The Challenge! How much hair can I grow between today, February 1, 2026, and February 1, 2027? What we're starting with! U-shaped layers from jaw to shoulder length when stretched. What we're working with! Very fine, highly porous, 3B-C curls with significant shrinkage when they're not stretched. Hair status: Virgin. Never been colored, chemically processed, or heat styled in any way. I stretch it with cornrows. The Growth Method: Internal: Approximately 1 gallon of water per day, with electrolytes (not a sponsored link) Daily supplementation of: Bovine Collagen Peptides Iron Vitamin C Omega 3-6-9 Fatty Acids Scalp: Regular, targeted cleansing with Kojic Acid Soap. Oiling and massage with a homemade, custom blended scalp oil. Length Retention: Use of an updated LCO method, with freshly cleaned, wet hair as the L iquid, a commercially manufactured leave-in conditioner as the C ream, and homemade chebe butter as the O il. The above products are then set under a steam bonnet for an hour to melt down the oils and butters so they can penetrate the hair shaft. Silk bonnets are worn to bed every night, and silk or satin barriers between my hair and the world are worn whenever possible. The Goal Length: Before surgery, my hair was growing at around 2" per month. It's all but stopped while my leg has been healing, but I expect to get back to that rate pretty quickly. If I can preserve it with the chebe, I'm hoping to be somewhere around waist length by this time next year. Now, I won't beat myself up if I don't make it there, especially considering I'm pretty obsessive about keeping the ends trimmed and even, and that can sacrifice some length. But my goals are ambitious. The Record: I'll take pictures just like the ones above on the first of the month (or as close to as possible) to track the growth, and write up a report on whatever I think is worth talking about regarding my hair that month. And you'll follow along!

TW: medical neglect I've read from a few sources that it was believed for a long time that autistic people don't feel pain, or feel it at far lower levels than neurotypical people. As a neurodivergent person with multiple chronic pain issues that have brought me to the Emergency Department on many occasions, I've experienced this personally. But it's not that my Emergency staff knew I was neurodivergent and therefore assumed I wasn't feeling pain, it was that my neurodivergent, accustomed to a certain level of daily pain response is so different than a healthy neurotypical person's that Emergency staff don't recognize me as a person in pain. It also doesn't help that I'm a cisgender (that means the outward, social expression of my gender matches my sex/genitalia), AFAB (that's "assigned female at birth") person, women's pain is traditionally downplayed even when we're incoherently screaming, so I'm basically fucked. Let's start with the infamous pain scale. It became the biggest metric of my life 10 years ago, and I very quickly had to figure out how to use it to convey my pain levels as accurately as possible. For the record, your doctor will immediately discount your pain if you report it as an "11" while displaying zero stress symptoms. Also, that's about the most neurotypical thing you can do. Here's my pain scale: my daily pain levels fluctuate between 2 and 4, and that's medicated, they'd be an easy 8 unmedicated. 5-6 is about where I was from October-hip surgery, painful but I can generally handle it myself and minimally function. 7 is where I call the doctor, 8 is where I head to Emergency. For comparison, 8 is usually compared to unmedicated childbirth. There's also a "my 10," which is not the "screaming uncontrollably and unable to communicate" that the 10 is officially reserved for, but basically your absolute limit pain, which for me rounds out to around an official 9. I would like to point out that this is the pain scale of a chronic pain patient, which is widely recognized to be completely different from that of a healthy person's scale. My "gosh, maybe I need help with this" is most people's "writhing and screaming uncontrollably." Thing is, that doesn't mean that my pain is any less stressful to my body than the writhing and screaming neurotypical's, it just means that I'm not writhing and screaming. Okay, here's the problem: at 7, I can't mask my face or voice anymore. Both go flat. I'm told at this point my complexion is absolutely corpse-like, and the stress in my voice makes me sound bitchy, and it doesn't help that I can only manage short responses. But when I'm in the ED, I can pull it together enough to answer questions thoroughly, strike one against me for actually being in the kind of pain I report. Never mind that I'm in a hypertensive emergency thanks to the pain, and the blood pressure monitor is going bonkers. Why? Yeah, I'm this kind of autistic, I sat back and figured it out one day - I'm not emotionally connected to my pain. People don't scream because of the pain itself, they scream because they're terrified of what's happening to them. Me? I apologize to my care team in advance, because I know that if I'm going to outwardly express my pain, it'll be with expletives. I'm sure you're not surprised. I have the benefit of knowing full well what's going on in my body, I've had a whole lot of imaging done. I just saw my bones yesterday, even, including the new titanium one. I know the difference between nerve pain and muscle pain, I understand where pain originates from, and I know what I can handle and what I need help with. This makes me the opposite of a "drug seeker," by the way. I take Naltrexone daily for fuck's sake, you can't even give me opioids. Another fun neurodivergent trait is that we do emergency situations really well. Sure, we're anxious, depressed messes when everything's going great, but a disaster happens? We're locked the fuck in until it's over. That's how I can muster full, detailed answers to doctor's questions during my worst pain, I'm in mind over matter mode, and the matter is my malfunctioning body that we are now focused on fixing. Or at least I am, if I can convince my doctor that the fact that I'm even there means it's serious. They're not used to patients like me, with the level of body awareness that I have, or the level of pain familiarity or neurodivergence. Why am I writing this? Hopefully it helps neurotypical ED workers understand their neurodivergent patients better, so we don't get dismissed, and get more comprehensive care. And hopefully it finds other patients like me, because this is a very lonely feeling when you're half naked on an ED gurney.

