Corseting: Embrace Your Own Beauty Standards

This post was originally written for The Body is Not an Apology, where I am a Content Writer.

When I went to my first corset booth at a Steampunk convention, I was very embarrassed. I had only seen corsets in the media on very thin models, so I was sure that no one would make a corset big enough to fit me. The artistry of these handmade, steel-boned garments was amazing, though, and I had to inquire about them. 

Wearing my "Dollymop" corset from Dark Garden.

At the booth were men and women, of all shapes, assisting customers with trying on corsets. The corsetier had many plus sizes available and was happy to make a corset in any size you needed. This was the first shopping experience I had had where I did not feel out of place and as though everyone were wondering why I was there.

Last month, I was able to stop at Dark Garden Corsetry & Couture, where I was also pretty nervous because they make corsets for Dita Von Teese. I felt like I did not belong in a shop that creates garments for beautiful people. The woman who helped me never batted an eye, never questioned my size, and never treated me as though I were not good enough to belong in a place that clothed models and performers. She treated me with such respect that I felt safe and accepted, which is rare in my life.

I have come to find that the corseting community is extremely body positive. Most tightlacing groups and blogs all have a “body/corset snark free zone” label on their pages. They do not allow body shaming or shaming of how you choose to wear your corset. I had never really been in a community like that. People of every gender, ability, shape, size, ethnicity, culture, and country all come together around this one topic where we all support each other in being body positive and practicing radical self love.

Being part of this community has taught me to be snark free when talking about my own body and the bodies of others. It has also allowed me to learn to not care what other people think about what I look like.

At first, I was scared to wear a corset in public, especially since I like to wear them over my clothes because it is easier to adjust them if I need more pressure when I am anxious. The first few times I wore a corset in public, I did have people comment on it: “Can you breathe?” “Is that safe?” “That’s inappropriate.” As I spent more time in the corset community and saw so many people supporting each other and the concept that no one gets to tell you how to look or judge your character based on how you dress, I started not listening to other people and their beliefs on how I should dress. I am learning to say “Eff Your Beauty Standards.”

Plus-sized model Tess Munster started the “Eff Your Beauty Standards” campaign. She says, “For everyone that says we can’t show our tummies, wear a pencil/form fitting skirt, wear a bikini, wear sleeveless tops... YOU can! I want YOU to join me in wearing "daring" fashions & stop hiding your body because society tells you to.” (Tess looks great in her corsets.)

As I have learned to feel less ashamed of myself and follow my own beauty standards, I notice that people don’t really comment on my corset anymore. At least, not negatively. If I go into a room with my head down and my arms crossed to cover the corset, people feel the need to say negative things to me. When I go into a room confident and I don’t focus on my corset, I get no negative comments. In fact, my confidence seems to make other people more comfortable in telling me that they like the corset, especially older women who tell me all the time how pretty the corset is.

I still wear the corset under my clothes or under a jacket when I am in places that I know are unsafe. Usually, those are places where people want to try and exert their power and seek to shame me. One day, I will not hide it in these places, but emotionally, I am still building up to being ready to handle a verbal attack. I don’t think I would have ever gotten to the point where I was actually confident in what I wear- not the “fake it ‘till you make it” confident I had been practicing my whole life had I not started wearing a corset and participating in such a supportive community.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Overcoming Self-Harm: My Messy Beautiful

This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE!

This post comes with a trigger warning because it is about self-harm. However, I hope that by sharing with you one of my most Messy, Beautiful stories, if you are currently struggling with self-harm, that this helps you “Carry On, Warrior,” as Glennon would say. We need to know we are not alone. In order to heal, we need to hear from people in similar situations as us who have carried on, and been able to work through some of these messy parts of life.

Here is my Messy, Beautiful story:

October 20, 2013 was the first day of Brene Brown’s online class, The Gifts of Imperfection, through Oprah’s Lifeclass series.

