Sticky Buns and Shrinking

“‎You're not the same as you were before," he said. You were much more... muchier... you've lost your muchness.” – Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland

Sometimes things in life are just a little… excessive. Like, for instance, sticky buns. Horrible name aside, these delicacies have a lot going on. From the rich, yeasted dough to the caramelized pecan topping, you don’t pretend a sticky bun isn’t a ball full of sugary glory. There’s joy in the muchness of a sticky bun.

I am a lot. You might say I’m “muchy” – I feel things very intensely. Coupled with a lifelong commitment to honesty, my intenseness often extends outward, enveloping those who are close to me. I can imagine this might be overwhelming, particularly in a world in which we are told that we need to be small, quiet, and demure. I get very sad, very anxious, and very, very angry. These are emotions I hate, and that I’ve spent a long time trying to let myself feel. It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that my muchness also includes the depth of the feelings I enjoy – when I am inspired, I can write thousands of words per hour. When I love someone, I love with every fibre of my being – so much that it aches. When I am happy, my laugh is infectious.  

I spent a while trying to shrink myself; partially in a self-protective way, I pretended, for some time, that I wasn’t a lot. More than physically, I shrunk emotionally. I fell into the smallness of numbness – refusing to feel the feels that overwhelmed me and made me aware of the depth of the ache. Part of this endeavor of shrinking was tied to the depth of my sensitivity to others’ muchness, too. I easily absorb others’ emotions – I am hyperaware of the weight of others’ feelings. Whether or not it was conscious, my shrinking was a retreat from this sensitivity.

The problem with denying my muchness was that it burst out in fits and starts – it was caramel, simmering silently until, in a moment of inattention, it bubbles over into a sticky mess. Like that sticky mess, it took a while to clean up.

I sometimes struggle to talk about my endeavours to get closer to and accept being a lot. It’s hard to frame shrinking endeavours without being accused of seeing my own eating disorder (and, by corollary, others’) as some kind of choice. Is it a choice, though, to retreat from intensity? Is it conscious? I would argue, here and elsewhere, that it was intertwined with societal discourses about being a woman – being small, being quiet, expressing only the good feels and only in certain settings – but this doesn’t mean it was a choice. This also doesn’t mean that I do or ever did buy into the validity of these discourses. Being aware is not being immune. Leaning into the sway is not accepting it as valid. Protective mechanisms do not need to be volitional to be socially rooted.

Getting back to the metaphor at hand, it took me a very long time to let myself rise. I still hear and feel the call to stay low, hard as a rock and protected from the onslaught of emotions – yours and mine. Is not listening a choice, or is it, too, circumstantial? I hope the nuance comes through… it is neither. It (acceptance, recovery, or what have you) is a complex interweaving of thoughts and emotions; of lives and relations and contexts. Sometimes it is sweet. It’s always muchy.

Pecan Sticky Buns on Eater.com

Retrospective Rhubarb

Eating disorders tend to have a revisionist history. Many of my research participants have commented on gaps in their memories around the experience of having an eating disorder; flashes of moments invade the present, interspersed with others’ retellings of their histories. Set in stone in clinical notes are the observations others have made; in eating diaries self-imposed or prescribed, our own bodily histories may dance across pages, disembodied or viscerally felt.

There are times when our memories conflict with those of others. Our stories may morph and change over time. As we become someone else in the eyes of others, our bodies may take on different significance for those seeing them. We aren’t the only ones to make meanings of our bodies, our recoveries, and our histories. To look at the pages and pages of medical history many of us hold, we are likely to find not the certainty we are looking for, but deviations and perhaps even embellishments. Objectivity is a slippery beast.

Today I went to speak, for the seventh time, about my recovery at the treatment centre I was treated at. I have a complicated relationship with these invitations – in one, I mark the invitation as a recognition of my recoveredness in the eyes of the establishment and fear that my presence and story reinscribes a particular recovery narrative. As I baked strawberry rhubarb squares on Monday evening, I wondered about the ethics of telling my story, and the balance between offering hope and telling a story that has already been told.