Funny story... They used Dermabond to close spine surgery 4, and it gave me the worst rash. Like, itching at an 11, it was terrible. So, I had my doctor put Dermabond on my medical allergy list. I pointed this out before surgery, and right before I went under, in the OR, the surgeon's assistant told me that they usually use Dermabond to close the incision based on where it is, and could they spot-test the Dermabond before making the decision on how to close the incision? And I told them to do whatever they needed to do, right before I went out. Now, no one tells you how they closed you up in the hospital, and for the first week you have the big foam bandage, which covers a smaller mesh bandage. I didn't inspect the mesh bandage any further than making sure that it wasn't bleeding or infected, and for some reason I assumed the Dermabond worked and I just needed the mesh removed. The mesh has just started to peel off... and revealed the stitches that have been in my leg for nearly four weeks now 😅😅 Now, I have yet another virus, lucky me. I've had nasty post-nasal drip for the past couple of days, as well as a lack of appetite, and some general wooziness. I cancelled my PT for the day, and informed my surgeon's office that I am sick, and I will be masked, and that they can head me off if they want to. Since I haven't had a fever, they want me to come in, because I need my stitches out. Glad I discovered them last night, that would have been a surprise 😅😅 I'll be back with an update, which I'm sure will be glowing! Update: Stitches are out! The incision happens to be in a spot where I have enough nerve damage that I didn't feel a thing, even as they were like "I'm so sorry, I know this is uncomfortable!" Nope, not for me. I could barely feel them tugging on the skin. And yet, it's still easier to bend that joint without the stitches in there. Of course, this is why I'm seeing my new podiatrist on Monday, because I can't tell when I'm slicing into my own nailbeds with sharp pedicure implements. But it came in handy here, so I'll take a win where I can get it. Everything's healing super well, and post-op 2 happens in a month.

TW: medical diets, food allergies. I tracked my food intake and how that breaks down nutritionally for the first time a few days ago, for a What I Eat In A Day blog post over on Auntie's Allergy-Free Eats. That used to be about the most toxic, controlling thing in the diet culture, making you account for every single thing that goes into your body every single day. Even if it wasn't on social media, it was usually shared with weight loss groups. I refused to participate until now, and that's mostly because people are doing #WIEIAD videos on TikTok where they're being... very honest. And considering I eat a very restricted diet that I have to cook from scratch, I thought that me recording this content, but in blog form with recipes and nutritional content instead of just mukbang videos, might actually help other people getting used to a new, restricted diet get ideas on how to feed themselves day to day. And I learned that I'm on a slight calorie deficit (which I knew), and getting plenty of protein and carbs, but maybe only half of the unsaturated fat (or even saturated fat) I should be getting. When you can't eat dairy or nuts, you better like eating a lot of avocados, olive oil, and seeds 😅😅 So, I've started to begin and end my day with a serving of dairy-free yogurt substitute, and 2 tablespoons of ground flax seed and a teaspoon of raw honey from my neighbor's hives. The yogurt has 6g of fat, the flax seed also has 6g of fat, and the flax seed has the dietary fiber to feed the probiotics in the yogurt and the honey. So, at least I know I'm getting 24g of fat from plant sources each day, and it'll keep my gut biome healthy. When did having a body get so ding dong complicated?

