bodies bodies bodies

19 Feb, 2026

content notes: body horror, dysmorphia, disordered eating, diet culture; plus-size fashion; medical horror; failing marriage, questionable decisionmaking; patriarchy, capitalism; mom issues; other people’s version of Hell. Sorry, I’m in a rush to finally get all these draft posts out of my life!

I was assuring the Gen Z’er that she was not, under any circumstances, developing “jowls.”

“You’re in your 20s, right?” I asked her. She hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, those aren’t jowls,” I said. I thought about it. “You’re still losing weight?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“That’ll all tighten back up,” I said with unwavering conviction.

Genuine relief crossed her face. “Thank you,” she said.

I said something to her about bracing myself “on the precipice of the so-called ‘aging cliff’,” where my face is expected to imminently cave in. I was already lost in thought when the Gen Z’er said “you could pass forrrrr… 29. Easily.”

I looked up. “Who, me?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Like…” and she double-checked before continuing, “…I can’t see a single line on your face.”

I inhaled sharply, pressed my lips together, and nodded. I knew she was being nice, but I also knew she was telling the truth. I mean, I do look my age. The signs of aging are upon me, just not from the chin up.

“It’s the connective tissue stuff,” I finally said.

Maybe it really is, or maybe I just don’t want to cop to how much money I spend on fucking skincare. Still, I don’t want to take any credit for something I haven’t actually accomplished. Who can say for sure why my face is flat-ironed?

“I can see where lines are trying to come in,” I said quickly, “especially with this dry winter air.” I gingerly touched the corner of my left eye, thinking about my recent switch from cleanser to cold cream. My new moisturizer is also really effective. “Or, okay, I have one fine line that keeps trying, right here above my lip. From smoking. Just on the one side.” I pressed my index finger against it.

“Really?” she asked me.

“Yeah!” I said. I left the room, then popped my head back in the doorway. “But I love you for saying that.” We laughed.

I hesitated then, still standing in the doorway.

“A 21-year old picked me up in a bar,” I finally said. Not long before the split. The great unraveling.

“Get it, girl,” the Gen Z’er joked.

Oh. “I should say he tried to pick me up,” I said. He was just flirting, practicing his game, deeply unserious. “I never told him my age. I mean, I couldn’t bear to. He kept asking me, how old are you really? What would I tell him? ‘I’m two of you’? Embarrassing him forever?” We both laughed.

“Yeah,” she said.

“You were married!” my best friend’s mom whispered to me in mock horror as I crossed the room.

I heaved myself into a chair near her bed. I sat in the dark for a spell, motionless. “Yes I was,” I said to her.

“It illuminated some problems,” I continued. I hesitated. Alarm bells had been going off for a while. “I realized I couldn’t remember the feeling of being wanted.” How dangerous a feeling it is, wanting to be wanted. Once upon a time, I’d been interested in ‘ethical PUA’—just the sheer game of flirting, low stakes, absent of genuine feeling. This time I’d been so morbidly fascinated by the entire scenario. I’d also been sitting with a younger, hotter, more accomplished married friend; this was not lost on me. Perhaps a pickup mentor had advised him to always go after the dowdier, frumpier one. “The interesting thing is, I didn’t tell him I was married.” Not as if I were ever caught not wearing a ring—although I guess some people might think silicone ring bands signal a lack of gravitas, this belief that you should keep that hand studded with gemstones, catching the light like a crossing guard’s vest. “Instead I kept telling him I’d be canceled.” I’d also suggested he not flirt with lonely old women at all.

“I wouldn’t cancel you,” my best friend’s mom whispered. She was smiling.

“For hooking up with a 21-year old?” I asked her of this hypothetical. She shook her head, grinning. “I think I’d cancel me,” I said wryly.

We were quiet then. I’d momentarily forgotten about my best friend’s mom’s short dating history. Now I remembered. I hadn’t intended to sound judgmental.

“I haven’t dated in years,” she finally managed to say in between pumps of the ventilator.