I had all my supplies ready for my art projects. I was ready for six weeks of focusing on combating shame and embracing vulnerability. I was ready to be courageous and embrace my imperfection!

The first part of the art project was “Permission Slips,” where you wrote down some of the things you needed to give yourself permission to do in order to engage in the work of this class. Some of the “Permission Slips” might even be things you needed to give up. I knew there was one thing in particular I had to give up if I was going to be sure I started to heal from shame. I did not want to write it down though.

The second part of the project was to take a photo of yourself with “I’m Imperfect and I’m Enough” written somewhere on your person; most people chose to write it on their hand.

As I was getting ready to take my “I’m Imperfect and I’m Enough” photo, I could feel the pain in my legs. Every time I sat down, the fabric of my jeans pulled against raw skin. I had to remember to be careful how I sat so that I did not aggravate the sides of my upper thighs where the day before I had cut myself. This was the thing I had to give up, cutting. 

Writing it down would not be enough because I knew in a few days the raw skin would heal, I would forget the realities of what I was doing to myself, and I would do it again. A picture would be the only way to remember the gravity of what self-harm does. A picture was the only way to adequately describe what happens to me, and many people like me, when shame is so overwhelming and so painful that the only way we know how to release that inner pain so we can get through our life, is to cut ourselves.

That’s what self harm is, a release. Not a cry for help, not one step closer to suicide, it is a survival mechanism. I admit, not a good survival mechanism, but often the only one we have when we are not getting the help with shame resilience that we need, or we have not healed enough yet to have other ways to survive. Contrary to popular belief, cutting is not only a teen phenomenon or even something that starts in the teen years. I did not start cutting until a few years go, at the age of 33. It was actually an accident. I dropped a dish and I was overwhelmed because it was one more thing that went wrong that day. As I was picking up the ceramic pieces, I cut myself on one of them. I felt relieved and calm, and that’s how it started.

Photo copyright Jeff Norris, 2013.

Then on October 20, 2013, I took the typical “I’m Imperfect and I’m Enough” photo where I am smiling with the words written on my hand, this is the photo I let others see. However, I also had my husband take a photo of me where I wrote “I’m Imperfect and I’m Enough” with the raw cuts on my legs. I was finally working with a therapist, the first in 19 years, who understood trauma and shame, and I was embarking on this six week class with Brene Brown. I knew that now was the time to give up cutting forever because I had the support system I needed to be successful.

That was the most Messy, Beautiful photo I have ever taken.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

"Vincent and The Doctor:" In Celebration of World Bipolar Day 2014

Today is the first World Bipolar Day:

"World Bipolar Day (WBD) will be celebrating its inaugural year on March 30th, the birthday of Vincent Van Gogh, who was posthumously diagnosed as probably having bipolar disorder. The vision of WBD is to bring world awareness to bipolar disorders and eliminate social stigma. Through international collaboration the goal of World Bipolar Day is to bring the world population information about bipolar disorders that will educate and improve sensitivity towards the illness."

Logo from ISBD.

Since Vincent Van Gogh's birthday was chosen to celebrate this day, I think it is fitting to talk about one of the TV shows I feel raises awareness about bipolar disorder, helps decrease stigma, and increases compassion: Dr. Who's "Vincent and the Doctor" (Season 5: Episode 10.) When I saw this episode, I felt like part of my story was being told. It was a compassionate understanding of mental illness and the struggle of those of us with bipolar disorder.

I think what the episode shows about mental illness that most people fail to understand, is that while our mind may not work the way we want it to sometimes, one of the amazing things about our illness is the way we see the world. We often see it as more real than other people. In Dr. Who, Van Gogh not only sees the nuances of color, light, and beauty in the world, which makes him a great painter, he also sees truths that others do not see. As Van Gogh says, "There is so much more to the world than the average eye can see."

In this science fiction story, something has recently brought death to the community, which everyone blames on the "madness" of Van Gogh. We discover though that the thing which is bringing death is a monster from another world that no one else can see, except Van Gogh.