Guess who hasn't been to PT now in nearly two weeks? Thankfully, I'm doing all my home exercises every day, and healing just fine, but this whole stuck at home while I have a bunch of medical appointments thing is pretty infuriating to someone who takes commitments seriously and hates being unreliable. With a chronically ill body, you'd think I'd be used to being unreliable af and give myself more grace, but I do not. But this is what it looks like outside my bedroom window, and it has looked like this all night: The camera actually saw a lot more than my eyes did, all I could see was white. I couldn't see my neighbor's house or all those trees. On a positive note, especially for Milosh, I'm back to walk-up head scritches. They involve bending a bit past 90°, so I'm just starting to get back to carefully scritching his floofy head. I'm not quite to "speedy pets" yet, which is where he runs at me half-speed, and I have to pet him once as he runs past. If I miss my cue, I get the stank-eye and a do-over. The boy was getting mad that I was neglecting my Mumma duties. Milosh.

I know the trend is "Things I'm Not Buying," but this is a shorter list: Food. Gotta feed myself. Nutritional supplements. I enjoy being the most animated corpse I can be, and that takes nutrients. Hygiene, skincare, and hair care consumables. Which I don't use a lot of, and only buy one bottle of one kind at a time, two if there's a BOGO sale. Marijuana. Infrequent "little treats" in the form of inexpensive jewelry and perfume. Possibly a piece or two of secondhand clothing, potentially the fabric and elastic to make a pair of "balloon pants." I'm adding "new tattoo" to this list purely for manifestation purposes. Update: it occurs to me that I've been wearing the same glasses since pre-pandemic. I should probably have my eyes looked at. Not a sponsored link, but I discovered Zenni Optical 20 years ago, when I was in college, and I haven't bought glasses from anywhere else since. That's... about it. My current wardrobe is fantastic. You know how I said I have an ancestress recorded only as "Enormous Viking Lady," not by first name? I got her build. It means that 50lb weight loss I can't stop bringing up in every post didn't drastically change my measurements, and my weight's been so up-and-down over the past 10 years, anyway, that my wardrobe is very forgiving. And so very well curated right now, I can't wait to be able to wear it out again. But that means I don't really need to add anything to it. I'm even set for 80% of the predicted trends already! I'm getting the biggest and most gorgeous library you have ever seen right down the road from me, so I'm planning on utilizing it to the fullest for my physical media needs when it opens later this year. YouTube & YouTube TV are the only paid online services I have... I'm on a family plan, I'm not the one paying, heh. No Netflix, no Hulu, no Amazon Prime, no HBO, no Disney+, no Spotify... you get the idea. I have a small makeup kit I assembled last year, it's all still just fine, and also rarely touched. The only time makeup has been my thing was during the pandemic, and I'm kind of over it. If I do anything, I like the minimalist approach Gen Z is starting to take. As for beauty maintenance, I do my own (ish). I wear and cut my own hair, use temporary glue-on strips if I want lash enhancements, do my own manicure and have a podiatrist for my toes, I don't have dermatological procedures or plastic surgery done, and I don't remove my body hair. And yes, I know the science behind it, but those red light masks still look like the worst beauty snake oil. I don't need to spend my money on one. And as for "stuff," I have so much stuff already, I don't need more stuff. I need more stuff to do. That's it. I feel like this should end with everyone holding hands and singing "Simple Gifts."

Tomorrow is three weeks post-op, and I have two updates, finally: "Winter Storm Fern" (as a person named Katrina, I hate the practice of naming storms, but shared meaning and all that...) had me miss two PT sessions and my first post-op last week, so all of that has been pushed into this coming week. Since that was when I was supposed to be graduated from my walker back to my cane... I graduated myself. tbh, I've been walking around smaller rooms in my house unassisted. I feel totally stable on my new joint, at this point it's just what's left of healing the sutures and the bone. And not getting tripped by stir-crazy cats. And today I have this weird nerve thing in my left thigh. It's nowhere near the incision, much lower on the thigh. I'm pretty sure it's my body telling me it's time to switch back to the Baclofen from the post-op Robaxin. Baclofen has never been much of a muscle relaxer for me, but it does turn off the "spine ache" from my spinal cord injury, so I'm on a 10mg daily dose... as long as I'm not on Robaxin. I'm going to switch it up tomorrow, and see what happens. And turns out all that gastrointestinal distress and sweat-outs right after the surgery was probably norovirus. My sister brought the same symptoms home from her job just this past week, and gave them to her boyfriend. I didn't spread it because I was isolated in my bedroom. So, maybe those aren't common post-op symptoms after all.