“I know,” I said. I looked at her sadly—a body she can’t use—then down into my own lap. I felt guilty for ever thinking of my body as unusable, uninhabitable.

Why, I thought to myself, would I ever want to be wanted, anyway? It’s not like anyone has sterling intentions. People only seem to harbor bad intentions for a useful body. Hungry eyes, self-serving eyes, self-aggrandizing eyes. Who wants to be chewed up and spat out?

We sat quietly. It began to occur to me that being stripped of all your resources and ‘usefulness’ and ‘value’ is liberating because, if you have literally nothing left to offer anyone, no one will be coming for your ass, trying once again to juice, extract, exploit, consume.

Sure, you might worry this makes you societally disposable, as if you’re the Happy Prince about to be melted down into lead. And maybe this really does put you in greater danger, what with all the shitty hobbyist eugenicists creeping around lately. But this idea of endangerment is only the perspective of a predator! From the perspective of prey, you're camouflaged perfectly, like a leaf. Maybe it’s even better to look like a poisonous leaf, brightly dyed and spangled. Do not eat!

I realize that stuff like Project 2025 aims to coerce people into ill-fit partnerships by stripping them of all other options (and to be sure, marriage is a traditional method of redirecting and reallocating one person’s own resources directly into another person’s patrilineal line). To have my fate altogether wholly tangled up with someone else’s, not entirely of my own free will and volition? Pressured through scarcity, lack, anxiety? Well, I can safely say I’d rather die.

Semi-recently I just... didn’t respond to a text message from someone. I haven’t seen him since 2012, but last year or the year before he convinced me to go all the way across Los Angeles to pick up his pants. Sighing, I hopped into an Uber. The driver waited outside this person’s old apartment building while I stood inside, waiting for a receptionist to find this guy’s pants in the mail room. So many people waiting on this man’s pants!

I hopped back in the car and thanked the Uber driver for waiting. The driver said I was a good friend. I wasn’t so sure.

This same pantsless man had asked me for a number of loans. He paid them all back, of course, eventually, which is more than I can say for most people. When I was sending the last loan, though, I suggested he maybe start some sort of emergency slush fund—“taking out loans from yourself and then paying yourself back”—rather than continuing to rely on me as his own personal slush fund. Yeah, it was a good idea, he said. Yeah, he’d been meaning to do something like that, he said.

Then he texted for one more loan—last time!—but each subsequent time had been the “last” time. I considered communicating, I considered reminding him I’m going through a divorce, that money is tight, that I am borrowing against my own future each time I help out. Instead, I just... didn’t text back. This time I decided I didn't have the resources to help out. Instead of actually saying “can't do it this time” and possibly opening myself to having to explain myself, I said nothing.

This should not be a moral conundrum! Why is it a moral conundrum! I didn’t text back, and he hasn’t texted me again. And, as I still haven’t seen him in over a decade, I still have his damn pants. What do I make of all this? I’ve decided to make nothing of it. If, at some point, there is an emergency that is worse than all the other emergencies, I’m sure he will tell me. Or else he will move on! It’s fine.

Historical Christianity did some pretty good deflection marketing, “kill yourself to support your brother,” so I’ve spent my whole life hemorrhaging everything I have, often to people who understand what’s really going on here far better than I do. My adoptive mom bought into “compassionate conservatism” hook, line, and sinker: some sort of small-government deflection campaign designed to make social inequality a problem for anyone but the federal government.

Later I walked in with jowl-tightening cream, to show to the Gen Z’er.

“What’s in this, retinol?” she asked me.

Retinol! How quaint. In the year of our Lord 2026, we are onto sea algae and bioidentical salmon DNA.

“I’ll be honest, I’ve never checked what’s in it. Because I’m convinced it works. I’m scared that if I ever check the ingredients, it might stop working. Little bit of magical thinking there.”

She stared at me.

I turned to leave.

“Thank you,” she called out behind me.

“Yeeahhh whatever,” I said in the doorway without turning around, and we both laughed.

When I was I think 39, a delivery driver refused to drop off the pallet of wine.

“Are you kidding?” he asked me. I’d already given him my ID.

