Today I started 40 days at my local yoga studio, which means that for 6 weeks I’ll attend 4 yoga classes a week along with a lecture about the spiritual and practical effects of yoga in a western lifestyle. I’m going to preface this post by saying I’m nothing special when it comes to this topic: I go to yoga but I’m no expert (I can’t touch my toes), I’m a thick girl but I’m about a size 16, I’m mentally ill but I’m high functioning when medicated. I’m not trying to tell anyone that practicing yoga will solve any of your deeply rooted problems, I’m mostly expressing my experience with the practice before starting a project, and at best hoping to start a discussion about the topic. 

My relationship with my body is both complex and subtle. I grew up in an athletic setting where women were openly shamed for being unable to control their growing bodies. I personally never experienced anyone telling me I wasn’t thin enough but I watched other girls experience blatant criticism for their bodies and thought to myself “I love them, but I will not be them.” However when I was seventeen due to a trauma I was no longer able to practice the sport I had dedicated 10 years to and the settling dust of this experience unearthed a lot of issues with my mental health. I found that being an athlete was quelling a lot of inner turmoil and without an outlet I was bursting at the seams with unbound mania and depression. I have experienced a lot of really deep and terrible depressive states in my early 20s but this time when I was 17 is still the time that I think of as my most unstable. I was diagnosed bipolar, which I now I think the more accurate label for myself is something my doctor calls bipolar depression, and when I was 18 I started medication before starting college. 

Let me make this perfectly clear: I don’t think physical activity is a replacement for medication. I fucking love medication. I would kneel down at the alter of my Effexor and my mood stabilizer and give it my deepest blessing. However, the meds accompanied by having no physical outlet caused me to gain a lot of weight in college. Luckily for me, this weight came at a weirdly perfect time in my life. Don’t get me wrong, the weight gain accompanied one of the most difficult and depressed times of my life, but I was so wrapped up in hating my mind and my heart that I couldn’t give a shit about my weight. Honestly I thought I looked fucking fine. I still think I look fucking fine. I think plus size women are so fucking beautiful and I refuse to allow anyone to tell me that being skinny is the only way to be genuinely happy. 

This being said, I still wasn’t content with my mind. I doubt i’ll ever truly be content with my mind. I remember reading Ellen Forney’s Marbles and for the first time truly feeling like I was understood. In this book she talks about being very skeptical about practicing yoga, but in time she found it to be extremely beneficially to her mental health. This was very accurate to my own practice, despite my mother’s futile attempts to get me to lose weight in any way she could manage. After a few weeks of frustrating and trying practices, I found that the quieting of the mind was incomparable. Sometimes the hour and 15 minutes I spent wiggling around in a hot room was the only time all day I didn’t feel like dying. The quieting for me comes from both the excursive and the meditation of the practice. I completely knowledge that as a white woman doing yoga in the USA in the year 2016 completely erases all of the beautiful eastern culture of the practice of yoga, but even the watered down version of age old poses I attempt do so much for me. 

featured image originally published in Ellen Forney's graphic novel Marbles. 

Lately I’ve felt the need to purge. Get rid of junk. Pick the rotten old scab off the skin of my life right now, even though my whole life kind of feels like a rotten scab. 

Purging is not something that comes naturally to me as a person. In college I picked up a bit of a hoarding habit, I thought of myself often as a character in my favorite movie Labyrinth, a puppet who clomps around a land of trash and picks up items that she deems as worthwhile or useful and tosses them on her back until they become a part of her physical body. She hunches over, a hump of trash and antiques towering over her like an extreme hunched back, encouraging the films protagonist to hold on to items in her room that hold nostalgia or aesthetic value. The more I think about it, the more I think my hoarding habit might be drawn from this movie in general, maybe I admired the slow panning camera scene in the beginning of the film where Sarah’s room is filled with toys, knick-knacks, and sweet memorabilia. 

When I left my family home to live by myself for the first time, the hoarding habit got out of hand. I was shopping constantly, if not in store then online. My last apartment in Brooklyn was never ever clean, and was constantly filled with weird things I saved off the street or picked up at thrift stores. When I packed up all this junk and moved across state back to live with my family again, I realized that I was filling my life with nostalgic trash. I remember telling my favorite therapist that I would never be the kind of woman who loves to travel and can fit everything in a bag at a moments notice to hop on a whirlwind adventure. First of all, I think the idea that all young people are privileged enough to travel is dumb, and I won’t get into it now, but the idea of wandering has never appealed to me. I’m a loud person who lives quietly. It takes me a long time for me to figure out where i’m going and feel comfortable in my surroundings, and i’m genuinely happiest when i’m spreading my roots in a place I care about compared to exploring new places I’ve never traversed. 

I still identify as this person, but I definitely have come to acknowledge that I hid behind being a homebody as an identity in my late teens and early 20s. I clung to being the kitschy woman with too many things who was afraid to leave her house on the weekends as an excuse to let the objects in my life take over. Even when I began to embrace paganism in my college years I was really gripping to the excuse to cast spells and leave them hanging around my house as a form of proof that they were working. 

As I’ve been getting more invested in my research into production values as it relates to our fast consuming society, I felt that my life was no longer living up to the expectation of my morals. I could no longer look at the pile of pilled fast fashion clothes in the corner of my room endearingly as things I should save to wear one day. I also found that the more I committed to making choices that would lead to long term happiness versus short term satisfaction, I couldn’t keep physically or metaphorically stepping over the trash in my life anymore. I also have been doing some very minimal (blatant pun intended) research into minimalist lifestyles, mostly using youtube and blogs. I particularly like a youtuber and blogger called Rachel Aust, who has very reasonable recommendations for consolidating your life but still appeasing aesthetic needs. She made a 30 day entering minimalism challenge that I might try to record here on this blog. 

This being said, I’m never ever ever going to be a minimalist. I’m never going to be a woman with five total pairs of shoes or be able to fit all of my clothes in one travel casual duffel. I’m literally a maker, by definition I put more things into the world, i’m not great at taking them away. But the more I think about the well being of myself as  person, consumer, and a woman, the more I need to get ride of the things that don’t fit me physically  or morally anymore. I dumped 6 bags of my former treasures into a donation bin today, and i’m currently just happy to be swathed in clean sheets and be able to see the floor of my room.