FEELINGS FRIDAY

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Today is our inaugural weekly FEELINGS FRIDAY where we write about our feelings in poetry and it’s Friday and I love you and your beautiful feelings.

My first poetry prompt for you is based on a poem by Tasbeeh Herwees.

i.

“Your name is Tasbeeh. Don’t let them call you by anything else.”

My mother speaks to me in Arabic; the command sounds more forceful in her mother tongue, a Libyan dialect that is all sharp edges and hard, guttural sounds. I am seven years old and it has never occurred to me to disobey my mother. Until twelve years old, I would believe God gave her the supernatural ability to tell when I’m lying.

“Don’t let them give you an English nickname,” my mother insists once again, “I didn’t raise amreekan.”

My mother spits out this last word with venom. Amreekan. Americans. It sounds like a curse coming out of her mouth. Eight years in this country and she’s still not convinced she lives here. She wears her headscarf tightly around her neck, wades across the school lawn in long, floor-skimming skirts. Eight years in this country and her tongue refuses to bend and soften for the English language. It embarrasses me, her heavy Arab tongue, wrapping itself so forcefully around the clumsy syllables of English, strangling them out of their meaning.

But she is fierce and fearless. I have never heard her apologize to anyone. She will hold up long grocery lines checking and double-checking the receipt in case they’re trying to cheat us. My humiliation is heavy enough for the both of us. My English is not. Sometimes I step away, so people don’t know we’re together but my dark hair and skin betray me as a member of her tribe.

On my first day of school, my mother presses a kiss to my cheek.

“Your name is Tasbeeh,” she says again, like I’ve forgotten. “Tasbeeh.”

ii.

Roll call is the worst part of my day. After a long list of Brittanys, Jonathans, Ashleys, and Yen-but-call-me-Jens, the teacher rests on my name in silence. She squints. She has never seen this combination of letters strung together in this order before. They are incomprehensible. What is this h doing at the end? Maybe it is a typo.

“Tas…?”

“Tasbeeh,” I mutter, with my hand half up in the air. “Tasbeeh.”

A pause.

“Do you go by anything else?”

“No,” I say. “Just Tasbeeh. Tas-beeh.”

“Tazbee. All right. Alex?”

She moves on before I can correct her. She said it wrong. She said it so wrong. I have never heard my name said so ugly before, like it’s a burden. Her entire face contorts as she says it, like she is expelling a distasteful thing from her mouth. She avoids saying it for the rest of the day, but she has already baptized me with this new name. It is the name everyone knows me by, now, for the next six years I am in elementary school. “Tazbee,” a name with no grace, no meaning, no history; it belongs in no language.

“Tazbee,” says one of the students on the playground, later. “Like Tazmanian Devil?” Everyone laughs. I laugh too. It is funny, if you think about it.

iii.

I do not correct anyone for years. One day, in third grade, a plane flies above our school.

“Your dad up there, Bin Laden?” The voice comes from behind. It is dripping in derision.

“My name is Tazbee,” I say. I said it in this heavy English accent, so he may know who I am. I am American. But when I turn around they are gone.

iv.

I go to middle school far, far away. It is a 30-minute drive from our house. It’s a beautiful set of buildings located a few blocks off the beach. I have never in my life seen so many blond people, so many colored irises. This is a school full of Ashtons and Penelopes, Patricks and Sophias. Beautiful names that belong to beautiful faces. The kind of names that promise a lifetime of social triumph.

I am one of two headscarved girls at this new school. We are assigned the same gym class. We are the only ones in sweatpants and long-sleeved undershirts. We are both dreading roll call. When the gym teacher pauses at my name, I am already red with humiliation.

“How do I say your name?” she asks.

“Tazbee,” I say.

“Can I just call you Tess?”

I want to say yes. Call me Tess. But my mother will know, somehow. She will see it written in my eyes. God will whisper it in her ear. Her disappointment will overwhelm me.