Time and again I settle on telling my story in the context of the treatment centre. I must admit that this is partially a selfish performance – there’s something about reflecting that reminds me how I have come far, which is particularly interesting as, believe it or not, I don’t actually think about how far I have come on any kind of regular basis. My recovery goes largely uncelebrated in my life, usually until something tests it. For all that I make a career of eating disorder work, I live in my present recovery without much nostalgia.

A more unselfish reason for the telling lies in the possibility of providing hope with at least some acknowledgment of the unfinishedness and imperfection of recovery to those struggling. It’s easy to forget, I think, that sometimes a rosy-ish story can be comforting, when I go on my rants about the need to complicate recovery. There was a time, I think, when I wanted the comfort of thinking recovery was perfect, and that may serve for a while. It’s a balance between hope and pragmatism every time I step into the uncomfortable position of role model.

This balancing act is often complicated – not only by my own memory of a time that was and embodiments that no longer haunt my flesh, but by others’ selective and revisionist histories of the depth of my illness. Time and again, I find my psychiatrist asking: “when did you accept your diagnosis of anorexia nervosa?” or revealing how closely I toed the line between inpatient and day hospital. The truth of the matter is that I was not diagnosed with anorexia nervosa – I was diagnosed with eating disorder not otherwise specified, because my weight was just above the cut off and I (ironically) still menstruated thanks to the birth control pill. There was never any question of my being inpatient, at least not a question that was ever asked to me.

So why the revision, I wonder? My psychiatrist celebrates my recovery, perhaps in complicated ways tied into the need for hope within the eating disorder profession itself, when so many patients die or cycle in and out of treatment. Is the revisionist worsening of my illness a way to build confidence in systems that don’t always serve – and if so, what is the impact of this and where is the impetus for the system to change?

I also wonder: who is to be believed? Some might write off my interpretation of this revision as due to denial of the seriousness of my illness and believe the one in authority. But I am not in denial – I was very sick, and I needed help. Yet in privileging the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa as the most serious one, we miss those stories of people not diagnosed with anorexia but who struggle enormously and deserve help. Many people in larger bodies will never be diagnosed with AN and will be repeatedly told that they are “doing great.” After all, as Deb Burgard has been saying forever, “we diagnose as eating disorders in thin people what we prescribe in fat people.”

So I wonder about the ethics of this revision, and what it offers to our collective imaginings of seriousness. The diagnosis of anorexia is also more easily re-written onto my form, embodying as I do the privileges of whiteness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, middle classness, and relative thinness. Would it be so easily retrospectively applied to someone whose recovery body exceeds the expected?

My thoughts are unfinished, and don’t really relate to the beauty of the post, which is due entirely to these strawberry rhubarb bars, which happen to be gluten free and vegan, because everyone deserves delicious food. So perhaps the only real link is there – in that everyone deserves the deliciousness in life – and yet we socially inscribe categories around who is worthy.

[Strawberry Rhubarb Bars from Minimalist Baker]

Time and Tapas

Time has a curious hold on me. I’d be willing to bet it probably has one on you, too.

I’m a very lucky person: I have a partner who is extremely flexible in terms of rolling with my schedule; while he works a 9-5, he understands that my work often flexes and flows around, functioning in bits and starts and seeping into the evenings following long afternoon pauses. He also understands my meal times, and I often joke that he has a degree in hanger management for his ability to forecast my need to eat at regular intervals lest I become a raging beast of a girl on an empty stomach.

This weekend we went to Montreal for a vacation – a work-less vacation, an experiment on my part, undertaken in an effort to lessen the grip that my email has on me. I set an auto reply and resigned myself to unanswered notifications glaring at me from the cracked phone screen. I packed only two books on feminist philosophies of time, and a small notebook. For me, this is progress.

Curiously, I’m seeing time everywhere, right now. In my dissertation, I’m contemplating the ways in which people in recovery tend to question their own narratives and memories; their claims to the discursive “space” of recovery with all of its socially perfectionist trappings. I’m wondering about how treatment systems tend to remove people from time as it marches on in their everyday lives and imposes a new time structure that resembles rigid neoliberal time. Returning to the “real world” can feel like an abrupt departure, in this context – moving from a time-space where choices are made for you to one where everything and nothing has changed; where not everyone pauses at noon on the dot for a lunch break and where you’re suddenly expected to choose your correct choices for health.

