I just got back from my most favorite activity: Silent Disco on the Niantic Bay Boardwalk. It's not a night club, a gym, or a thing organized by someone else.
It's something that just sort of happened one late, rainy afternoon last fall. I was feeling done...helpless, hopeless. Blah. A few months earlier, I'd quit the gym I'd been a member of for 10 years. I "needed to exercise" because of the pandemic weight I’d gained.
So there I was with my headphones on, YouTube Music set to a playlist I can’t remember the name of, when Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls came on.
And something shifted.
Every time Freddie Mercury sang the refrain, I joined him, out loud, with my arms pumping in the air, loud and proud:
FAT BOTTOMED GIRLS YOU MAKE THE ROCKIN' WORLD GO ROUND!
I may have played the song on repeat until I got to the end of my walk. To those who heard me, may your world have been rocked, even if just a little bit.
Since then it has become my thing, my happy place, a joyous expression of myself. Nearly every day I get myself out on that boardwalk and walk and dance and sing and laugh and smile. It feels effortless and real. No faking it.
My playlist, now called Hellcat (which I will explain some other time), is made up of songs that make me giddy, that make me want to sing out loud and move my body.
Because I am a 61-year-old woman who, in the 1980s, LOVED a good night out dancing.
It was pretty much the only place I felt free to be me.
I have no desire to go out clubbing now (I’m usually in bed by 8 p.m.) and putting music on and dancing at home just isn't the same. Neither is ecstatic dance or Nia or any other sort of organized dance-related thing.
It wasn't until I had several Silent Disco Boardwalk experiences that I realized what was happening and what made it so goddamn thrilling: I was being witnessed in my joy by the other people on the boardwalk, just like when I was in my 20s at the nightclubs.
Bonus: there's a set of train tracks next to the boardwalk (sounds like it wouldn’t be all that attractive, but it is) and when the Amtrak trains go speeding by I wave my arms over my head and the train toots back, which makes me ridiculously happy.
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I am far from alone in my experience of childhood trauma (divorce, emotional neglect, violence, abuse, alcoholic parents etc.) and that I have C-PTSD.
I am far from alone in that my body/weight was a problem or issue for my mother (and society at large), even when I wasn't "fat," and that I developed binge eating disorder and life-long body image issues as a result. She projected her internalized shame on to me in the form of her critical words and gaze, and her contempt and disgust for me not just for my body, but for me as a person.
I, in turn, internalized that shame, contempt, and disgust for myself.
I've had to reclaim my dignity, my expression, and my audacity. Over and over again.
~~~
I am an author with several books to my name, a podcast, an active email newsletter/blog, and a decent social media presence. I've had years of therapy, I have my own set of certifications, and I've worked with and created healing frameworks for women with “difficult” mothers.
A year ago, I wrote and published a book about releasing the shame that gets passed down through our maternal lineages.
Unlike other book launches, I was terrified. Destabilized. Slightly dysregulated (although I didn’t see it for what it was at the time). I had very little capacity for more than posting about it on social media.
I chalked it up to pandemic stress, having my publisher “fast track” the book (I don’t do well when rushed), and (at the time) every-other-Sunday calls with my mother.
All of that and this hindsight realization:
Being fat(ter) felt unsafe.
I have spent much of my life ashamed of my body and then ashamed for being ashamed of my body. I "should” have been able to feel safe no matter how much I weigh, given how much “work” I have done and the feminist principles I have embraced. Not to mention that despite the extra weight, I am “remarkably healthy for a woman of your age and weight.” ~ my doctor
But the truth is my body's intelligence knows better and rather than trying to fight it, I'm working with it.
Silent Disco on the Boardwalk didn’t result in weight loss or “cure” me of shame, but it did help me feel safer in my body.
And there’s way more to this story than this.
Stay tuned.