“No,” I say, “Please call me Tazbee.”

I don’t hear her say it for the rest of the year.

v.

My history teacher calls me Tashbah for the entire year. It does not matter how often I correct her, she reverts to that misshapen sneeze of a word. It is the ugliest conglomeration of sounds I have ever heard.

When my mother comes to parents’ night, she corrects her angrily, “Tasbeeh. Her name is Tasbeeh.” My history teacher grimaces. I want the world to swallow me up.

vi.

My college professors don’t even bother. I will only know them for a few months of the year. They smother my name in their mouths. It is a hindrance for their tongues. They hand me papers silently. One of them mumbles it unintelligibly whenever he calls on my hand. Another just calls me “T.”

My name is a burden. My name is a burden. My name is a burden. I am a burden.

vii.

On the radio I hear a story about a tribe in some remote, rural place that has no name for the color blue. They do not know what the color blue is. It has no name so it does not exist. It does not exist because it has no name.

viii.

At the start of a new semester, I walk into a math class. My teacher is blond and blue-eyed. I don’t remember his name. When he comes to mine on the roll call, he takes the requisite pause. I hold my breath.

“How do I pronounce your name?” he asks.

I say, “Just call me Tess.”

“Is that how it’s pronounced?”

I say, “No one’s ever been able to pronounce it.”

“That’s probably because they didn’t want to try,” he said. “What is your name?”

When I say my name, it feels like redemption. I have never said it this way before. Tasbeeh. He repeats it back to me several times until he’s got it. It is difficult for his American tongue. His has none of the strength, none of the force of my mother’s. But he gets it, eventually, and it sounds beautiful. I have never heard it sound so beautiful. I have never felt so deserving of a name. My name feels like a crown.

ix.

“Thank you for my name, mama.”

x.

When the barista asks me my name, sharpie poised above the coffee cup, I tell him: “My name is Tasbeeh. It’s a tough t clinging to a soft a, which melts into a silky ssss, which loosely hugs the b, and the rest of my name is a hard whisper â€" eeh. Tasbeeh. My name is Tasbeeh. Hold it in your mouth until it becomes a prayer. My name is a valuable undertaking. My name requires your rapt attention. Say my name in one swift note â€" Tasbeeeeeeeh â€" sand let the h heat your throat like cinnamon. Tasbeeh. My name is an endeavor. My name is a song. Tasbeeh. It means giving glory to God. Tasbeeh. Wrap your tongue around my name, unravel it with the music of your voice, and give God what he is due.”

Tasbeeh Herwees, The Names They Gave Me

via Rachel Mckibbens

I love this poem. It feels like an instruction manual of how to honor yourself, starting with your own name. Do you like your name? Do you like it when other people say it? How does it roll off your tongue? Is there another name you’ve always wanted to go by?

If you want to share your poem with me, send it here: marylambertsing@gmail.com. I’ll pick and post my favorites next week!

Tips:

-Follow your instincts.
-Freewrite first and then edit later. Let the critics in your head take a backseat today- nothing is off limits, nothing is wrong, nothing is stupid.
-This is simply a jumping off point! Sometimes I end up so far from the prompt itself, I can’t even remember what it was! Though I also never remember where I parked the car when there are only two other vehicles in the Stop & Shop parking lot, I find that when I stray from a prompt, it is often my inner-self hungry to process an issue. If I end up writing a soliloquy to a sandwich, I may just be hungry. To me, free-writing is as much poetry as it is therapy. Go there, boo boo.

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Round and Round: Part 1 —

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Trigger warning: This post touches on issues of health and wellness, weight loss and eating disorders.

Perhaps you aren’t aware, but there’s a seismic shift happening within the Health at Every Size^® (HAES) community. It all started with the book Body Respect by Lucy Aphramor and Linda Bacon.

As most of you know, Bacon wrote the groundbreaking book Health at Every Size, which tackled the way in which personal health behaviors can have a profoundly positive effect on metabolic health even if weight loss is not a  consequence of those behaviors.

