I.
Some people go to Vegas, the beach, or Walden Pond for respite. I went to “fat camp,” so called by the other women who also attended the wellness and fitness camp in western Massachusetts. I was twenty-four, entering my third year in the English PhD program at Stanford University, and preparing for the exam that would allow me to enter the next phase of PhD candidacy. Only, this wasn't the first time I'd taken a graduate exam, and the first one had humiliated me. From a distance, I appeared to be thriving. Mentally I was unraveling.
The camp scheduled varied daily activities. One day, the counselors had us do a plank-holding contest. Whoever held their plank the longest could sit out that morning’s gym circuits. In order to read for my third-year exam, I vowed to win. On the ground and ready to plank up on my forearms, I waited for the counselor’s cue to begin to implement the technique I used to get through any challenging physical activity—saying my ABCs over and over. Some women dropped quickly. Others made it through my third round of the alphabet. My abs screamed at me, my forearms asked to stop holding up my entire body. Then it was just me and another girl. I numbed myself to my body’s pleas. She fell as I got to my fifth M.
For my reward, I was invited to sit on a metal folding chair on the gym stage. I sat there for the rest of the session, trying to read my copy of Invisible Man as the other campers ran around the gym, but feeling too self-conscious to focus, not realizing yet that there was an invisible gaze that had led us all there in the first place.
*
My mental fraying had started two years before. When I first arrived at Stanford, I marveled at the striking sandstone buildings, the arcades and red-tiled roofs, so different from campuses I’d seen on the east coast. The mile-drive up to campus leads as if to a resort, lined as it is with grandiose palm trees. From Palm Drive, you can see Memorial Church in the distance, built in the 1890s as the center of campus. Glistening in the sun, its front façade displays a mosaic fresco which, according to Stanford’s website, “depicts Christ welcoming the righteous into the Kingdom of God.”
Granted admission into the Kingdom, I thought I should have been happy. But as Satan tells us in Paradise Lost:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
I know this quote because I read the Western Canon for my first-year qualifying exam, informally called “From Beowulf to Beloved.” Held at the end of the summer after the first year in the PhD program, it was a two-hour exam during which faculty members in the English department could ask you anything.
How do you interpret Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath Tale’? Explain how you see Toryesque elements either in Pope or Swift. Why is the tableau scene in The House of Mirth significant? Choose two Modernist novels and compare them formally and thematically. Talk about unrealistic usages of fictional texts to establish reality. Discuss insanity in a work on your list.
The faculty member assigned to give us tips for the exam, who was also one of the examiners, boasted he had passed his own at Yale with distinction because he could recite entire monologues and poems.
If we passed, we stayed in the program, but there was no clarity about what counted as a passing or failing grade, or if everyone who failed could retake it. Some students left the program after this first year. Consequently, I approached this exam as the measure of my worth, as the ultimate assessment of whether I belonged in higher education. I needed to recite Wordsworth on command.
I could not afford to be kicked out of Paradise. With my $25, 000 stipend, I made more than most of my family members. My family had migrated from Mexico and worked manual jobs. Unlike most of them, I had health insurance. I could help my parents with their household bills and my brother with his college expenses.
*
I had not set out to be an English major, but I took a Chicana/o literature class in college that changed the course of my life, and it was offered through an English department. English departments tend to follow the additive model—they add a couple courses about race and ethnicity to the curriculum without fundamentally changing the discipline. But back then, I was grateful for any non-canonical morsels. In that Chicana/o literature class, I was exposed to writings that imparted the importance of collectivity to address inequalities and which expressed longings to imagine other ways of being and knowing despite a dominant U.S. culture that emphasized individualism and assimilation. Growing up Mexican in Providence, RI, I knew nothing about the long history of Latines in the US, so I took as many courses as I could in this area along with classes in other ethnic literatures. I wanted to be a professor so I could pass on the gift that a friend told me courses gave him too—“that we are not alone.”