Our Van Gogh/Dr. Who Poster. Copyright C. Norris.

This ability to see more than others can- whether that be through physical sight, increased empathy (which can be seen in the show with Van Gogh's ability to see Amy's sadness over a loss even she does not remember consciously), superior leadership skills, the ability to see organizational systems, etc...- is well documented in bipolar disorder. You can read about this in A First Rate Madness by Dr. Nassir Ghaemi and Touched with Fire by Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison. Many people see us as irrational, eccentric, too sensitive, too emotional, and thus disregard what we see and feel. The research shows that we actually have more insight that people believe we have. I love in the show when Van Gogh says "I may be mad, but I'm not stupid." So true, and what so many of us want to say to those who think we are incapable of contributing to the world.

Dr. Who also shows the great agony those of us with bipolar live with daily, and yet we fight to carry on anyway. One of the things many of us worry about is that our illness will make us unable to leave anything good behind when we die. Will we ever be worthy of the precious life we were given? There is a beautiful scene at the end of the episode when The Doctor, Amy, and Van Gogh travel forward in time to the 21st century and Van Gogh is able to see that he has made a difference and left the world more beautiful.

The museum guide, an expert in Van Gogh's art says of Vincent:
"He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy, joy, and magnificence of our world; no one had ever done it before, perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind that strange, wild man.... was not only the worlds greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived."

Transforming the pain of my tormented life into beauty and good is something I strive for every day. Most people I know like me are all trying to do this, but rarely does the world see our resiliency, gifts, or talents because too many people choose to focus only on the negative aspects of the illness.

After their trip to the future, Amy believes they have "saved" Van Gogh and prevented his suicide. After they return Vincent to his own time, she hurries back to 2010 and thinks she will see hundreds of new paintings by Van Gogh hanging in the museum. However, they were unable to "save" Van Gogh, and he still dies from suicide at 37 years old.

Bipolar disorder is complex and like any illness, it takes lives. We wish we could save everyone, but we can not. Sometimes we are unable to find the right treatment in time to prevent death by suicide. It is sad, and I wish this were different, but this is a reality our loved ones have to understand about mental illness. They need to understand this for their own well-being, because the burden of attempting to "save" someone is too much for anyone to bear.

Because they could not prevent his death, Amy thinks they did not make a difference to Van Gogh's life at all, but she is wrong. Showing someone compassion always makes a difference, it makes our life better, and we never forget it.

As Dr. Who says to Amy, "Every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa. The bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant. And, we definitely added to his pile of good things."

I believe Vincent and the Doctor is the perfect show to watch on this, the first World Bipolar Day, for it reminds us that:

• Those of us with bipolar see and experience the wonder and beauty of the world, also it's pain and sadness, in a way that others do not. This can be a struggle at times, but it is also an amazing gift, a gift which we can use to make the world a better place.
• We may not always be able to fix or save someone, but we can always add to their pile of good things. The simplest way to do this is to show another person compassion.

In honor of World Bipolar Day, may we all add to someone's pile of good things today.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Everyone Who Has Mental Illness Matters

I have been so conflicted over whether or not to write a post reflecting on the death of actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman due to a possible heroin overdose after 23 years of sobriety. He was a fantastic actor and his loss is felt by many people for how he touched their lives through his acting. Not very different from when Glee's Cory Monteith died last year also from a heroin overdose. Depending on your age, you may have felt a connection and deep sense of lose with the death of both of these actors. I have also written about other celebrities and mental illness such as the suicide of Lee Thomson Young.

When I write about these celebrities it is often to help raise awareness about mental illness. The stories of these celebrities remind us that mental illness is a very common illness but also one that we try to hide all the time. However, when we speak up, we help bring it to light. As more people can identify with those of us with mental illness, more compassion can be created, and the more people will want to help rather than make fun of or hide the illness.