Bacon’s book was a seismic shift in itself, directly challenging the orthodox view that weight loss is the end all, be all goal for overall health and well-being. When I began blogging back in 2009, my goal was to explore the science of HAES and to find out for myself whether weight loss was necessary for health. I’m pretty sure you all know where I stand now.

The seismic shift caused by Body Respect adds a depth of understanding to HAES that had previously been lacking. Namely, that the social determinants of health (SDH) have a broad-ranging effect on the health choices of both the privileged and unprivileged classes of every culture.

If you’re White, middle class, cis, heterosexual, able-bodied and male, then odds are in your favor that you’ll have better access to healthcare, quality education, a variety of nutrition and exercise options, economic security and overall stability than someone who is a PoC, poor, transgender, homosexual, physically or mentally disabled, and/or female.

There is broad global agreement (starting with the World Health Organization) that the SDH affects health across the spectrum and has an enormous impact on the health and well-being of everyone, but a particularly nasty impact on marginalized communities. The stress of economic insecurity alone has been indicted as a primary driver of poor health.

In my review of Body Respect, I praised Aphramor and Bacon for incorporating the SDH into HAES as long overdue. I strongly believe that socioeconomic inequality is the biggest issue of our generation, and HAES can play a pivotal role in drawing attention to and addressing the SDH.

Image from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

But in that review I raised some questions as to where this new focus on the SDH leaves the promotion of individual health behaviors. As the authors said in Body Respect, “Health behaviors account for less than a quarter of the differences in health outcomes between groups.” If that’s the case, then how should we frame personal behaviors within HAES? Does this signal a decreased emphasis on the health effects of diet and exercise? And if the SDH is the number one issue for HAES, then how can we, as HAES activists, fight against their toxic effects?

These are some of the questions I planned to ask Lucy Aphramor in my interview that she cancelled. So my first stop on my search for answers was the Association for Size Diversity and Health (ASDAH) blog, where Fall Ferguson wrote this post on health inequities. So I posted this comment and got no response.

After some consideration, I decided that maybe I could put together a panel of HAES experts to discuss the SDH. At first, I approached six HAES experts and arranged a sort of weekly email roundtable. But due to conflicting schedules and the impending holidays, it fell apart shortly after it began.

Still hungry for answers, I approached the Show Me the Data Yahoo! group, which includes most of the prominent HAES experts we know and love. I sent a message to everyone explaining the roundtable and how I would like to ask six questions and publish their answers here. Finally, I got a response and I was able to begin.

The First Three

The questions I chose were complicated, there’s no doubt. Asking “What do we do about the SDH?” is like asking “What do we do about that meteor heading for Earth?” We might have some suggestions, but the scope of the problem is so broad, so enormous, so all-encompassing that any answer will be, by definition, inadequate.

The SDH is woven into our systems, our culture, our heritage, where we equate success with hard work and poverty with laziness. And interweaving those economic issues are issues of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and the inherent bias directed at marginalized groups. So, I came to the table knowing that we weren’t going to resolve the issue on a listserv.

However, I am optimistic that if we organize our thoughts, our knowledge, our understanding, perhaps we can construct a framework for advocacy so that we, as HAES advocates, can all push in the same direction. For example, a small, but (relatively) simple proposal that could have a net positive impact on millions of Americans is to raise the minimum wage. Hell, if I were King, I’d push for a living wage pegged to inflation. As they say, a rising tide lifts all boats.

If ASDAH and HAES advocates were to rally behind this economic issue, we could join the countless other social movements pushing for economic justice.

And so, it is with all of this context in mind that I asked my first three questions. I hope that this dialogue will provide insight into how HAES can play an effective role in addressing the SDH.

Question 1: If HAES is focusing more on the social determinants of health, what can individuals do to either reduce, mitigate or counteract the effects of the social determinants of health? What can/should we expect from the future of HAES advocacy in terms of addressing the root causes of the SDH (e.g., economic inequality, social injustice, institutionalized discrimination)?

