Pertinent to my Interests

Everyone around me is shrinking, and this is starting to feel like an extinction event.

Please give me some grace here as I make some difficult statements that reflect my reality and may not reflect your lived experience.

Everyone around me is shrinking. At first it was just celebrities and influencers. That was hard enough! My very favorite size 18 body-positive influencer went on GLP-1s last year, and although she’s still posting body-positive messages, it’s just not the same when the accompanying photo is of an hourglass size 12 body.

There’s this wonderful poem I love about accepting your body just the way it is and clawing back all the time you’ve spent worrying about your weight and hating yourself. I searched out the poet on the Internet the other day because it had been a couple years since I had followed her. I can’t even describe how betrayed I felt when I discovered that she is also now thin.

There are two local influencers I used to follow back when I was deep into diet culture and striving for weight loss too. They were on the same path, but eventually–like me–gave up ye olde gain/loss/binge/hungry lifestyle to embrace more of a body-neutrality/mindful eating approach. Both of them are now on GLP-1s.

And there are quite a few people in my real life who are on GLP-1s. Some of them I know for sure, and some of them I just know. You can tell. Nobody loses weight that quickly for that many months in a row just with diet and exercise.

It felt for a little bit like culture was moving in the right direction. The idea that obesity wasn’t just a matter of willpower and laziness was gaining momentum. Mindful eating was getting hot. There were pictures of fat women modeling bras at the mall. The Health at Any Size movement was winning ground, even in doctor’s offices. Plus size hiking pants were a thing!

For the first time in my life, I felt like maybe my body was okay? Maybe I was okay? Maybe my body really wasn’t the problem all along?

And then GLP-1s became widely available, and all of this cultural and personal change has come to a crashing halt.

Let me be clear: I think GLP-1s are actually a good thing. There is no question that they are improving the health of millions of Americans. For many people, they are truly a miracle. On an individual level, I am very supportive of GLP-1s. Those influencers I mention above did not owe it to me or to anyone else to stay fat.

It’s the cultural effect of GLP-1s that is causing me great despair. The fewer of us fat people there are, the less inclusive the world will be. Why use a fat woman to sell bras when your customer base is now mostly in the normal BMI range? Why make walking pads that can support someone who weighs more than 250 lbs when almost nobody weighs that much anymore? Why deal with your patient’s body dysmorphia and slightly elevated blood pressure holistically when you can just write a prescription instead?

“Your body is not the problem,” one of those fat-positive influencers used to say all the time. But as soon as she was given a non-surgical option to become thin, she took it.

If she can’t accept her body just the way it is, what hope does a normal, not-fashionable, not-confident person like me have?

And if the people I love the most assure me that my body is just fine the way it is, but then they choose to go and shrink their own bodies, how am I supposed to interpret that?

I know that what other people do with their own bodies is not a reflection on my body. I know that. But also… isn’t it? We are social creatures. Our lives are always tangled up in cultural norms. Everyone else starts watching Bridgerton so we do to. Everyone else is wearing skinny jeans so we do too. (Remember how ridiculous those looked at first?)

What is it going to be like for those of us who are still out here trying to just live our lives as fat people? It seems like there will be this strange sub-class of humans who either don’t want to take GLP-1s, don’t have access to GLP-1s, or can’t take GLP-1s for medical/side effect reasons. There will always be obese people in the nation, but I’m not sure how many there will be in the end. And I suspect the world won’t be kind to us.

“Your body is not the problem.” I still say it to myself, whisper it like a prayer, but it doesn’t feel possible to believe it anymore. I think GLP-1s may be proving that it was never really possible.

So where do I go from here?

I wasn’t very excited about traveling over spring break this year. I’m not a good traveler to begin with, and it felt like last year we did too much traveling too many times.

This trip actually went quite well, and I think it’s because I was the man for most of it.

Let me explain. I did not plan or book a single thing for this trip. My husband did all the planning, all the research, and all the booking. I didn’t even know exactly where we were staying or what the check-in times were. I didn’t research a single restaurant, and yet somehow restaurants had already been chosen. It was awesome.

I also did all the driving on this trip. Since we left on a Monday and returned on a Friday the entire trip took place during my poor husband’s work week. And car time is email time. He settled into the passenger seat with his laptop and his hotspot, and I settled into cruise control and my Taylor Swift playlist. He offered to drive for the very last hour on the very last day but at that point I was highly motivated to finish it out myself and I did not take him up on this offer.