“Are you kidding,” I said to him in disbelief. He was absolutely beyond convinced I was a teenager trying to steal my dad’s wine.

“It’s the hoodie,” I finally said. “I’ll take it off.”

I recently watched a video where a somatic therapist was explaining that everyone is born with, more or less, the same “window” of distress tolerance. With each deleterious or traumatic experience, she said, that window of tolerance narrows. The therapist illustrated the idea with her hands: after repeated violations, that window has narrowed to this little inch of space.

“It made me think about how my window of temperature tolerance changed,” I told my former roommate, remembering how I’d break out into either a hot or a cold sweat depending on which side of 73 degrees Fahrenheit I was on. “But I also remembered how the front door was always unlocked.” During and after GamerGate, while people were trying to find our home address, our front door had consistently been left unlocked. I’d started acting absolutely insane about it, hair-trigger reactivity over the goddamn front door.

“I bought us that robot autolock!” the roommate protested.

“Yes,” I said, “the August door lock.” We’d gotten it in 2018 or 2019, four or five years after the primary thrust of a doxxing campaign. Sometimes the autolock struggled or stuck—those first Augusts were very simple mechanisms, physically twisting a deadbolt one way or the other, a remote, rechargeable Bluetooth device intended for renters—but it had been relatively reliable overall! Who wouldn’t want a full-time robot companion! Then again, a robot companion would be like being married to a zombie during a zombie apocalypse.

“But I realized, if I were constantly really agitated and fearful, you’d get to think of yourself as the ‘brave’ one. …Not consciously, of course,” I added quickly.

I don’t know how much of what we do can be said to be ‘deliberate’. I just think, if there’s a hidden nonobvious benefit to something, we don’t exactly feel incentivized to rush to change it. This is human nature! Of course I get a little boost when I’m calm and stable in the face of someone’s panic. Of course I am grateful to be the reliable, dependable friend in a storm. Coregulating makes me feel useful!

Conversely, having a dysregulated nervous system makes me feel the opposite of useful, or dependable, or safe. It makes me feel needy, dangerous, unreliable. It makes others feel that way about me, too. A friend of mine semi-recently apologized for vanishing during a storm. “I was a bad friend,” she told me.

I laughed and waved her off. “You just feel unsafe around a dysregulated nervous system,” I replied. I gave examples.

“Hey, that’s true!” she said, smiling at thin air as if a realization were materializing in front of her. Anyway, she was still sorry, she said, but I’d made her feel a lot better.

I think it was during that same conversation that I finally admitted that I’d gotten bad vibes off a mutual acquaintance and now planned to forever avoid her.

My friend wanted a detailed explanation of my apprehension. Ohh, it had been the way she’d set a little verbal trap for me. I recounted the moment.

“I think she probably wasn’t listening to you,” my friend mused. She was probably zoned out until she’d been activated like a sleeper agent by a specific sequence of red-flag words, selectively heard and utterly divorced from context.

I nodded. All of this seemed very likely. But I’m already on such high alert when it comes to the real-life “you’re too late, I’ve already drawn you as the Y and me as the X” meme format—asserting one’s own goodness by engineering a little trap, solely for a captive audience to witness and judge. It’s a type of improvisational triangulation that raises my hackles, making for a very poor impression of someone you’re only meeting for the first time.

They say that what we remember about other people is how those people made us feel about ourselves. On the one hand that is surely true; on the other, it’s such a devastating, vacant way to look at relationships. It suggests that, rather than having real relationships with others, we are only having relationships and conversations with ourselves, as mediated by others. I am not a lens or a framework. I am not an object to compare yourself against. I certainly hope you feel the same.

Another night, the Gen Z’er asked me if I’d seen the girl on TikTok who bought a new mattress and subsequently broke out into facial boils. Everyone in the comment section had suggested the girl get onto Spironolactone. Anyway, the girl’s mattress had contained fiberglass.