David Spero, R.N.
A registered nurse with 35 years experience focusing on diabetes and the SDH

This is a very difficult question â€" what can individuals do about social causes of illness? It’s why my diabetes book was never popular with people with diabetes â€" learning about the social causes only made people feel more disempowered than they already felt. I usually suggest:

1. Use knowledge of the pathways from economic and social inequalities to illness to stop blaming yourself.
2. Be more open with others in your community about SDH to provide mutual support.
3. Use knowledge of the health effects of oppression to make plans to reduce those effects in the limited, but still useful ways, that are available to you (e.g., relaxation, exercise, social support).
4. If willing and able, get involved in trying to change some of the SDH that are affecting your community directly, which could be stigma, environmental pollution, poverty, lack of access to care or to food, etc. … there are a lot of them. The act of fighting back reduces the feeling of hopelessness, which is a major stressor, maybe the worst. Remember that stress is the number one way that oppression damages health in most cases.

Hope this helps. I am in no way saying that these are the only measures or the best measures. They are just the ones I know and use. People seem to like the sound of them, but I have no data on people putting them into practice.

Laurie Klipfel, MSN, RN, BC-ANP,WCC,CDE
Nurse Practitioner and Diabetes Educator

Well said David. I also am not sure we have the power to change socioeconomic status, but we can stop placing blame that only adds to the oppression and makes the effect much worse.

Lisa Du Breuil, LICSW
Clinical Social Worker who treats people dealing with addictions, eating disorders and problems post-weight-loss surgery at an outpatient psychiatry clinic in Boston

I really like David’s response to your question, Shannon.

In addition: Right now when I think of what HAES-oriented people can do to address root causes of the SDH, I think of working to get different voices heard by the people who currently have power in our health care system. I think about helping people actually see the systemic discrimination â€" what people used to call (still call?) “raising consciousness” â€" happening around these issues.

Question 2: How does one look at the effects of the social determinants of health, and the enormity of the institutions that ensure its ongoing existence, and not succumb to feelings of futility and immutable fate regarding one’s health and wellness?

David Spero

Shannon, you are asking the questions that politically-minded public health people have been wondering for years. A health approach to oppression, inequality, and environmental degradation gives the same picture that a social or political approach gives â€" the same problems and the same alignment of forces on different sides. If the 0.1% remain unwilling to share and willing to use all their power to maintain and exacerbate the status quo, it will be very hard to change conditions. Appealing to their sense of fairness or compassion sounds like a total waste of time to me. They don’t have such concepts about us.

So, to change SDH in a positive direction would require a very strong class-based movement, like in the US in the 30s or 60s, and in Europe until recently. On an individual, community, and family basis, we pull together to take the best care of ourselves and of each other that we can, we fight on issues where we have a chance, and we don’t give up. Beyond that, I don’t know.

Your questions aren’t new Shannon. Many activists have written books about how to keep strong in the face of the powers we are up against. Check out Joanna Macy for one, or Nelson Mandela.

Deb Burgard, PhD
Eating Disorder Psychologist and Past President of ASDAH

I guess I fall back on the skills that I use in the face of almost anything that seems overwhelming to me: I think, OK, this isn’t going to get fixed right away, but what can I do today to chip away at it? What can I do every day to chip away at it? How do I think about this so that I integrate it into my life as a part of my daily self-care? Care of the world = self care.

Practically speaking, I start with the low-hanging fruit and then build from there. What is right in front of me to do? Just start. And then just repeat. And then, just return (after I â€" inevitably â€" get interrupted).

Part of the problem is the dealing with the confusion about what is enough to do. It will never be enough, so how do we figure out whether doing anything is worth it? How do we figure out how much is worth doing?

I guess I am proposing Intuitive Activism â€" that there is something that is possible and worth it, and we need to free ourselves up to do it, and manage the sense of overwhelm/guilt/despair that lurks constantly over our efforts.