As an undergraduate, I could get away with not speaking. When I did talk, it was in the halting way someone sounds when they are simultaneously rethinking everything they say. I would also mix up words and pronunciations. George W. Bush was president at the time and comedians highlighted his malapropisms and confusing use of grammar. I wondered—is that what I sounded like? Did I have George Bush syndrome? In case I did, I tried to stay mute, not trusting my tongue or command over texts.
*
The texts we had to read for the qualifying exam at the end of the first year of coursework were on a list that consisted of about a hundred texts from the eleventh century to the two-thousands. We had just the summer to prepare. To get an overall sense of the work, I first read using colored pens and sticky notes to mark places I wanted to return to. Then, I reread for analysis, making notes on a Word document to print out and tape onto a large spiral black sketch pad so I could have all my notes in one place, tactile and visible, a layer onto which I could stick more notes and draw connections in pen. But how much info was necessary to include, I did not know, so I just kept reading and reading, layering and layering.
Exhausted, I became the worst version of myself. I flipped out at my roommate. Why did you use my little pan?! That’s the pan I always use to make eggs!
I made her cry. Avoided people. Hated who I’d become but felt I didn’t have time to do anything but read and annotate. By the end of the summer, after months of fitful sleep and not seeing friends, I could only find reassurance in my plot summaries, analyses, and timelines of publication dates.
The day of the exam, I biked over to the English department, my stomach knotted gnarly like the plot of Benito Cereno.
Waiting for my exam to start, I saw one of my examiners in the hallway. It was Poetry Reciter, the one who had memorized entire poems. He was friendly at first, but I was too nervous to chit-chat and gave brief responses. He immediately turned cold. I still remember how quickly his smile dropped, how his posture stiffened, and the iciness of his glasses-wearing, bearded gray face. I didn’t realize how this seemingly minor interaction would have major implications in the exam to follow.
Next, I saw my advisor, a Chicana professor, and I told her I was about to be examined.
I hope I don’t disappoint you, I whispered.
*
I entered the exam room and sat down across from my examiners: two white men and a white woman. Months before, in one of our info sessions about the exam with those faculty, I saw the female professor get bullied by the other male professor, not Poetry Reciter but a Specialist in Nineteenth Century American Literature. Anything she said was dismissed. I had heard she was descended from Emily Dickinson. I took a mental note that even Emily Dickinson’s descendent could be talked to like she didn’t know anything. While waiting for the first question, I wished for a table to crouch under. I felt cold and shaky. The Specialist in Nineteenth Century American Literature was aggressive, but Poetry Reciter was openly hostile throughout the exam, and I realized my error in not fawning over him before the exam started. He was punishing me. What does “quitting” mean in relation to Chaucer? I remember being asked. I mumbled. Sputtered. Could not come up with complete answers to their questions. Like a deer tired of the headlights, I gave up and lay down in the road.
I failed that exam.
On TV and movies when people are distraught in bathrooms, they hug the toilet, sprawl out on the floor. Skin contact with anything in a public restroom horrifies me so even as I was crying in one on the second floor of the English department, I was careful to keep my convulsing contained.
My fears had been confirmed. I was lacking. I did not deserve to be in a place of higher education. I was the only one from my cohort who had failed. I was ready to fly home.
*
Months before I failed my exam, I had called home and tried to talk to my mom about grad school. It was the first time I said the word anxiety.
You’re just spoiled, she said. Told me I had too much time to think.
When I was younger and fought with my brother in public, my mom would twist my ear, which would quickly bring me to a stop. It was like her version of the dog whisperer, Cesar Milan’s quick jab to a dog’s neck.
Right then, an ear twist or a neck jab would have hurt less.
I told her I had to hang up. That I was late to my facial.