“Hey, that’s what my skin does!” I exclaimed. “If there is a single allergen or toxin in the environment,” I continued, “or any sort of foreign intruder my body doesn’t recognize, I develop these horrible cysts.” Also, hives and rashes. Also, VITT: a quick-thinking urgent-care physician had prescribed prednisone, probably saving my life. New research shows genetic changes result in autoimmune overdrive. I would turn out to be just like a lab rat, perfectly engineered to physiologically go haywire.

“I noticed your skin is looking a lot better!” the Gen Z’er told me.

I hesitated, then nodded. It wasn’t looking that much better, but it was at least healing; there were pale pink shadows where the eruptions had been. “I’ve been winning the war on mildew,” I agreed.

Later I popped in and asked if the Gen Z’er had already eaten dinner.

“I brought a salad,” she said.

I shook my fist at the sky. “Okay,” I said. “I need to go figure something out for dinner.” I excused myself.

But then she was talking, and I was getting anxious, and I started to eyeball the clock. Finally I admitted to the Gen Z’er I was trying to hurry and eat before the night shift started.

“Oh yeah, she commented on my eating habits, too,” the Gen Z’er told me. “She said I could eat anything without gaining weight, just like her sister.”

I balked. “Okay, how many sisters does she have?” I asked, bewildered.

I discussed the whole thing with my best friend in the car later. The week earlier, I’d just started on laundry. I was sitting in the kitchen nibbling on a party pizza, my first meal of the day. I had also just discovered the mildew problem—my face had swollen up, and I’d taken Benadryl—and I’d moved all my mold-infested laundry into the garage.

“You shouldn’t eat after midnight,” the night-shift worker had said to me. Then she’d said something about my cholesterol (my cholesterol is fine). She’d continued needling me.

“Yep,” I’d said. “Sounds good,” I’d said. “Thank you,” I’d finally said, a throwaway capitulation so that she would stop talking to me.

She’d looked at me and sighed. “I keep telling my sister,” she’d said. “Don’t eat after midnight! Your cholesterol!”

Immediately I’d understood that the night-shift nurse was reenacting a dysfunctional family dynamic. Which we all do, in hopes of reconciling an emotional issue. But I am not her sister, and the nurse doesn’t know shit about my health.

Then she’d left the room. Then she’d returned to ask me about the laundry. She’d looked really pissed. I’d explained that it had molded over and that I was going to be up all night rotating laundry loads.

Then she’d asked me for some cute shirts, if I were throwing them out, for her sister. She’d told me her sister was a size 20/22.

“Uhhh,” I said. “Sure, if I can get the mold out first?”

For the next four nights, before that nurse’s shift would start, I’d grab snacks from the pantry, waiting until morning to toss my trash out. After concealing my food habits for these four dark nights, I suddenly realized that this was incredibly late in life to develop an actual eating disorder. Then I became furious. And then it began to dawn on me why this woman had become a nurse in the first place: to feel like she had the authority to comment on others’ bodies, to concern-troll under the auspices of giving care, all of it tied to this dynamic with a sister.

“It was several more days,” I continued, “before I realized, by asking for my clothing, she was insinuating I’m just as fat as her sister.” This sentence did not hit right. What I’d meant was, her remark had initially glanced past me, affecting me in zero way whatsoever. I later realized she had specified her sister’s shirt size for some reason: perhaps to get me to react, or to goad me into gasping “what size do you think I wear!” Instead, I’d looked at her like she was nuts: Moldy shirts? I can look for some smallpox blankets, too, while I’m at it. (I’d shared this revelation with the Gen Z’er as well. She’d stared at me, stunned, before murmuring “you’re not fat.” I had not dignified this with a response.)

“And then,” I continued without taking any pause for composure, absolutely outraged, “to tell [the Gen Z’er] she can eat anything without gaining weight! ‘Just like her sister’! Surely she knows [the Gen Z’er] is still recovering from bariatric surgery.”

“She might not,” my best friend said, wide-eyed.

“I know!” I exclaimed. “It’s this preternatural, almost supernatural ability to zero in on a person’s vulnerabilities and hone in and swoop down and target them. I mean,” and I hesitated, “it’s true that you can just look at me and guess what my vulnerabilities are.”

