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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.

I took my walker into the kitchen last night to take my bedtime meds, and got halfway back to my bedroom before realizing my walker was still parked in the kitchen 😅😅 Guess I'm feeling better! That one muscle is still prone to tightening up, but frequent, gentle stretching and Robaxin loosen it up again pretty quickly. And, I'm off the Oxy! Down to just my usual pre-surgery pain combo, hooray!! Thankfully, at-home PT exercises are going well, because we're in the middle of a two day blizzard, and I've already called off tomorrow's appointment in favor of hunkering down 😅😅 Michigan right now. Brace yourself for TMI lady stuff... I'm just a couple of days away from week five off The Pill, and so far... nothing. Not a drop of menstrual fluid. That doesn't mean it still couldn't happen, but... the freak period I had during my cerebrospinal fluid leak in 2023 might have been it? 🤞🏼🤞🏼 Now, I do take daily Omega 3-6-9 supplements that include Evening Primrose Oil and Flax Seed Oil, both are highly estrogenic, they may be taking up the slack. Especially since I also eat a lot of ground flax seed, as I'm allergic to egg and use it to bind my baked goods. But I have my annual physical with my PCP next month, and I do believe perimenopause will be topic number one, yes even before the fresh hip replacement and podiatrist report (I see them next month, too). And I plan on staying off The Pill until that appointment, give her a good baseline read for any blood work she may order about that.

The cats are getting to the point where they insist I get back to my mom duties. Including having a fully functioning lap. Which, it is, as long as there’s quite a lot of pillow or blanket cushion. One of the muscles in my thigh, around the implant, is very stiff and sore today, so I’ve been doing my PT stretches and taking Robaxin to keep it from clamping down, and otherwise resting. STILL no shower, lol! But I did get to my manicure just now: I remember doing my fingernails around the same time I did that disasterous pedicure… three weeks ago? Sheesh. Collagen Peptides & Vitamin C supplements, ladies & gentlemen! And here’s Milosh being fierce to my hand, pre-manicure. I must be reminded of the fierceness that protects this house regularly.

The push is on to make 2026 the new 2016. Just in case you were wondering what yr Auntie over here was doing in 2016, I was working a “cool media job” in a midsized Midwestern US city known both for for its microbrewery, and arts culture. After work was small venue concerts, and art museum exhibition openings, and penthouse keggers with the city’s intelligentsia. I was the Queen of the Hipsters, you guys. I lived the whole scene life. 2016 was also the year I was formally diagnosed with Fibromyalgia. Fifteen years after my first flare, but that’s a pretty standard wait for diagnosis, especially since I was pre-ACA and went six years between aging off my dad’s insurance, and getting my own. Like I said, I have been uninsured before, I know what to expect coming up. As for what I looked Iike? This is the actual professional headshot I used at the time, for my “cool media job.” Photo by Johnny Quirin, who had to stop laughing at the sweater long enough to take the picture. I do still have the sweater. And the pearls, for that matter. I believe 2016 is also the year I started thrifting and swapping in earnest. That’s about the time my friend Mindi brought her plus-sized, new pallet purchase & thrift mix shop to my area, and we girls got CUTE on City Chic brand dresses. Plus, the natural hair movement was in its infancy still, but I had enough luck with the LCO method that for the first time in my life, I had hair . Apparently, I also have the pulse on the cultural shifts, because while I don’t have that “cool media job” anymore, “recipe & lifestyle blogger” is so 2016 coded it hurts 😅😅 Also, I seem to remember competition for the Halloween Costume of 2016: Kristen Wiig as Maddie Ziegler in Sia’s Chandelier video, and David S. Pumpkins. Yes, both Saturday Night Live sketches. I may be off by a year either way. Regardless, I expect the same energy for Halloween 2026.

I’m not saying I had any grand plans for the day, here. PT yesterday wore me out a bit more than expected, so I passed on the shower for an early bedtime and planned to shower today. At 11am, after I drank my giant breakfast smoothie and took my meds, my body wanted a nap. A six hour nap. Again, I’m not about to force myself out of bed for an unnecessary shower if I need the sleep. We’ll try again tomorrow. And if you’re wondering if that nap will keep me up all night… by how I feel right now, I’ll probably get a full night’s sleep on top of it. Healing takes a LOT of sleep. Kawaii, huh?

