Tag Archives: Self-help

The Science of Well-Being

(Posted on behalf Sierra) Through these turbulent times, it’s difficult to unplug from the news circuit and prioritize mental well-being. The COVID-19 pandemic has left many of us with barren schedules and feelings of anxiety. I myself have been very tempted to close the curtains and withdraw into the comforts of my bed, drowning all worries in Netflix and true crime – a temptation I regularly succumb to (not to brag, but I finished streaming Tiger King in two and a half days). However, soon after this nation-wide shutdown began, I made a decision to take advantage of the rare opportunity that’s come with this devastating crisis: free time.

Big-top Bonanza

Big-top Bonanza

I’ve never had so much of it! Maybe in elementary school when summer vacation promised limitless fun and presented me with Phineas and Ferb’s “annual problem”: “finding a good way to spend it”. Except, this isn’t a vacation, and leaving our homes isn’t a viable option at the moment, so that rules out both fighting a mummy and climbing up the Eiffel Tower. Alas, in search of a solo indoor activity, I turned to Coursera.

Coursera is an online learning platform, founded by Stanford professors. The website has free online modules and certifications from internationally acclaimed universities. It’s a tome of anything you could ever want to learn! If I’m being honest, it was a bit daunting at first: did I want to study Italian? Graphic Design? Water Supply and Sanitation Policy? The world was my digital oyster!

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Break the Silence

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Image result for bell lets talk 2020In the Harry Potter universe, a sense of cold, creeping dread announces the arrival of Dementors, foul creatures of darkness who sweep away happiness and deal in despair. “Get too near a Dementor,” Professor Lupin tells Harry in The Prisoner of Azkaban, “and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you.” Dementors might be real, dangerous monsters for our wizard hero, but for author JK Rowling, Dementors are an avatar for depression. While writing the beloved series, Rowling was suffering from a bout of depression herself, which she described as “that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad.” This, incidentally, is almost exactly how Lupin describes Dementors to Harry. 

Unfortunately for us Muggles living in a boring, non-magical world, things like depression don’t exist in a solid form. We can’t shout “expecto patronum!” at mental illness and chase it away with a helpful Patronus. But there are some steps we can take to combat it, such as the simplest, most obvious, but often most difficult starting point: talking about it. When Harry faints upon his first encounter with a Dementor, he is filled with shame. Nobody else is fainting, so why is he? It isn’t until Professor Lupin opens the door to a conversation that Harry learns why he is so affected by the creatures, and how to fight them off. Today is Bell Let’s Talk Day, a day dedicated to breaking the silence on mental illness through conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and text messaging with the hashtag #BellLetsTalk. 

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You Have the Right to Remain Fat

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Virgie TovarThere are just short of 128 pages of text that I’d like to quote in this post, but I’ll have to make do with a select few tidbits from the entire selection. It’s worth noting though, that in just over 100 small pages with You Have the Right to Remain Fat, Tovar has made what I felt to be quite a compelling argument against diet culture & fatphobia, arguing that its continued existence in the form of popular health guides (e.g. healthy is the new thin) seeps through every pore of our existence and submits every woman it touches to its unhealthy system of size discrimination, regardless of where along the spectrum you fit in (in fact every person, as it’s not just women participating in the propagation of and living with fatphobia). I would recommend You Have the Right to Remain Fat to any and everyone. Go read it. Now. We have two physical copies and one electronic book (available via hoopla), so there’s no excuse not to either borrow it or put yourself on  hold immediately. So let’s get into some of what makes this slim volume such a pithy and convincing text on why we as a collective should stop judging people by the size of their bodies, including ourselves.

If I were to ask you whether you’ve been affected in any way throughout your life by fatphobia, what would your answer be? If you identify as, or have been categorized in some point in your life by other people as, belonging to the side of the spectrum that fatphobia puts down and shames – i.e. if you’re fat – you might have precious little difficulty coming up with instances when being anything more than what is deemed thin enough (is it ever enough?) has played a part in influencing your life in ways both obvious and more insidious. For those on the other side of the spectrum – thin or even just not-fat – would you say you’ve been touched by fatphobia? At first glance, it might not be immediately obvious, but the unfortunate fact of the matter is that body size monitoring, whether it’s becoming thin or staying thin, affects everyone, not just those on the fat side side. Unless you’ve gotten to this point completely unaware of body size discrimination and the values we as a society ascribe to different body sizes (in which case… I don’t know whether to be happy for you because you’ve been so fortunate/live somewhere where body size discrimination doesn’t exist (also where you at?) or to ask if you’ve buried your head in the sand), and even if you’re unaware of how body discrimination has affected you throughout your life thus far (and will probably continue to do so in the future), this is a bias that is as pervasive in popular media and in lived realities as it is damaging for everyone involved.

Timely in the wake of diet culture, You Have the Right to Remain Fat will incense you and give you some hefty chunks of food for thought that will make you re-evaluate your existing biases and our societal norms.

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