Two essays you should read this weekend

Balancing grief, respect, and self-image in today's world

Because I’m on deadline on some longer-form writing and also working through deep disappointment with old friends who mean well but are working with some bad faith actors, I’m using this week’s newsletter to highlight recent work of two people I greatly admire.

The worst person to run into on the way to the bathroom 

My friend (and wedding officiant) Phil Atiba Solomon penned a moving essay about his late father and a deep personal commitment to his family at Time.com:

Moral philosophers tend towards analytic certainty, but my father was a philosopher in a different mode. Long before Ted Lasso made it cool, my father was the single most curious person I have ever met, both in being odd and in being interested in the world—though mostly the second thing. There was kindness in it. He would turn his curiosity towards every new person he met, which absolutely made him the worst person to run into on the way to the bathroom. But he was also reflecting to people that they were worthy of someone’s attention. He was being a mirror for them to love themselves through.

Read the whole beautiful essay here.

“I struggle to navigate a world in which this is so common, but so seldom discussed”

Another person I am so glad to have in my personal-professional orbit is Janet Bufton, who used her most recent birthday to reveal her eating/exercise disorder and her journey to a healthier life: 

I am lucky that my reaction to traumatic birth was to develop fiercely protective feelings about my body. I am lucky that I had the resources to give up on getting a doctor’s permission and just find a therapist. I am lucky that my OB referred me to a perinatal psychiatrist. I am lucky that both my therapist and my psychiatrist were dedicated enough to dig into my history and help me pull apart the threads so I could start to heal. I am lucky that I found a program while pregnant that takes a Health At Every Size, trauma-informed approach to physical activity. I am lucky that I have a supportive partner. I am lucky that I have my girls to help me believe that doing the work to get myself in order is worth it. And I am very lucky that my struggle with my body never put my life in danger.

I will probably be picking up the pieces for a long time.

Read her deeply moving reflection here.

This is one of those topics that should serve as a reminder that society retains deeply harmful biases despite years of social progress. Although some men also experience unhealthy relationships to/with their own bodies, women disproportionately suffer from eating disorders. Whatever the reasons for that—including the often pernicious ideas of beauty in popular culture—the persistent idea of women as the weaker sex can only hamper collective efforts to confront and overcome these problems. See also: post-partum depression, the choice to be single/a single mother, the inability to conceive, the choice not to be a mother, and other issues…like women being anything other than sex objects and child-bearers. 

I don’t write a lot about women’s issues—in part because I still have my own biases to come to terms with, but largely because they will be their own best advocates—but their struggle is real too.

More from me next week. 

Until next time, wishing you peace, love, and soul…

JPB