Teeth and skin are often read as markers of health and class, and at a place like Stanford, of belonging. Some of my working-class peers in grad school got Invisilign and I got facials. It's funny to me now that we spent our stipends on these cosmetic procedures, but to us, it was the most money we ever had and having it felt tenuous, like we had to constantly act and look like we belonged there. I was getting facials because I was losing a battle with acne, and my usual strategy of trying to remain invisible was no longer working. As a child in New England, I still heard slurs associated with Mexicans like dirty, ugly, lazy, dumb. But I didn’t know anyone I could talk to about them and the media I was exposed to never had Mexicans thriving in schools or professions. Even though I got good grades, I didn’t like standing out. I wore as many layers as I could and hated whenever people looked at my face. In college, Proactiv commercials seduced me into trying their potent benzoyl peroxide solution. It got rid of my acne, but it also turned me red and scaly. I thought once I molted, I would have baby-smooth skin. Vaseline countered the dryness, leaving me in the meantime with a shiny snake-face.
After that phone conversation with my mom, and as I lay slathered in peppermint serums and braced myself for extractions, I wondered if my mom was right. She was cleaning toilets as her second job, and here I was getting my face cleared out by a facialist squeezing out the contents of my pores. It would be years before I brought up being anxious to my mom again. My chronic breakouts were just one sign my body was inflamed, but at that point, I was only paying attention to what lay on the surface.
*
Many first-gen students make our advisors into surrogate parents, seeking in them the guidance and support we were not able to receive at home. It’s a lot of emotional labor for the mentor and emotional heartache for the student–something I know now from both sides of the desk. Paul B. Preciado recounts a fable in which an aspiring philosopher follows his master up a mountain, hoping to be granted the “wisdom and opportunity to embark on the task of philosophy.” Right before the highest point, the master throws a spinning blade which boomerangs and cuts off his own head. His head rolls to one side of the mountain, while his body falls back down to the precipice. The disciple is faced with the question—Should he go after the head or the body?
Perhaps the fable is meant to prompt the reader to wonder if true wisdom is housed in the mind or the body. But presented with this tale as a grad student, the value of the body would have been lost on me. The body—at least my body—was something to be hidden, used, and cast aside repeatedly for the sake of the head. At that point in my life, I would have thrown myself toward my master's head, even if I was dashed to pieces in the process.
When I was told by the department that I could retake the exam, I was shocked. A second chance. I grasped at the one I was given. Accepted that I needed help. Since I did not grow up in a family where we talked, talking in general let alone in an academic setting was difficult for me. My parents had grown up in families where everyone worked in the fields for fourteen hours a day. They themselves came home tired from working in factories. My father wouldn’t even let us talk at the dinner table. Eat. No Talking, he would say. There was little time and energy for conversation.
In preparing for the retake, I practiced talking. Can I tell you what I think, I would ask my friends. I spoke and I slept. Since the worst had happened and I didn’t die, I was finally able to get regular sleep. I’ve heard that sometimes our fears can be so overwhelming, exhausting that sometimes we inadvertently make them come true just to stop the anticipation.
I retook the exam and passed. It wasn’t that I knew the texts any better—it was that I focused on what each examiner wanted from me. With only two weeks to prepare for the retake, I didn’t reread texts but instead considered how each of my examiners interpreted texts and what kinds of questions they would likely ask. I was like a psychoanalyst or FBI profiler. When it worked, I realized it was more a test of how to appease my examiners than one that allowed me to tell them what I really thought.
I hoped that once I passed my qualifying exam, I would finally feel deserving, but I didn’t. A white female administrator once crossed her arms over her face like she was cowering and joked that that’s how I looked. I reddened at the realization my outside was revealing so much of my inside.
I think back to when I was preparing for that first exam and ran into one of my examiners, the Specialist in Nineteenth Century American Literature who kept putting down Emily Dickinson’s descendent. At this point in his life, he was slightly stooped and ailing, but he still had so much power. I mentioned that Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark, a book about how whiteness gets constructed in opposition to and through blackness in the American literary imagination,had helped me understand so much about literature.
It’s hardly a book, he sniffed.
A year later, I would witness this same professor launch increasingly hostile questions toward a senior scholar of color giving a research talk on his recently published book. “I thought you liked him,” I commented during the post-talk reception, looking down at my crudité, trying to make small talk.
I do! I like to punch at people to see if they’ll keep standing!