Bob: “Imma put my asshole on your antakarana, mom. Gonna make it real hole-y. Get it??”

Woke up with this playing in my head... Complete TMI: The Activated Charcoal from Monday cleared out of my system last night before bed. I am now at the point where I am the least bloated I have been at any point since my most recent weight loss. It's... wild. I haven't been anywhere near this size since my spine went bad in 2020. I need to re-take my measurements. Today is PT, then a shower and hair treatment. It's a beautiful, sunny day, I'm in a great mood, and I'm honestly kind of shocked I feel this human at a week and a half post op. Otherwise, it's pretty apparent, even as I'm clearly getting stronger by the day, that I went off my pain meds for a few days over the weekend, so the rest of the time today is going to be hitting that balance between rest and healing movement.

I took this picture last night, right before putting my bonnet on. This is slightly damp hair, dry enough I knew it would finish drying in the bonnet, after a good wash, scalp oiling, chebe butter application, and steam treatment, plus 4 hours of air drying. I didn’t clump the curls after the steam treatment, but you can still see I have the entire range of the C pattern on my head. Also, I have significant shrinkage, when this is stretched it’s perfectly sitting at shoulder length. Final result of post-op hair preservation methods: full success. Now, there’s been zero growth over the past week, and yes, my hair grows fast enough that I do see noticeable growth in just a week. Understandable, my hip is a lot more important to put the nutrients towards right now. But my body didn’t shed hair to take the resources of growth off the pressure of repairing bone. It just… forgot about the hair for a minute. Even after 48 hours of zero calorie consumption, I had enough nutrients in reserve to still heal my leg and not sacrifice my hair for it. And my ends are still pristine from the cut they got a week and a half ago now, thanks to regular spray-in conditioner and wearing a bonnet 24/7. So, how am I attaining this biological feat? First of all, I’ve been preparing my body for this for literally years. I was diagnosed with food allergies in 2024, and spent last year really gelling in my safe diet, which is a lot of whole, clean, unprocessed, nutritionally dense food. I also conquered my sugar addiction, which helped me build that nutritional base faster, and lose significant weight. And I have had a daily nutritional suppement routine for years. I discovered my electrolyte supplement in summer 2023, first summer post spinal cord injury and it got REAL obvious that the injury had drastically affected my heat tolerance and ability to dehydrate. I started dosing bovine collagen with my morning coffee a couple of months later, when the stats came out about how your body stops producing collagen altogether at 40, just as I have a follow up MRI showing widespread moderate-severe degenerative disc disease at all levels of my spine. If you’re taking collagen, you need high dose vitamin C to go with. And that also helps with the absorption of the high-dose iron I apparently also need on the daily since the SCI… my doc wanted to try a maintenance dose last year, which resulted in a big chop at the end of September. And I also high dose a magnesium complex at bedtime for my migraines and sleep. When it comes to skin and haircare, the only other real step is to understand how to best use humectants and UV protection. And I’ve written a few posts about that already. This all now has me perfectly poised to join the hair growth year that the natural hair community is starting in February 1. Shoulder length is a very easy starting point to calculate from, February should be when my hair growth kicks in again, and February 1st is my FLOOFIEST son’s second birthday, so this is auspicious day to start a floofiness journey. Especially considering two years ago, Milosh was a preemie micro kitten no one thought would survive, and now he is the largest, FLOOFIEST boy. So, I hereby declare February 1, 2026-February 1, 2027 as Milosh’s Mumma gets FLOOFY year. Me and the boy are gonna match.