For some reason though, even with how much I like Phillip Seymour Hoffman, I felt like I did not know what to say, until I read an article by actress Jamie Lee Curtis on the subject of Hoffman's death and addiction in general. In it she says: "What we rarely talk about are the deaths of the unknown soldiers and civilians, the non-famous. Their deaths, no less sad and tragic, their families' grief, any lesser."

I could write about another celebrity and have a call to action through compassion and better care for those of us with addiction and mental illness. However, I have done it so many times before. What makes the stories of the celebrities any more important than the many people who die daily of overdose and suicide? Furthermore, I feel a bit like I am almost exploiting the deaths of these celebrities by using their death as a way to call us to action. Would they want their death to be used in that way? I did not ask them. Am I using their celebrity status for an agenda rather than seeing them as just another human being who struggled to live well on this earth, just like all the rest of us?

The truth is, everyone who has mental illness matters. None of these celebrities are any different than the rest of us. Yet we keep writing these stories because it's sensational yet a few months later we forget and nothing changes. In the mean time, people with mental illness are dying every day and we never mention them and never write about them. In fact, we cover up the reason for their death. In the mean time about 58 million people in America are living with a mental disorder and we do not do much about it.

How about now we do something about it instead of only talking about it when a new story comes out?

Here are some suggestions of what we can do:

• Learn about mental illness and the effectiveness of different types of treatment.
• Read stories from people living with mental illness.
• Ask a friend or family member with mental illness how we can support them.
• Advocate for more advanced treatment options.
• Volunteer with an organization that helps people with mental illness. 

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Disney's "Frozen": Why Elsa Matters

I have a few posts planned in reflection on the new Disney movie, "Frozen." For this post though, I want to talk a bit about why I identify with the character of Elsa in "Frozen" and why characters like her matter.  (Note: while I do not tell you exactly what happens in the movie, there are spoilers and the ending will not be a surprise.) Simply, I like her because she shows how scary it is to be taught to fear yourself and be told you might hurt the people you love just by being who you are. This happens when you live through abuse and trauma in many different forms.

My son says Elsa is like me because: "She is scared of herself, that she might hurt someone she loves with her power. She has to learn to love and trust herself, and then she is ok."

Photo from Disney's blog.

For me, Elsa is an important character not just because she needs to learn to accept herself the way she is, but because the writers show through her just how devastating and terrifying it is to fear your own soul. There is no terror and sadness like that of thinking you are bad when you do not want to be. It leads to a type of self-sacrifice and shame that actually makes you unable to heal. On accident, Elsa's parents taught her to be afraid of herself and taught her that the only way to protect others was to sacrifice herself. They shut her off from the world and gave her the mantra "conceal, don't feel, don't let it show." She becomes filled with fear, never learns to have compassion for herself, never learns to control her power, and thus she never knows love and belonging. This is a trauma for Elsa that makes her use the only survival she has ever been taught, that of shutting herself away and attempting to shut off her own emotions. No one trusts that she can be safe and thus she never learns how to control her own emotions or use her gifts well.

This can be seen in the song, "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?":


Many people can relate to this archetype, especially people who have been physically or emotionally abused and were told they deserved the abuse because they were "bad." I am glad we finally have a character in mainstream media that shows how trauma can effect you and that bad behavior does not mean you are a bad person. (Which is why I also love Elphaba from Wicked.) My son says the most important line in the movie Frozen is in the song "Fixer Upper," which the trolls sing. They say: "People make bad choices if they're mad or scared or stressed." For some people if they are scared enough, even their ability to make a choice and control the fear is compromised. I feel like this scene from the movie best shows Elsa's fear and how much she wants to never hurt anyone. However, she was never allowed to learn to work with her gifts and abilities, so they remain largely uncontrolled. Elsa assumes she is out of control because she is bad, but really, no one ever gave her the tools to be in control. ("For the First Time in Forever, Reprise.")