I see now the extent of academia’s combative culture where scholars like him take pleasure in the trials by fire. It’s a culture that’s also innately defensive in its maintenance of hierarchies. What to some is sport–and the constant requirement of deference–is life and death for others. I know many scholars of color who have had breakdowns or attribute their chronic health conditions to the toxic stress they experience in academia.
Years after I graduated, I would come to find out that this male professor had been accused of rape by a female graduate student, and was psychologically manipulative toward other students, but these were only whispers, back then. In grad school, we talked about power in texts, but in the abstract, never talking about power dynamics between faculty or with students.
Not all the faculty were coercive, but the hierarchies of power—whiteness, masculinity, and canonical cultural capital at the top—were clearly structuring informal and formal interactions. The exam I took my first year was an example of how the academy was socializing me to be a good colonial subject, telling me I was mastering the canon but really teaching me to obey, telling me what was worth valuing as knowledge and what to reproduce. We were shown how power worked. You were either the one pummeled or you pummeled others.
I think about how English Studies began and continues to be a colonial project. Even before British authors were widely taught in England, because England was still invested in a Classical curriculum, British texts were used to subjugate inhabitants of India, the beginnings of what became a global disciplinary phenomenon. If people don’t want to admit to and address the violence at the very core of English Studies as a discipline, it’s because they don’t want to give something up— the status of whiteness, of Eurocentricity—or concede that the lasting effects of empire should be contested.
If you’re not asking the right questions, you’re not ready for the right answers, I’ve learned from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, who in a talk shared this advice she learned from her mother.
Various industries have their own “tests.” But academia can often appear as if bricked off behind a wall of self-denial, unable to or unwilling to self-examine because to do so would mean to admit that many scholars, despite talking about power, revel in and get rewarded by keeping others without it.
It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues, Ngũgĩ writes in Decolonizing the Mind.
II.
Perhaps if I listened to my own body, I would have realized that the process of assimilating to the requirements of academia was making me sick, anxious, and afraid. But I did not know then that our bodies function like alarm systems, signaling that something is wrong.
Stanford sits in the midst of Silicon Valley, an area known for tech innovation. But this environment that fetishizes newness circulates old belief systems about denying the body and discipling the mind. Malcolm Harris’s book, Palo Alto, illuminates the foundations of this culture, contextualizing Palo Alto and Stanford in relation to broader capitalist phenomena.
Harris recounts how Leland Stanford– Railroad Baron, Governor of California, and founder of Stanford–extracted his wealth from enterprises built up by Indigenous, Mexican, Chinese, and poor white labor. With his wealth, he founded a university named after himself and developed the “Palo Alto System” through his horse stock farm, which significantly sped up the assessment of horses to cut down the time and money usually spent training them to see if they would be good racers and breeders. His program would make horses run early, even before they could walk, and if yearlings snapped tendons and broke down as a result of being whipped to run faster before they were ready. It was better that they fail early, to cut down the amount of investment that would have been spent on them in the long run. Reading this recently, I felt sick. I've long known that academic programs like to design certain courses or exams to “thin the herd,” but somehow knowing Stanford’s history made it real. It confirmed that in the moment I felt most unworthy after failing the exam the first time, my institution was deliberating my worthiness too.
In the third year of the program, we took another exam. This time we chose three fields and compiled texts we wanted to read in those areas. We also got to choose who we wanted as examiners. I wanted to study race, class, and American literature and asked faculty in those areas to be on my exam committee. These were faculty I felt more comfortable around, so the exam situation didn’t seem as stressful as my first-year exam. But since I esteemed these scholars so much, and doubted myself always, my anxiety was still high.
By this time, I had developed a sugar addiction to cope with the constant deadlines and criticism. Feeling lethargic because I was working all the time and so, so anxious—a combination that didn’t make sense to me until I realized how exhausting anxiety could be—I would rush the sugar into my system. I would mainline cookies, ice cream, whatever was available—to get to the point I could ride the sugary high, above and beyond for the moment, self-medicating to raise my dopamine levels and to fuel intense bouts of productivity before I came crashing down and needed to repeat the cycle.