“That’s how it always was for me,” my best friend said flatly.

“It’s always projection,” I said. “People are always trying to give you their issues, their neuroses! I don’t know why! Do they want compassion, understanding? Or maybe to level the playing field?” Some sort of karmic redistribution, or sin-eating, even. I thought about it for a moment. “Or mothers,” I said. “Even with the best of intentions, mothers give their children their issues. They don’t want their children to suffer in the same way they did—so mothers turn right around and give their kids the exact same issues.”

My best friend’s face fell. “I don’t think mothers give their children their issues,” she said. She looked very angry, actually.

I didn’t skip a beat: “My [adoptive mom] told me ‘I just don’t think you can be happy that size.’ That was her problem! Not mine!”

“You were never big!” my best friend exclaimed.

“I know,” I exclaimed, equally and oppositely. “It was her problem. Somehow she manifested it onto me. She was obsessed. She went to a weight-loss camp—”

“Why!” my best friend said.

“Right? She was fine.” I looked down at myself. “This is her body,” I said. “It’s fine. But she always told me, ‘Not me! Your grandmother gave you that body.’ It’s the same body.”

My best friend choked, then laughed.

“My [adoptive dad] tried to tell her. He always told her she had the most gorgeous legs of any woman he ever saw.”

“He loved her,” my best friend said.

“Yep,” I said. “Through it all.”

“Warts and all,” my best friend said, laughing.

For the record, she did not have warts. She had perfect, radiant skin.

My best friend had been telling me the story of meeting a guy at some work party. She’d told him she disliked cooking. She’d meant that it was unfulfilling, and that she is pressed for time. He’d interpreted this as meaning she was bad at cooking, “so he spent the rest of the night recommending recipes he thought I could handle.” She gave a couple of examples, describing the recipes with an escalating hostility.

I was smiling crookedly. Finally I pointed out that this said nothing about her, and a lot about him.

“He’s probably one of those people who can’t stick with anything they aren’t automatically good at on the first try,” I said. “It’s his own insecurity. He just assumed you’re the same way he is.”

“Ohhhhhhhh!” my best friend exclaimed, an actual revelation.

I proceeded to tell her the story the Gen Z’er had told me, about a mean girl in high school. The mean girl had told the Gen Z’er she had the most basic name. “And that mean girl’s name? Was [essentially ‘Jessica Smith’]”.

At the Gen Z’er’s initial telling, I’d died laughing (“so now we know what Jessica Smith obsesses over!”), and now my best friend was laughing, too.

“It’s always projection,” I said, and now her dad snorted and bowed his head, and I just intuitively understood that he’d suddenly thought of some past coworker or another.

Later my good friend in Missouri told me about the local church, its new sermon series on “taking offense.” I was ecstatic. I talked about “interpersonal friction,” about how the first half of our lives is accumulating other people’s crud and then learning to wipe it off, and how the second half is about keeping crud off us, preserving the integrity and sanctity of the spirit. These moments where we take offense are rumble strips, the gate checkpoints: either it’s projection, which you hand right back to the person trying to give it to you, or else you take a beat to critically assess your still-oozing wounds.

“I don’t think the goal is to completely kill the ego,” I voice-messaged my friend, “since we really do need the ego to keep our bodies alive.”

During the Superbowl, my best friend’s mom remarked that Adam Sandler looked old.

“Mom!” my best friend shrieked.

I was snickering. “It’s true,” I said, “when young people start looking old, it’s scary. It puts us in touch with our own sense of mortality.”

“The scarier thing is he’s hasn’t made a single funny movie in 25 years,” said my best friend’s husband.

We laughed. “Everyone has that thing they value,” I said, surreptitiously winking at my best friend. She and I sat down on the couch together. Her mom and I got into a conversation about my grey, grey hair, how grey hair “ages you.”

“Mom!” my best friend shrieked again.

“I’m talking about my hair,” her mom mouthed at us.

“Uh-huh. You know what really ages you?” I said coyly. “Aging.”

After a long pause, and with great effort, my best friend’s mom whispered: “Shut up.”