In my own life, I’m wondering about this persuasive pull of time. I wondered, this weekend, why I itched to know what time we’d seek sustenance in the morning. I wondered why I felt the need to drink my coffee at 10am, to eat a snack at 4:30pm, to be in bed by midnight. Our vacations are often dictated by “Andrea time” – so I decided to try Alex time for a change.

My experiment ended up yielding an eerily similar schedule, were you to break down the activities and times – we ate meals around their usual times, woke up before 9, and went to bed before midnight. And yet, it felt different to renounce the rules – if only for a weekend.

The truth of the matter, though, is that the flexibility to follow your whims, when it comes to time, is not always there. You can’t always linger over a delicious 4 course dinner of tapas while sharing deep thoughts over a seemingly bottomless glass of wine. The constraints of contemporary working society’s structures don’t really allow for the intuitive.

This is one reason why – despite philosophically agreeing with concepts like intuitive eating and despite my own habitual 2:30pm walks in the woods – I don’t necessarily preach the virtues of mindful living within the current neoliberal capitalist time structures we live in. Ideal as it might be to decide you’d prefer to have cake for lunch and to have it at 3pm, it’s not always possible.

Does that mean I’m resigned to neoliberal time, content to re-impose these structures on those who’ve fallen out of step (or, conversely, overly in step) with these temporal logics? Not at all… it’s just yet another case for the need to consider the momentary, micro-action and the broader chipping away at the system that we must do to actualize a different kind of world that is open to multiple relationships to time and bodies in space.

[Photos: Glorious meal at Restaurant les 400 Coups, Montreal]

Egg Whites and Embodied Subjectivity

I think it’s probably fair to say that I think about my embodied subjectivity more than the average person. I was thinking about my embodied subjectivity the other day while sifting flour endlessly in the service of creating a lime pistachio angel food cake for my mom’s birthday. As the egg whites whipped in the KitchenAid, I pondered the challenge of moving body love discourse beyond the mirror image – and loving one’s body when it isn’t doing what it’s “supposed” to do – even when it looks like it is or should be.

Body image, you could argue, has become somewhat of a buzzword; many of us are concerned with how bodies are framed in society – objectified, denied access, confined to certain spaces, etc. A glance at Instagram or other social media sites reveals thousands of posts about body image, body positivity, body love. I know that I surround myself with a rare set of humans who consider these issues on a deep and systemic level, moving beyond the rhetoric of “just love yourself! Love your curves! But be sure to eat Special K!” brand of body positivity that co-opts the terms of a movement to sell products and peddles discontent in the name of fixing it.

I also know that it is easier to love my body than it is for some to love their bodies. I do not face the same kind of scrutiny that people in marginalized bodies do when I walk down the street. I hide behind my averageness, as averageness easily slides into “normalcy.” I’ve written about this ad nauseum, but it bears repeating. While owning my body privilege does not a) exempt me from experiencing its impact or b) solve anything, it’s still an important part of participating in the communities I participate in. Further, and as others have more convincingly argued, the body positivity – or fat acceptance – movement is not really my movement.

Sometimes when I give talks about eating disorder recovery, I cringe at the questions about how long it took me to love my body, because I fear that my “timeline” will impose a set of criteria. I also fear that my answer will perpetuate the idea that everyone in eating disorder recovery needs to be able to shout that they love their bodies from the rooftop, or that they somehow need to rise above the “average person’s” experience of body insecurity, body shame, or body struggles.

I get frustrated when talk of body love only touches the surface of the body, too. This is not a discussion of form versus function; I’m not saying “we need to focus on what our bodies can do, not just what they look like!” – after all, the function argument can easily veer into ableist territory by asking people to celebrate normative movement. Both an aesthetic body love (i.e., realizing that fat is beautiful) and functional body love (i.e., focusing on the joy of movement) can ignore the reality of loving a body that doesn’t always function the way we want it to. They can leave alone the question of: how do I love this rebellious instrument that aches, that breaks out, that stops moving as I am telling it to? How do I love this woman-body that’s not acting as I’m told a woman-body should? The theory behind body love is, of course, that all bodies are loveable, no matter what they do or look like. But in practice, the words often end up being hollow, accompanied as they so often are by images of normative, privileged bodies.