Do you really want to help your disabled friend, your Hispanic friend, your otherwise BIPOC friend, your Palestinian friend, your Jewish friend, your neurodivergent friend, your queer friend, your unhoused friend… That’s the question. That is what you ask them. And it’ll usually be something like sharing their mutual aid requests. I have never once had a successful online fundraiser, because I share the link everywhere I can possibly promote it, and then it dies. No shares means you reach no one and raise no funds. If someone you know as well as an acquaintance and know they’re honestly in need shares a personal fundraiser link, sharing it, whenever they share it, with a little “this is a good guy going through a rough patch, I’ve been watching this as it happens to them and they’re really doing a,b, and c, could you please spread the word about their fundraiser so they can get a leg up?” This is literally the minimum. It’s completely free, and takes no more than a minute from your day. And it is the most helpful thing you can do. And yet, we’ve gotten so weird about fundraising that some white trash bitch can call an autistic child a terrible slur, and raise thousands upon thousands of dollars in an online fundraiser because of her “free speech,” but someone fundraising for medical support can be completely ignored by people in their actual, offline life who claim to care about them. Medicaid is going away in a year for a lot of vulnerable disabled Americans, myself included. If you don’t want to perpetuate a literal genocide, you’re going to want to get comfortable with sharing your friends’ mutual aid requests so they can find donors. It will also look like sharing factual evidence and own voices media of people telling their stories and stating their needs (like this blog). If the friend you’re supporting isn’t up to assembling you a reading list, you need to educate yourself on where you obtain factual evidence and reliable own voices reporting. Again, barest minimum, find the subreddit on the topic, and start a thread with your questions. And actually consume the resources they give you, don’t have your AI cliffs notes it for you. Back in my Water Protector days, we had a speaker at a rally we put on who started his talk with three quick facts about the topic we were educating/protesting about. He had the crowd repeat them once or twice. And then he told them “now you have the facts, and you can share them with anyone.” And then he had them all pull out their phones and put the quick facts in a status update on their Facebook. Congratulations, you just did a actually useful act of resistance. You did it en masse, and you reached a lot of social circles with needed information. Easily the best rally speech I have ever hard. “I can’t be silent!” doesn’t mean posting anti-Trump AI slop. It means amplifying truth and educating people around you in real ways. Do better.

My “I didn’t pass out!” face. The surgical dressing has been removed (forgot to do that Saturday, whoops), and the first shower has been taken! I even got a good scalp oiling and chebe in! I’m recouping from what I forgot was the most exhausting shower ever with a one hour steam treatment in bed. I’ve also kept down all food and meds all day, and cancelled my urology follow-up, because correcting my pelvic tilt cleared that problem up right away. I still have a little bit of a feels hangover from yesterday, but today’s gone well! This might be the most human I’ve felt at this point post-op, setbacks over the weekend notwithstanding.

Y’all. I might actually shower today. FOUR doses of activated charcoal every two hours yesterday finally quelled the Mentos & Pepsi reaction in my guts, and completely soaking through my nightgown twice while getting that 15 hours of sleep on top of that got the rest out… Today, I’ve so far kept down two “sports drinks,” two mugs of electrolyte-spiked bone broth, and about five saltines with a little hummus. I’m about to try the white rice and cod I couldn’t hold down yesterday. Speaking of rice and cod bowls, my mom got on a single-serving meals in a small rice cooker video kick, so she bought a little rice cooker. Expect a series of rice cooker meals on my recipe blog! Anyway, food on the stomach means I can get back on my meds schedule, hallelujah! Going off the pain meds at 5 days post major joint replacement was interesting. Not nearly as bad as when they hauled me out of bed two hours out of recovery to teach me how to do stairs, but definitely not not painful. But let me tell you, gas pain is 1000X more painful than sutures in your muscles. Not having the blood thinners for a couple of days was a bit worrying, too. My mom was worried I had a clot in my guts or something. I did not. Dehydration + stress gave me a migraine with it, too, that I couldn’t medicate, so that wasn’t fun, either. But, I’m already feeling a lot less shaky than I was this morning, and I think I’m at around six or eight full sweat-outs at this point since this time last week, so that shower is needed. I’m also already a lot more mobile. My PT sent me home with literal “baby steps,” proto-step movements to practice, with the goal of a short stride by today. I’m actually already normal striding with my walker, and even stepping away a few steps here and there. I can also already get up from a low chair or toilet by myself, so I’m finally out in the recliner and not in my height-boosted bed. That’s doing a lot for my mood, not being so isolated from the rest of the family. Penelope prefers me in bed, but she’s not too mad about it.