Frozen seems to also illustrate Dr. Brene Brown's research on vulnerability, fear, and shame. Shame, the belief that "I am bad," is what destroys people because it takes away the things we most need in life: love, belonging, and connection. I see Anna and Elsa both, in the end, as saving themselves by learning the components of true love. I am going to challenge the typical definition of true love (selfless love for another person, often a romantic love) and say that I think true love is radical compassion. Compassion for others and for yourself. Anna's love came from learning to have compassion for someone that was struggling, even though they hurt you. Elsa's love came from learning compassion for herself, which I do not think was only due to Anna's act of true love in the end of the movie. Elsa started on the path of self compassion when she chose to "let it go" and be herself. She then needed the act of love (compassion) on Anna's part to round out that self compassion. She had to learn that she could be herself within a community of people, as long as that community was compassionate and did not vilify her. No one can live well and be healthy in a community that has no compassion for you. Anna's act of love taught the whole community to be loving and shame-free.

If you do not have compassion, you are unable to accept and truly love yourself or anyone else. Without compassion we engage in shaming and blaming ourselves and others, rather than seeing life as fluid and full of mistakes and success. Shame, blame, and fear keep us from healing. How could Elsa ever even think she could control her emotions if she believed she was inherently bad?

I find that in treatment for mental illness, compassion is frequently left out of the equation, and shame is the norm. No one ever learns to heal themselves and understand their mind when other people shame them and tell them they are a bad person.

Trauma is a main contributor to mental illness for most of us (and trauma looks different for every person.) We did whatever we had to do to survive, and sometimes those survival skills don't work well in the rest of our life, but they are the only skills we know and they are the only response our brains are programmed to go to. Compassionate treatment tells us that we are not bad and that our brains just have not learned yet how to survive in other ways now that the trauma is gone or now that we have some agency in how we interact with that trauma due to being an adult. Sadly, most treatment focuses on shaming us for our behavior rather than getting to the reasons behind the behavior and teaching us how to reprogram our brain from old survival responses to new, more healthy survival responses. Bad therapy and treatment is basically what Elsa's parents accidentally did to her. Good therapy and treatment looks more like the relationship between Elsa and Anna. Anna did not continue to shame and blame Elsa, but rather saw that Elsa was struggling and helped lead her to self compassion and better ways to survive.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

Will 2014 Be the Year of Mental Illness Awareness?

Friends shared two article with me recently that call for mental illness awareness in 2014. This is exciting!

In First Up, Mental Illness. The Next Topic is Up To You, Nicholas Kristof says mental illness is the issue that needs more awareness and advocacy in 2014. Kristof states:

"So, if we want to tackle a broad range of social pathologies and inequalities, we as a society have to break taboos about mental health. There has been progress, and news organizations can help accelerate it. But too often our coverage just aggravates the stigma and thereby encourages more silence."

Kristof advocates for more truthful and comprehensive reporting about mental health, increasing proper care for mental illness, and talking about the realities of how prevalent mental illness is and that it is treatable and not to be feared.

Then in the article A Phrase to Renounce in 2014: "The Mentally Ill," Carey Goldberg eloquently lays out an argument for why we should no longer call people "the mentally ill" and how we need to use person first language. Saying "the mentally ill" implies that people with mental illness are separate than everyone else, other, which increases fear and misunderstanding. Goldberg notes something he learned from people with mental illness (peer specialists):

"Some newly minted peer specialists sat me down and re-educated me about the wrongness of using 'the mentally ill' and the rightness of using 'people first' language. A person is not defined by a diagnosis, they said. If you have a mental illness it doesn't define you any more than your heart disease defines you if you're a cardiac patient. A person is a person who happens to have depression or schizophrenia; the correct term is 'people with mental illness.'"

Both of these articles are well worth the read. I really do hope that mental illness advocacy is a focus of 2014. We have a long way to go until those of us with mental illness are not feared, victimized, hated, left untreated, and daily made fun of in our society.