TW: medical neglect I'm going to let you in on how the medical system works. When you go to your PCP, they're there to treat normal stuff - colds and flu, high blood pressure, etc. They can be your first gatekeeper when it comes to determining if your condition is "normal" enough to see a specialist or not. Otherwise, they refer you to a specialist. Now, here's the thing. Your body is intimately connected. And you may not be seeing the right specialist based on the symptoms your body is giving you to work with. I'll use my most recent personal example to illustrate: My first symptom that something was "wrong" was that I was having urinary problems. I'd empty my bladder but my brain wouldn't turn the "gotta go" signal off, so I'd feel like I'm going to pee my pants with a freshly emptied bladder, and that feeling would persist for a good hour. Or I'd genuinely need to empty my bladder every 20 minutes for a two hour stretch, usually at 2am. Or, I wouldn't realize my bladder was full until I'd cough or laugh and have to change my pants. Or, I'd have to strain to empty my bladder. A nine month wait for a urology appointment, and a full Urodynamics workup showed a bladder in pristine health. They sent me to a pelvic floor therapist, who's tests revealed I had a perfect pelvic floor, and something wrong going into the left bend of my colon. At the same time, I'm dealing with chronic constipation so bad that Epsom salt and vegetable glycerine enemas were my only option for voiding my bowels all summer. A six month wait to see a gastroenterologist landed me with a nurse practitioner who dgaf about what my pelvic floor therapist found. I got no real treatment. It wasn't until I couldn't walk that I got the referral to orthopedics, and discovered that my pelvis was tilted thanks to the rotten hip joint. The bladder issues resolved immediately after surgery. The bowel issues are starting to heal. Here's the takeaway: all of those doctors treated me to the fullest their specialty allows... with the exception of the gastroenterology NP, she was pretty useless. But they were not going to look outside the bounds of their specialty for answers. The urologist was not going to x-ray my pelvis, he was going to cath my bladder and put it through the paces. I saw a young patient complaining online recently that they can't find a neurologist who will take the nerve pain in their arm seriously. Of course - a neurologist isn't going to care unless it's a migraine or MS. You need to go to either orthopedics or spine & pain for that. But a neurologist won't tell you that. A neurologist will simply tell you that there's nothing wrong... but they mean that there's nothing wrong that they can treat within their specialty. I think House, MD really messed with a lot of people's ideas of how medicine really works. And diminished the role of the patient as advocate. When you have a chronic illness, you need to stay on top of your doctors, and make sure you're seeing the right one with the right tools. It's not the other way around.

I have AuDHD and the very literal thinking that goes with it, and even I am confused by how many people are getting incredibly literal about hair growth, to the point where they're dismissing products and techniques that work because they're not for "hair growth" specifically, but for "length retention." Let's start with the basics. Hair grows from the scalp. To grow your hair, you need: Proper nutrition and hydration. Particularly note your iron levels, anemia will not only stunt hair growth, but also cause your existing strands to break and shed. And if you're over 40, I cannot recommend supplementing collagen peptides and vitamin C enough. It's made a hugely noticeable difference not just in my hair growth, but in my nail growth and skin quality, too. Regular scalp cleansing and exfoliation. Shampooing has conditioned (pun intended!) us to focus on cleansing the strands, but it's your scalp that needs the focused scrub-down and exfoliation to clean the follicles out for growth. Scalp oiling. Some folks find scalp serums work better for them than an oil. A dry, crusty scalp isn't the best environment for your hair to grow, and proper scalp cleansing will dry your scalp more than you're used to. The stimulation from massaging the oil in also stimulates growth. That is what you need to grow your hair. That's it. And that doesn't address my fine, highly porous strands that literally dissolve at the slightest hint of environmental stress. I can grow that all I want, but no one will know how fast my hair grows if I lose the hair just as quickly as I can grow it, which has been my problem all my life. This is where length retention comes in. Now, as I write this there's three camps when it comes to how to retain length: Expensive protein bonding treatments and salon hair care systems. The "Abbey Yung Method," a drugstore products version of the above. The "LOC" or "LCO" method (that's Liquid or Leave-In - Oil - Cream) that was popularized about 10 years ago by the natural hair movement, which is being modified today with products like chebe butter from Chad. I'm in the third camp. I've been using the LCO for 10 years successfully even before the "modern" (which are actually millennia old) modifications, we all know I was raised crunchy af and stuck with it, and I still have trauma from 30 years of using "white" hair care products and looking fucking godawful no matter what I did because they ruined my hair over and over. Never again. So, when it comes to my length retention routine: Start with wet hair. This is