I think people underestimate the power of small, consistent, irritations on the status quo. I may not be able to change it all in my lifetime but that doesn’t mean I can’t use the opportunities that I have for being an obstacle to the Death Machine. If everyone did that there would probably be enough lack of cooperation that many of these big forces would lose at least some of their momentum. And because the big forces come down to money, if it becomes too expensive to fuel the big forces, then they stop getting fed.

The other thing that really helps me is to understand that the world I inherited was made better by those kinds of efforts that people before me made. I feel like I am part of a long chain, a long tradition that is the best human company there is. I want to be part of it. So I don’t want to do nothing, because I want those efforts that other people made to come to some fruition eventually. It is not just numbers of people who get momentum going, it is persistence over time and generations, and that is something that we do through institutions, traditions, oral history, activism. We are a team, it is my turn with the ball.

Jon Robison, PhD, MS
Researcher, assistant professor at Michigan State University and co-editor of the Health at Every Size journal

Love the sentiment â€" and for me it is always about the music â€" chippin’ away.

David Spero

Beautiful, Deb. It’s harder for me to maintain belief in the long-term when the long-term seems to be disappearing, but as long as we can hope for a future, I guess, we can keep trying to make it better.

Deb Burgard

Yes, David, many times before humans have had to face the worry that they will not be here much longer, even in my lifetime. I think our work is directly impacting the available energy for people to face those pressing and urgent problems and stop frittering away time and energy on fruitless weight loss projects.

I heard somewhere that pilots learn and practice to keep flying the plane no matter how close to crashing they are (I guess as long as they don’t have the option to parachute out!). I can see that being quite useful since you never know for sure.

Laurie Klipfel

Beautifully said Deb. Even after you are long dead, your chipping lives on. You really have no idea what your impact will be, or how big the small changes will grow. Watching It’s a Wonderful Life shows how little impacts can make a big difference.

Keep chipping!!

Carmen Cool
Psychotherapist with a focus on eating disorders

I am so grateful for this discussion â€" thank you everyone! I am totally in love with the idea of “intuitive activism”!

One of my favorite authors is Margaret (Meg) Wheatley. One of her most recent books, So Far From Home, was a tough but important read for me  because she takes on this issue of “feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and sometimes despairing even as you paradoxically experience moments of joy, belonging, and greater resolve to do your work.”

This is the text of one of her posters, made from the book, and I was reminded of it while catching up on these wonderful emails!

A Path for Warriors

We are grateful to discover our right work and happy to be engaged in it.
We embody values and practices that offer us meaningful lives now.
We let go of needing to impact the future.
We refrain from adding to the aggression, fear and confusion of this time.
We welcome every opportunity to practice our skills of compassion and insight, even very challenging ones.
We resist seeking the illusory comfort of certainty and stability.
We delight when our work achieves good results yet let go of needing others to adopt our successes.
We know that all problems have complex causes.
We do not place blame on any one person or cause, including ourselves and colleagues.
We are vigilant with our relationships, mindful to counteract the polarizing dynamics of this time.
Our actions embody our confidence that humans can get through anything as long as we’re together.
We stay present to the world as it is with open minds and hearts, knowing this nourishes our gentleness, decency and bravery.
We care for ourselves as tenderly as we care for others, taking time for rest, reflection and renewal.
We are richly blessed with moments of delight, humor, grace and joy. We are grateful for these.

Question 3: How has HAES been supportive of and successful for marginalized communities? How has HAES fallen short? What are some specific ways in which we can support and reach out to those most affected by the social determinants of health?

I received no response to this question.

Tomorrow, I shall post the second part of this roundtable, which is a single question that got an overwhelming amount of response. Many thanks to all the HAES experts who participated.

Filed under: DT, ED, EX, FH, FP, FS, Weighty Wednesday, WL, WLS - Repost by dzzfashion.blogspot.com -
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