My rigid strength-training program didn’t help. Fitness culture was strong at Stanford and the many gyms and sunny mild climate made it easy to work out. My peers were often at the gym or biking or hiking.
Maybe if my graduate school friends had been drinkers or smokers, I would have turned to those things instead. But my drugs of choice became exercise and sugar. I worked out six days a week and constantly worried if I was getting enough protein. My internet searches led me to a fitness forum where people avowed that eating smaller meals 5-6 times a day was the only way to make muscle gains and to prevent muscle atrophy. From this forum, I got the sense that if I wasn’t ingesting protein every 3 hours, I would have Olive Oyl arm laxity by the end of the day.
I meticulously kept track of my daily calories on a spreadsheet. I also meal-prepped before leaving the house, filling Tupperware with chicken and green beans, and carried protein bars just in case. I declined invites to eat out with friends because not being able to control what I ate and when was out of the question. My friend Jill even made me a meat cake for my birthday, knowing I’d be more willing to celebrate with others if I was also feeding my muscles. It was a mixture of beef and lamb, topped with a yogurt sauce glaze that said, “Happy Birthday, EM.”
When our environments or minds feel out of control, we often try to exert command over or escape our bodies. Working out was a stress reliever but also a stress inducer for me, wrapped up in desires to look thinner—thinner but still strong— which felt ever out of reach because mentally, I felt so weak. I binged on sweets on my “cheat day,” which sometimes turned into weekends. I would lose control and decide to throw in the towel for just this short period, promising I would snap back to my regimen first thing Monday morning.
On one cheat day, I ate an entire carton of ice cream and my toes started to painfully swell up. I vowed to never eat ice cream again. Two hours later I wanted a baked good. The barista at my nearby Starbucks once asked me if all the pastries I was buying were for myself. How rude, I thought. I never went back.
We didn’t talk about it then, but two close female friends in grad school also sought comfort in overeating and deprivation. One binged and vomited to do resets and another ate apples all day to curb her appetite and to keep her calorie intake low. We hid our addictions, buried ourselves in work, and held fiercely to the cruel optimism that one day we would feel fulfilled and full.
*
The highs and lows of having a sugar addiction wreaked havoc on my hormones and mental health. I felt physically sick but didn’t know what to do. I needed to read that summer for my exam but the thought of going home to my family’s apartment, where there was little privacy and always problems, scared me. My mom showed love through food and, as such, enabled my cravings.
I also hated what the sugar addiction was doing to my body. At a place like Stanford, where people are so fit and exercise gets associated with discipline and productivity, it was another sign of failure, this time of my body.
III.
Leland Stanford’s entrepreneurial project was so successful that Stanford University’s nickname is still “The Farm.” In Palo Alto, Harris explains that his horse “farm was a scientific project from the outset, part of a larger atmosphere in which ambitious thinkers began applying the tools of systematic observation to the world’s mysteries.”
This combination of systematic observation, speculative financing, and genetic-determinist view would inform the beginnings of Stanford itself, in the first of its Presidents, David Starr Jordan’s eugenicist politics, which translated into creating a campus culture that saw itself selecting for and elevating desirables, aka Great White Men and the women who would support them, and sought to identify potential from a geneticist standpoint, measuring IQ and even height. While I attended Stanford more than a century later, systematic observation and fast-paced assessment, and its ties to bodily discipline, were part of the culture of entrepreneurship that permeated campus and wider society.
What seemed like a niche culture back then, I see everywhere now.
In order to cope, survive, or thrive, many of us apply systematic observation to ourselves, rooted in centuries old habits.
I first read Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography in grad school, a text that models and promotes systematic observation. As a trailblazer in American innovation as well as the culture of entrepreneurship, Franklin related his method for self-improvement and attempts at attaining “moral perfection.” He famously wrote down 13 Virtues he wanted to master, which included Temperance, Frugality, and Industry, the latter specified as: “Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.” He kept a log with each day of the week and if he failed to uphold a virtue on a particular day, that day would be besmirched with a spot. He aimed to be literally spotless.