important, many people start with dry or slightly damp hair. This method has the opposite intended effect if you do it on dry or damp hair. It has to be wet, slightly dripping even, to work. Apply your favorite leave-in conditioner. It took me a whole year to find one with no nut or soy oils that works for my hair. Apply chebe butter over your leave-in. A decent amount. I'm using a good 2-3 tablespoons on my shoulder-length hair right now. Make sure you concentrate the application on the ends. Put on a steam bonnet, and settle in for at least a half-hour of heating all that moisture and oil and butter and resin up so your hair can best absorb it. Your hair will be just as wet as when you started at this point, so here is where you dry your hair and style it as usual. And finally, wear a silk bonnet to bed every night. I do both my scalp care and my length retention routine every 2-3 days on average. Up to once a week when Life or Health gets in the way. I should note that I'm working with "virgin" hair - uncolored, never chemically processed, never heat styled. I kept my hair dyed since I was a young teen to try to hide all of that product damage, which of course provided its own damage... the last box went in July 2021, right before my first professional photo shoot. The headshots on my About page were taken in 2023, two years into the growing out process, which took three full years all told to grow my hair to shoulder length. This was before I discovered scalp oiling and chebe steam treatments, this was also before I was diagnosed with food allergies and started supplementing iron and collagen/Vitamin C. The 2026 Hair Growth Challenge starts in a week and a half, and I'm planning to go from shoulder length to somewhere from bra strap to waist length by February 2027. That's how fast my hair has been growing since I started using this two-part method in September 2025.

Today, at two weeks and one day post-op, is where this blog will likely stop having daily post-op reports. Why? I don't really have anything new to report. Today is day 2 of a 6 day blizzard, and considering I can't get into the boosted truck with the 4 wheel drive, and the Kia Soul is... not quite as good on the roads in these conditions, and also considering I have a history of fucking up fresh surgery in a freak accident.... today's PT was cancelled, Thursday's will be rescheduled, and so will Friday's post-op appointment with my surgeon. I also need to call my lawyer about re-applying for SSI Disability, which while I know this part isn't super taxing on me, I still prefer to not be on opioids while doing it. So, I have things to do tomorrow, but they certainly don't involve leaving home. And they're not too exciting to blog about more than this, either. As for my leg and the healing process, that's again where it's boring! Hooray!! Even that problem muscle in my inner thigh has loosened up, and I'm walking straight shots with a normal stride, only getting choppy about turns so I make sure to stick to my rotation restrictions. The walker is a great abundance of caution at this point, again, I'm prone to post-op freak accidents. And I have eight cats. Better safe than sorry. The only pain I have still is suture pain, and that one protesting muscle, but even the suture pain is as well managed right now with Tylenol and Meloxicam as it was with Tylenol and Oxy two weeks ago. So, no news is good news when it comes to post-op going forward! From here you get me spouting off about current viral topics in blog essays, and in 11 days you'll get regular hair growth updates on top of that as the 2026 Hair Growth Challenge begins.

TW: bullying Yes, I know, thank you. I'm going to tell you why I chose it. See, I was very badly bullied as a child. Why? Well, hindsight being 20/20 and all, it was because I was hella neurodivergent, and the neurotypical kids had no idea what to do with me... beyond make me the school scapegoat. And the first thing they did was get a hold of a derogatory nickname, and use it against me fiercely. I learned this game very early. I also watched closely when Gen Z joined the internet. It became very obvious very quickly that they are Not Kind, as a whole. Especially to people my age. So, I chose the cringiest screen name possible. I want you to call me Auntie, you can't use that as an ageist slur against me. I even took it a step further to add the "yr" prefix, the cheugiest, most Millennial way to present myself. Yeah, I'm fucking uncool. And I'm owning my uncool-ness. I'm making my un-coolness part of my brand. Try to bully me for being a cheugy Millennial when I have acknowledged, accepted, and embraced the fact in my screen name alone. And trust me, you will find nothing to cancel here. As much as people love to hate my "pretentious" AuDHD delivery in the comments, I'm simply a mirror. Always have been. Being hated for absolutely no reason other than being different and my difference rubbing the sameness the wrong way is a lifelong condition for me. Hate me all you want, but you will find nothing to cancel in my blogs. Simply opinions and personal truths gleaned from first-hand experience and observation over a very diverse life. And yummy recipes, if you're at the other blog. And if you're Gen Z and you're reading this, I hope it gives you pause that your generation is so damn mean that you triggered a childhood trauma response in a neurodiverse lady with a fake hip so hard that she branded her recipe blog in a way that challenges a whole age group to throw some fucking hands if they want to comment on her age or sense of humor.