If you follow me on social media or know me in person, you probably know more about my hormones than regular friends know about each other. Hello, my name is Andrea, and I share my whole life online. Over the past 8 or so years I’ve struggled with extreme hormone fluctuations often resulting in lots of pain, nausea and other unpleasant symptoms. As a result of the out-of-control-ness of my body, I have often found myself fighting it. The more I fight it – like overworked dough – the more it resists me.

On my way home from Toronto (to deliver said cake) yesterday, I listened to a podcast that discussed body love in the context of chronic illness and PCOS. While I don’t have PCOS (my hormonal issues bear no name besides “I have no idea what’s wrong with you,” if you ask a doctor), the podcast really got me thinking. It made me think about whether I really enact body love, or whether I only love my body when it’s doing what I want. It made me consider how maybe the time I need to offer my body love the most is when it isn’t doing what I’m told it’s supposed to do.

I hesitate to co-opt this discourse either, as most of the time my body still abides by the ableist requirements set by society. I also wonder about the invisibility of hormonal issues, among other chronic conditions, and what it means to have a body that looks normative but rebels inwardly. As per usual, I have no solid answers, but it felt like a thought worth sharing, this working on my relationship with my body in times when it isn’t convenient. And while those who ate my cake might not be pleased to hear that my thoughts about my hormones infused the cake, it’s the truth. If only enacting this were as easy as making a lime glaze and sprinkling on some pistachios.

Lime Pistachio Angel Food Cake - recipe from Bon Appetit

Red Velvet and Revolution

I want to talk about making mistakes. Yet again, baking can act as an allegory for my mistake-making, in life. Most of the time, things go smoothly when I bake. Because I’ve been baking for so long, it’s not intimidating for me. I can reasonably expect that when I cream butter and sugar, add some eggs, vanilla, milk, flour, and baking powder, I’ll get a nice cake at the other end of a sojourn of 25 minutes at 350 degrees.

Sometimes I get ambitious, though. I approach baking with reckless abandon, never thinking to myself “well this is going to fail.” In general, it’s a great approach. It has led me down many baking rabbit holes that have yielded either deliciously crispy oil-fried doughnuts, to … crying on the kitchen floor covered in two types of icing and countless layers of unevenly textured cake layers.

I approach my work with reckless abandon, too. Unfortunately, because I work in academia, I do often expect to fail when I try to push up against the boundaries of the academic status quo. When I prepare a new paper or apply for a grant, I always suspect that somewhere in my future I’ll be lying on the kitchen floor crying, covered, this time, in rejected manuscripts and lost forms.

It all sounds terribly melodramatic, doesn’t it? Most of the time, my work, and my baking, fall somewhere in between. My manuscripts get rejected a few times and then, finally, get to be revised and resubmitted. Usually my red velvet cupcakes come out pink.

Sometimes I get ambitious, though. I expect myself to juggle too many projects and say yes a lot. I wind up answering emails at all hours of the night and in the early morning, I have trouble just watching a movie when I could be simultaneously searching the literature or cleaning my data. I push the burnout under the rug until it bubbles up uncontrolled, revealing to me oversights and errors I missed in my rush to get everything done on time.

When I buy into the busy contest, I am the one who ends up losing. When I buy into the busy contest, it’s like accidentally swapping baking soda for baking powder: it all bubbles over, and I have a big old mess on my hands.

I am currently emerging from a week of acute anxiety over mistakes I made while buying into the busy contest, trying to be perfect, and not asking for help. The visceral character of the anxiety – making it hard to eat, to sleep, to be – taught me a number of lessons I’ve been intellectually aware of for a while but somehow unable to incorporate into my self-concept.

That’s just the thing, isn’t it? You can know that you’re burning out, and not want to contribute to the busy contest, and yet still have it happen and contribute to the very thing(s) you hate. For me, step one has been admitting that the way I’ve been working over the past few years is not sustainable – I’m beginning to finally let myself accept that work, and life, are for the long-game.

Of course, this all sounds quite idealistic and ignorant of the social strictures that require people to work constantly, and often for low pay, to live in this world. Certainly, I recognize my privilege in being able to decide that I won’t be answering emails after 10pm (or at least I will try not to…) and that I’m only going to say yes to projects that truly excite me. This shouldn’t be a privilege, though – and it reveals the paramount need to transform the systems that bind us in an ever-owing relationship with capital.

