in its place, we’d plant a garden. A garden where safety, vulnerability, and care could bloom, unruly and wild and free.
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Is that where you are now? In the garden? Are you dancing on your own — or did you find your father?
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I didn’t know that grief could dismantle someone’s life so completely. But I do believe, when the first domino fell and you left this world for another, you left me with some of your light. And I’ve kindled it, magnified it, nurtured it — I’ve surrendered to it so completely, I may as well have shed my entire skin at once, leaving a shell of the person I once was to dissolve.
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It wasn’t just suicide. We both know that. It was the weight of being a transgender person in a culture that wanted you erased. It was the weight of being unseen, the weight of disclaimers and footnotes, the weight of every explanation you had to give and all the ones you just... couldn’t. It was the mornings when you had to decide if a lip stain was worth the unspoken cost — glares, remarks, or... worse.
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It was the unspoken cost of having to ask yourself a thousand times over, “Can I be myself today — or is that too much?” Which was a roundabout way of saying that maybe *I’m* too much, and truth be told, you were in the sense that this world didn’t deserve even an ounce of your magic, as it refused it over and over and over again.
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The truth is, there won’t be “suicide prevention” until there is “violence prevention.” Until there is “oppression prevention.” Until, as they say, we’re all free.
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Because until we are, we’ll go looking for liberation elsewhere, and on the dark, frayed edges of the universe, there’s a quiet, velvety promise of Nothingness — and while I will never again choose it, I understand why you had to.
The hardest part of getting sober wasn’t the “new normal” that being free of drugs and alcohol created. It was finding self-compassion in a world that characterizes addiction as a personal failing. It was moving through the shame and stigma so that I could truly accept help. It was rebuilding my self-esteem in a culture that dehumanizes addicts.
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Addiction isn’t chosen. For me, it was a compulsion in response to unresolved trauma. At some point in time, my brain created a pathway that said, “The way to disrupt this fight or flight response is through drugs and alcohol.”
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Our brains are wired to repeat these compulsions if they work. If you’ve ever “unwound” at the end of the day with a glass of wine, you know that it does work. The problem is, drugs and alcohol by their very nature don’t “work” this way for very long — because repeated use diminishes its efficacy.
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But our reptilian brains don’t know this, because they operate on a bodily level, not a logical one. These two parts of the brain don’t compare notes. So the prefrontal cortex, our voice of reason, has no say on whether or not we develop an addiction. It’s the complex interplay of this more “basic” sensory part of the brain, finicky reward centers, and our very activated nervous systems that ONLY know to repeat behaviors that deescalate fight or flight.
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Recovery is a choice, yes, but it’s one not everyone is prepared to make. If there isn’t a safety net in place to ensure that someone can cope with being triggered in this way without self-medicating, it can make things worse. Fight or flight activated our adrenals, flooding our bodies with cortisol, the “stress hormone.” This is our body sounding the alarm, activating those same pathways that tell us to react — and quickly. We aren’t neurologically designed to ignore that alarm. This is why addiction is so difficult... our brains are working AS DESIGNED... but the problem is, this particular code is now creating more problems than it solves.
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I wish someone had explained this to me early on in recovery. Addiction isn’t about “bad choices” or a lack of self-control. Substance use disorders are real — and deserve empathy, not judgment.