I'm writing this as someone who came to the movement as a "genetically fat" woman in her late 20's with undiagnosed fibromyalgia, central sensitization syndrome, and joint hypermobility, just as the movement was starting in the wake of the 2000's super low rise trend. I mention my disabilities because that was part of it, originally. A little history: in the 80's, 90's and 2000's, the prevailing message towards women was that you need to strive for perfection. They'd call it "health," but if health had anything to do with it, people wouldn't have been shitting their brains out with Olestra, they'd be eating beans and rice like a sensible human being. "Perfection" in the 2000's meant wearing your Seven For All Mankind low rise jeans in a size 00, and if you were using liposuction to get there, you didn't talk about it - the best plastic surgery in my area is still located in a luxury hotel, so you can "go on vacation" and no one needs to know you paid for your body. You were expected to maintain your perfect double-ought body with a 1,000 calorie diet and hour per day home exercise program. You were given no real instruction on how to maintain this other than magazine articles covering the latest fad diet or exercise equipment. All of a sudden, all of the pro-eating disorder content on the early internet makes sense, huh? If you chose to live like this, it was the perfect recipe for literal insanity - your brain doesn't have enough calories to function. If you chose to reject this, you were ostracized in every way society could find to, from clothing selection, to blatant public bullying. It was not subtle. This is what the original "Body Positivity" movement was created to address. It wasn't to "glorify fatness," which is how it was portrayed from the outside right from the start - of course, it was a threat to the status quo. It was to break away from this toxic idea of "health" that was keeping us as sick as possible, in body, mind, and spirit. As Naomi Wolf says in The Beauty Myth, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.” The original idea was to love the body God and your ancestors gave you. You're bigger than a size 8 if you eat a normal, nutritious diet? You are worthy of love. You're the bony kind of skinny? You are worthy of love. Your body has disabilities that keep it from doing all the things fully abled bodies can do? You are worthy of love. Not to mention, your body is worthy of love, no matter what. Three babies and stress eating have you 70lbs heavier than you were on your wedding day? You are worthy of love. You are worthy of loving yourself, and accepting love from others. You are worthy of looking and feeling your best, no matter what kind of weight you're carrying around. Now, loving yourself also means taking care of yourself, and taking steps to clean up your diet and get more exercise is an act of love. People declared Lizzo a "body positivity traitor" for losing weight, but what Lizzo did was true Body Positivity, in the original sense. She did it in the healthiest way, for herself. Body Positivity was never about generalized "fat acceptance." It was about accepting that your body does not dictate your happiness, no matter what phase of your life you are in or what your body looks like or can do. Your bony, skinny body is worthy of love, but if you choose to hit the gym and get yourself a peach of an ass, that body is worthy of love, too. So, what happened? If we have learned anything from both "body positivity" and also "toxic masculinity" as shorthand terms for complex philosophical concepts, one person should not be naming anything like this. Because the masses will take the pre-labeled concept, reject the concept, and build their own meaning around the shorthand term that was coined for the concept. We also had a bit of a pendulum swing when it came to public bullying. Remember how I said that blatant public bullying of fat people was common? It was considered "good for their health" to publicly shame any fat person you saw daring to exist in public. In brutal ways. So, you have a good 30 year history of this building up in fat peoples' hearts and souls, and the fat people were expected to sit there and take it silently, because they were unhealthy and a drain on public resources, they had no ground to stand up to fight back on society's eyes. But, now we have "body positivity." And one of the earliest slogans adopted by the plus sized section of the movement was "Real Women Have Curves." To say the women who had been playing The Game this whole time are now being told that the "perfect body" they had sacrificed EVERYTHING for was now not a "real woman's body" and instead they need to strive for... fat? They're still bitching in the comments about how "bullied" they were by this slogan. And again, it's very obvious why they felt this way. Revolution isn't pretty, folks. It takes addressing cultural trauma. Not fun. Necessary, but not fun. Then, "body positivity" started focusing almost exclusively on fat bodies, which was the obvious place to start as demonstrated above, but it detracted from