Undoing these ties will not be easy – particularly not for those who have been multiply marginalized. The last thing I would want to say is that we all just need to breathe, take a bubble bath, and bake some red velvet cupcakes and it will all be ok. I know that it won’t; but baking the damn cupcakes is going to give me the energy that I need, right now, to do the work that might yield one of the many microscopic shifts required for widespread systems change.

So is this a post about red velvet cupcakes, or revolution?

[Baking notes: I used Sweetapolita's red velvet cake recipe for the cupcakes and her cream cheese icing recipe from her cookbook for the frosting]

Doughnuts and Double Standards

It’s fairly standard practice for me to bake when I’m feeling overwhelmed. There’s something about combining simple ingredients and creating something spectacular that makes me feel calm. People often ask me how I find the time to bake; baking, for me, is meditation. The question becomes: how could I find the time not to bake?

Of course, as with all things, I sometimes get concerned about what my visibly overachieving proclivities say about me as a feminist. I wonder, for instance, whether making a batch of doughnuts in the afternoon after I’ve spent the morning wrestling with theories of embodiment makes others feel like they’re not doing enough.

I’m acutely aware of the “busy competition” that goes on in academic – and other – spaces. I’m also aware of the problematics of calls for women to “have it all.” At this point, an analysis of that discourse seems almost too simplistic. Of course it’s more complicated than simply choosing to lean in to all of the roles we’re asked to fill. Of course my privilege affords me the occasional afternoon covered in flour and sugar.  

My domesticity lies in a funny rub with my insistence on being a career-minded individual and achieving in the academic realm of my choosing. I struggle with how to present my baking endeavours much in the same way that I ponder my posting of a self-portrait of my studio afternoons. Am I unwitting participating in the perpetuating of ideals of neoliberal femininity?

Of course I know that baking and dancing (and the subsequent posting of pristinely styled doughnuts and dance pictures) does not make me a “bad feminist.” The question becomes, of course, how to represent without subtly reinforcing dominant notions of a “good life,” a beautiful existence, a healthy balance?

Add to all of this a layer of eating disorder recovery, and my recipe for grapefruit curd doughnuts suddenly becomes an inquiry into the nature of engagement with and love of food in eating disorder recovery. I vividly remember sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a circle at feedback group during eating disorder treatment when I was looking into getting a job near the end of my day hospital stay. “We’d like you to evaluate your motivations for wanting to work at Second Cup,” they said “you realize you’ll be around food all day.”

This infuriated me, but I smiled and nodded politely. I hadn’t considered it, if I was being honest – I just really liked coffee. I never got the job, but that and several other encounters with folks about my love of food have landed me in some interesting conversations over the past eight years. Now, I’m no stranger to people questioning my motivations for all things – my career as eating disorder researcher, my enjoyment of dance, my baking, my proclivity toward hunting down the next “it” restaurant while travelling – and linking these to pathology.

This questioning evidences, to me, an inherent distrust of people who have had eating disorders that I find problematic. There’s a funny expectation that people in recovery will become agnostic about food and exercise. There’s not a lot of room for exceeding that agnosticism in either direction – loving the multisensory experience of making and/or eating delicious food, or not being interested in it and really just eating because it’s a human need. I think to discount either is problematic – because it ignores variations in human experiences in their bodies that I believe lend a lot to the world.

As you will expect from me, I have more questions than I have answers; but the questions seemed worth rising – much like these grapefruit curd doughnuts.

Grapefruit Curd Doughnuts with Citrus Sugar; recipe from Bon Appetit

Coming Soon: Smash the Pastryarchy

Cooking and writing are a lot alike, I think. Both consist of making something delicious out of unlikely ingredients, dreaming up combinations of flavours, adding a twist... and sometimes having unexpected explosions. I've been baking - and writing - since I was a child. Arguably, my writing pursuits have landed me outcomes that do more for my career; and yet, where would I be without hours spent in flour-covered contemplation? 

In this space, I'll chronicle my thoughts on baking, feminism, and eating disorders. Unlikely ingredients, perhaps... but might they be more tasty when combined?