Someone who aims for Humility (Virtue #13) yet saw himself able to “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” had to be facetious, yet his self-experimentation and the culture of the Protestant work ethic are taken up earnestly in so many forms.
“Ben Franklin would recognize us as his children,” writes Monica Huerta, “an entire generation that makes lists through needing to climb out from somewhere or to somewhere…”
I think about entrepreneurial gospel, which espouses we can figure out and enhance ourselves for maximum performance. If we don’t succeed, it’s because we didn’t work hard enough at it. Failure is self-induced.
Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Franklin and one for Apple co-founder Steve Job, who too exemplifies embodied entrepreneurship. Isaacson relates that during Jobs’ college years, he experimented with restricted eating, a habit that would continue throughout his entire life. He would eat only apples and carrots, to the extent his skin turned orange. In his later life, when he had cancer, he would refuse food, despite the concern and urging of his loved ones.
In graduate school, I encountered another Silicon Valley entrepreneur, Tim Ferris, through his books, The 4-hour Work Week, and The 4-hour Body. These books convey that you can work fewer hours to achieve better results, but as a self-described “human guinea pig” who never stops self-experimenting in order to capitalize on what he learns via his books and podcast, Ferris’s entrepreneurial lifestyle rests on the impossibility of actual rest.
Bodily self-experimentation to produce more and aim higher while weighing less is now called biohacking. Some seek solace, stability in prayer, others in the right regimen, hack, gadget, supplement.
*
In Fearing the Black Body, sociologist Sabrina Strings argues that while beauty was once associated with bigger bodies (think of Renaissance paintings), it was the fear of being seen as undisciplined, unmoral, and racialized that led to the idealization of thinness and its correlation with whiteness. It was Protestantism and the slave trade that influenced how people came to see thinness and whiteness as virtuous and desirous, and bigger bodies and Black bodies as not.
I see now I had internalized a valuing of whiteness and thinness to pass not just an academic, but a very American test. The tests I thought were purely mental were physical, too, and passing them as a first-generation and minority student was all the more difficult. I worked hard to fit in but realize now what this meant: the culture of entrepreneurship mapped on to the legacy of colonialism. If my colonial education was teaching me to obey in order to rule, my exposure to a culture of embodied entrepreneurship trained me to run faster and faster and to track my progress. Move fast and break things, as the Facebook’s motto goes, even if it’s others, even if it’s your own body. At the core of both was a pressure to be higher and farther than those systemically forced behind without admitting that I was part of upholding the system.
IV.
Fearing I'd completely lose control over my mind and body, and at the same time needing time and space to read for my third-year exam, I googled places to lose weight. I found a wellness and fitness camp in Massachusetts close enough to my family that I could spend time with them before heading to the camp for a month. The camp offered individual and group Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and accepted insurance so that was the biggest draw for me. It would be a way for me to access therapy for the first time and in a setting removed from either school or home. I gave up my apartment for the summer so I could afford to pay for it.
My retreat to get fit and healthy was also about ensuring I could keep working. I brought my books so I could get through my reading list.
*
My roommate at the camp was a Black woman named Cheryl. I liked her right away because she told me that she realized everyone feels awkward at first meetings, so she doesn’t worry about them. I didn’t yet have her ability to not be self-conscious. At our first meeting, when she lifted her shirt and asked, “Can I see your stomach?” I couldn’t do it. I still carried the shame I had internalized growing up. I'd always wanted to cover up my body.
Each day at camp commenced with a run through the woods, followed by “morning circle” where we did stretches. Then a full day of activities that included swimming, hiking, and volleyball. We did all these activities on 1200 calories a day with 10 grams of fat or less, like Victoria Secret models. Cafeteria food consisted of low-calorie foods—steamed fish, baked chicken, lots of veggies. In the evenings we all waited in hungry anticipation for our daily ration of 100 calorie processed treats: a Smartfood popcorn bag, a pack of Snackwell cookies, or a Nature Valley granola bar.