the message of "all bodies are worthy," and learned into the criticism of the movement being "fat positivity," which of course brought the inevitable chorus of "you're glorifying obesity!" The upside? More clothing lines in lower middle class price ranges started offering "expanded sizes" of their usual Juniors, Women's, and Men's lines, usually up to 3X (a US 20-22 in Women's sizing, generally), while the established plus brands like Lane Bryant and Catherine's modernized their designs and expanded their sizes out to 5X or 6X. I went from wearing the absolute worst Christopher Banks thrift store finds as a fat girl fashion protest to being... actually fashionable. This was also about the time that Reddit's r/ABraThatFits started, and the women who had been cramming their H cups into DD's since puberty were finally wearing the right size bra, which was a game changer for a lot of women. I even immortalized one of those godawful Christopher Banks sweaters in a professional headshot I actually used in the 2010's. I was that known for my fashion protest. If you've never been in a fat body, or you're reading this as someone who came of age in the 2010's so this is just normal for you, you're probably real confused reading this. Clothes? Yeah, clothes. This was the first time fat bodies had been validated in any way by society. Before this, "plus sized fashion" consisted of paper-thin t-shirts of Tweety Bird and/or the Eiffel Tower, and leggings that we were constantly told were "not pants," but pants in plus sizes were not easy to find and often too expensive... it was purposefully dehumanizing. I understand many of these same brands are quietly removing these expanded sizes right now in the wake of Ozempic. But the death knell was Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty." The ads were beautiful, and emotional, and oh so corporate. The minute it was taken from the hands of the people and turned into a sell-able commodity, it was done. So, in 2020, "Body Neutrality" tried to fill the hole left behind in Body Positivity's wake. This is the concept that you don't feel any sort of way about your body. You don't love or hate anything about your body, you simply accept it as the vehicle of your mind and soul and a point of self-expression, a fallible physical organism that is going to change throughout your life, and therefore you accept your body unconditionally as it is in the current moment, whether you plan to make positive changes or have it on lock for the moment. Not quite as dynamic as "you are worthy of love no matter where you are in your life or what you look like while you're there," but I know a lot of neurodivergent people who related a lot better to the neutrality concept. As someone who had both philosophies going into a spinal cord injury that made rapid and significant permanent changes to my body, where I had to grieve my old body and accept and incorporate the changes the SCI made, Body Positivity was a far more helpful philosophy for me as I was healing my body and spirit. But, again, both philosophies have merit, and can definitely be used interchangeably. yr Auntie got into a self portraiture collective that utilized the philosophies of Body Neutrality in late 2020, which led to a brief career between spine surgeries as an alternative lingerie model. Photography: Megan Darocha for Mod Bettie, June 2023. HMU: myself. Fun fact: I won this photo shoot by winning the Grand Prize game of Drag Bingo. That's a night of bingo games called by a drag queen, and broken up with drag performances. I'm seeing what I'm going to call the "Ozempic Freakout" happening online right now, under the dual tags of "Body Positivity" and "Fat Acceptance." And it seems to be a lot of morbidly obese people (one specified 100lbs overweight) digging their heels in about not changing their lifestyles and not losing weight, no matter the cultural trends. First of all, "my body, my choice" covers this, too. If you don't want to lose weight, you don't have to defend yourself to me. The only person you have to defend yourself to is you, and if you truly believe you're living your best life right now, you do what's best for you, friend. And yes, you are worthy of love as you are right now. That being said, if at any time you realize that you aren't living your best life, and that you'd be living a lot better if you got to the root cause of why you're carrying extra weight, and that causes you to lose that weight - you are not a "failure" at "fat acceptance." "Fat acceptance" is not a real thing. We're not falling in love with our fat here. We're falling in love with ourselves. And we are so much more than our body fat percentage. The goal of this is to have the healthiest body possible. Not the thinnest, not the fattest, the healthiest. If that looks like a higher body fat percentage for you, that's your body. If that means more muscle, that's your body. As long as you are caring for your body like the precious object deserving of love and care that it is, so it can take you through this life in the easiest way possible. That is Body Positivity.