I looked up startled, then burst out laughing.

“May we all be so blessed,” I said, standing and putting my arms lightly around her.

I remember the first time I noticed how very, very old I looked. It was footage of our front yard, captured on a Nest camera. I’d never seen how pronounced my hobble was before. I was hobbling, and my shoulders were very sloped.

When I first stand up from the couch, it always takes a few minutes for my hips to get greased up again. Once I’m really moving it’s fine, but it takes a little bit to get back into motion, like a very creaky old vehicle that has to heave itself in different directions.

My friend’s husband and I were leaving the mall when my left kneecap swung out of place mid-stride. “Holy shit!” I shouted. It was giving Paula Pell. We had to order an Uber.

For a while I was seeing a weight-lifting, gym-owning physiologist. She was great. “I’m not sure I ever even learned how to walk right,” I told her.

Four or five years ago I went into a cardiologist’s office to get the veins in my leg scoped out. I’d met the cardiologist in the hospital; he’d received specialized training in connective tissue stuff at a Mayo. He loved talking about video games while doing vein surveillance.

I walked in for my leg scan appointment and the attending nurse blurted something like “oh thank God.”

I gazed at her quizzically.

“I saw that you were coming in,” she said, looking down at a clipboard, “and I saw your birth date. I was born the year after. So I’ve been waiting for you to come in. I really wanted to see… I was scared that you’d turn out to be… old.”

“Thanks,” I said. Always happy to help.

A couple years ago a good friend of mine volunteered, abruptly and for absolutely no reason, that he was scared of visible veins on other people’s bodies, actually scared of them. Like, when the skin is translucent, and the veins are very blue or purple.

I was astonished. I’d very recently gotten out of a hot shower, had stared in the mirror in horror at my own chest and shoulders, at the veins that had floated close to the surface and widened.

“Wow,” I finally managed to say to my friend.

He was scared of them blowing up, he explained. Just exploding blood.

This is my exact medical problem—veins that do weird stuff, leaky and floaty and collapsey stuff, maybe an allergic vasculitis situation—and I finally managed to say to my friend, without any further elaboration, “That is so valid.”

Having had my own body horror so accurately reflected and articulated had been a nightmare. After that conversation, I’d periodically pick a vein on myself and just stare at it, trying to decide just how grotesque it is.

Much more recently, I was scrolling through Reddit, bored. I stopped on a skincare thread and opened it.

How do Japanese women get their skin like that? So translucent and glowy, with the veins showing through like that? Japanese skincare! K-beauty! Avoiding the sun. Scrupulous application of sunscreen. It’s generational, you start learning as a kid. Parasols! Hats! So practical, so pragmatic. Ah, especially the older women in their squared-off clothing, all straight lines. Oh, I love right angles and straight lines.

I stared at the screen and started laughing.

TMI: Every time I’m about to get into the shower, I pause for just a second, distracted and disturbed by the mirror image of the scar on my breast. It’s faded, mostly, but it’s still new enough to startle me every time I see it. Although it is no longer the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, there is now a permanent red line down the middle of the scar, from where I’d spontaneously started bleeding under the skin.

It’s fine, I think to myself each time, forcing myself to walk away.

Six months ago I’d been getting my semiregular patdown from the surgical oncologist. “This is healing up nicely,” she’d murmured to herself.

“It started to,” I exclaimed. “It was really looking good! But then I started spontaneously bleeding under the skin and now there is this permanent river of blood—”

“It’s fine,” the surgical oncologist snapped at me, with an absolute severity, almost fury, that knocked the wind out of me. I thought about what she looks at every day of her life, the total danger people are in, and I shut my fucking mouth.

Now, when I see that little rivulet of permanent bloodstain and stare and stare and start to drown in it, I involuntarily think to myself it’s fine—someone else’s words, in someone else’s voice—and snap out of it.

Maybe someday soon I will be able to glance at the mirror and be able to perceive all of myself, rather than fixating so exclusively on the accumulation of physical evidence of my having survived, but today is not yet that day.