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

What I Teach My Son When I Say I Am Fat

I saw this great article going around Facebook again this week called When Your Mother Says She's Fat by Kasey Edwards. It is a letter by Edwards to her Mom about what she learned from her mother when her mother insulted herself due to her weight. What Edwards learned struck a cord for me and the many women who have been sharing this article because these are the same things we learned from our own beautiful mothers who never thought that they were beautiful

As the mother of a boy, I then thought about what mothers teach their sons when we speak badly about our own weight and appearance.

What particularly struck me in Edwards' article is where she writes that as a child she looked forward to the day when she would be like her mother, until:

"But all of that changed when, one night, we were dressed up for a party and you said to me, ‘‘Look at you, so thin, beautiful and lovely. And look at me, fat, ugly and horrible.’’

At first I didn’t understand what you meant.

‘‘You’re not fat,’’ I said earnestly and innocently, and you replied, ‘‘Yes I am, darling. I’ve always been fat; even as a child.’’

 

In the days that followed I had some painful revelations that have shaped my whole life. I learned that:
1. You must be fat because mothers don’t lie.
2. Fat is ugly and horrible.
3. When I grow up I’ll look like you and therefore I will be fat, ugly and horrible too."

In that article I heard two voices from my own life. 

I heard my own voice, just a few weeks ago when I was talking to my husband, in front of my son, about going to my husband's annual Christmas party. I told my husband: "I don't want to go. I am fat, disgusting, and you deserve someone who looks good like you." 

I heard my son's voice who so often has said "No Mommy, you are pretty" at the many times I have made comments like I did about this Christmas party. 

I bet almost daily I say something negative about the way I look and I know my son hears it. It has become a daily part of my life, natural for me. As natural as the girls in grade school who told me I had to be at the bottom of the pyramid because I was so fat the rest of them could not hold me up. As natural as the people who made fun of me for having fat legs. As natural as the people who told my husband when we were dating that I was not pretty enough for him. It seems totally normal to me to feel required to never let myself forget that I am fat and ugly.

The comment I made to my husband about the Christmas party- "I don't want to go. I am fat, disgusting, and you deserve someone who looks good like you," told my son a lot about me, about himself, about his father, and about women in general. 

These are the potential lessons I taught my son that day:

• Body weight is a sign of beauty and thus there is one universal idea of beauty that we all must conform to.
• Fat is disgusting.
• His idea of beauty is wrong (because he thinks I am pretty and I am telling him this is not true.)
• A wife must look a certain way for her to be good enough to be seen with her husband.
• I am worth less than my husband.
• I am not someone that anyone would want to be seen with in public, and thus maybe even my son should not be seen in public with me
• Men should not love women who do not fit the cultural ideas of beauty.
• A person's self worth is based on their weight.
• I do not practice what I preach. I preach body acceptance and self-love, but I do not practice it. 
• To practice self-loathing rather than self-compassion and love. 
• To judge other's worth by their weight.
• To judge himself by his weight.

Since this type of body hatred is so normal for me, I do not even realize I am doing it. It was not until I saw this graphic going around Facebook today that I realized how often, every day, and every year, I talk about my weight and how much I hate my body. This comes from a Facebook page called Grrrl:

So, rather than resolving to loose weight again this year I resolve to not talk about weight loss or worth being attached to weight and looks in front of my son. Eventually I want to never talk about it to anyone again, but I know I am not able to do that yet. However, I can take the step now to not expose my son to seeing his own mother hate herself because of her weight. 

Blessings,

Rev. Katie

P.S. After I wrote this post, I took a break to have dinner with my family and noticed that in order to follow through on this resolution I already had to stop myself from saying things I typically would have said before. Such as "I can't believe I ate that much. I should stop eating because I ate too much already today. I feel disgusting that I ate this."

Also, I should add that "fat" is not in itself a bad word. When we add qualifiers to it like "disgusting," or when we use it in a negative way, that is when it becomes a problem.