We were conditioned to want our treats.
My graduate program had trained me to question, but not to always feel confident voicing my opinions, so I struggled with my growing distrust of camp. I had gone there thinking it could help me take care of my body, but I found its diet advice suspect. During the camp’s classes on nutrition, I wondered at the validity of sticking to 10 grams of fat per day. But when I asked camp counselors about salmon and avocado, they stuck to the camp script of promoting the cutting of fat from our lives. Questioning was not allowed.
Conforming to the camp’s schedule also required all my time and I often found myself choosing between committing to group activities and staying in my room to study. One of my camp counselors, a white woman named Colleen, did not like me because I was lax about the group activities. I felt pressed for time to read for my grad school exam, so I didn’t show up for swimming twice in a row. As recounted to me by a campmate who reveled in reenacting the whole scenario, when Colleen saw that I wasn’t in the pool, she blew her whistle and demanded to know where I was. Upon hearing I was still at the cabin, she blew her whistle again and screamed at the women to get out of the pool.
She marched them all to the cabin where I was in my room reading.
She pounded on my door and shouted. Alarmed, I opened. She demanded to know why I wasn’t at swimming.
I need to read.
We do things in groups! You have to come to swimming!
I don’t want to go swimming.
Behind her, I could see the women standing in the hallway, still in their swimsuits, dripping wet, looking as bewildered as I was.
I didn’t understand her rage. But I also wasn’t going to do something I didn’t want to do. I wasn’t used to standing up for myself, but this was camp for adults.
Seeing she couldn’t force me, she glowered and left. The group went back to the pool. She didn’t talk to me for the rest of the time I was there.
It was a small victory, but a beginning of saying no and standing by it.
*
The group and individual therapy at camp was facilitated by the same therapist, a young white woman named Amy, who had a kind, quiet demeanor. Even though the women in my group ranged in race, class, and weight, there were similarities. A lot of anxiety, depression, households where we didn’t talk about stuff.
Through therapy I realized many of us were struggling with our identities. Who were we? We were trying to be thinner, but if we got to our goal weight, would we be who we wanted to be?
As we sat on the carpeted floor and listened to each other’s stories, I breathed easier, in this space free of judgment.
One day, Amy asked us: “What three words would you say describe you? No matter how old you are, or where you are, or what you look like, what three characteristics have stayed the same?”
She had given us all a blank piece of paper. I thought about her question. Then I wrote down my three words.
After, I didn’t feel more attractive, less heavy. But I had a sense of stability for the first time in my life. No matter what I look like, I am those three things.
I too find comfort in lists.
V.
I lost two pounds during the weeks I was at camp. Now, I regret ever having bodily shame and all I wanted to lose because I was lost. I rue the years I wanted to conform but appreciate what in the process I did gain.
The camp was a space free of men, but it was created to appeal to and cope with the same systems that led us there in the first place— patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy–systems that thrive in making us run faster and faster, to shrink down or fill out, forever made to feel we need fixing, altering, are not enough or too much.
Camp and grad school were spaces that wanted me to self-discipline and self-deny, for the promise of gaining a thinner body, an elevated mind. They were also spaces that provided me the means to challenge what I had internalized. At camp, I started to learn a new language through therapy, one that would enable me to process thoughts and feelings and realize that they were intertwined. Stanford was where I read widely, deeply, and had mentors and friends who showed me care. I hold these contradictions while also feeling rage at systems and institutions demanding bodily minimization, emotional suppression, yet a maximization of labor.
As a professor now, I grapple with these tensions as I build on and depart from ways that I was taught. I also try to think of ways to pass on what I’ve learned outside of the classroom. It’s a challenge to speak to vastly different experiences. I hear inner doubts or critiques so resounding, I tell myself that is the voice of colonization. I imagine myself pushing it away, clearing space. I sometimes stumble with my words, not sure of where I’m going, but I keep moving, not for anyone’s metric, or to prove my worth, but to find alternate ways, sensed and lived. To feel-think-be.