I was also the spouse who left the hotel room to acquire coffee in the mornings. I want to say that this is usually the man’s job, but in my marriage it’s actually my job. I am much more coffee-driven than my husband. So this datapoint does not support my theory that I got to be the man for five days, but I think you get the picture.

But I have to tell you about the crazy waterslide I went on. It’s called The Hurricane at Wilderness Resort, and you can look it up on YouTube but I promise the videos do not do it justice.

I should have been more suspicious when we got to the top of the line and discovered there was a weight limit for the group and that they actually weigh you to ensure you’re under the limit.

It should have been a red flag when our three-person group was just under the limit.

It was a definite red flag when they had already sent us down the slide and I saw a fucking vertical drop coming up.

And then we flew. I closed my eyes. I screamed. I had regrets. I didn’t know where I was or what direction my body was moving in, and when I opened my eyes I was in a giant white space and I was not entirely sure that I wasn’t dead.

I was shaking when we got to the bottom and the attendant helped me out.

I feel like nobody believes me when I say this, but I really think this is the most terrified I have ever been. I’ve been on a ton of roller coasters that are much faster, much higher than this water slide, and I have been pretty scared on some of those. But at least in a roller coaster I’m strapped into a vehicle of some sort. I don’t really worry about falling out of a roller coaster, but on a water slide it’s just my body, a tube, and too much damn speed.

I actually don’t regret going on the slide–it really was an experience. But I will not be doing that again.

I will be letting my husband plan trips from here on out. He did a good job and we all had a good time.

Recall that I have yearlong nutrition/fitness goals which renew every month, and an additional resolution theme for each month.

My additional resolution theme this month was writing, and yeah… I would say this was a big failure.

I blame Past Casey, who we all know is the worst and definitely the cause of most of my suffering in life. Past Casey failed to set actual, measurable goals for this resolution. I guess she decided we could “just wing it” despite that having never, ever worked out for us before. Did she think we would actually sit down and write every day for thirty minutes without making a little chart beforehand? Please. Bitch should know better than that by now.

I am happy to report that I did meet my nutrition/fitness goals for this month, the second month in a row that I have accomplished this. This is extra noteworthy this month because I was sick for a week and I ended up having to rearrange my exercise schedule to add in missed sessions.

(I know that people writing about their exercise programs and talking about their exercise habits is so boring. I am so sorry, I am going to do it anyway.)

I am trying to be much more easygoing about my exercise. I hate exercising so much, and have fallen into this unhealthy system around it that goes like this:

Step One: Casey sets an utterly manageable exercise goal.
Step Two: Casey spends a great deal of time stuck in her head handwringing about whether or not she will meet this goal
Step Three: Even in the hours leading up to a scheduled exercise session, Casey will agonize over whether or not she will actually exercise
Step Four: Casey puts on her exercise clothes and still can’t let go of the idea that she might just abandon ship and not exercise and therefore she will continue to be a failure who never does anything right and has no accomplishments to her name
Step Five: Casey exercises, but questions the entire time if she is doing it right or doing enough
Step Six: Casey feels no sense of triumph because she is already freaking out about whether or not she will exercise tomorrow

So I’ve been trying to let go of the entire emotional battleground that I’ve built up around exercising and just trust myself that I will actually exercise and that I will do enough when I am exercising. It might be working? I am only experiencing a mild despair around exercise these days. I am also examining how my struggles with exercise and mostly-healthy-eating have contributed to my feelings of being an overall failure in life, and trying to sever those connections.

Like, what if I never exercised again and ate Doritos every day? Would I still be worthy of love and respect? What if the answer was yes?

Oh and I am still bribing myself because it works. Guess who met her goals and therefore gets to buy herself another Chip and Dale pin from the Disney Store.

I brought the car to the car wash today, the really nice one that does all the interior work for you. This is a task that my husband used to do all the time, but now that I have the car 99% of the time the task falls to me.

Apparently I have never actually gone to this car wash by myself before, because every step of the process was an awkward nightmare. I had to choose from a menu of options on a screen with a line of cars waiting behind me. Nobody was honking or angry, and I didn’t even take that long, but I cannot handle people waiting behind me. If I need to parallel park and there is another car coming up from behind I will just not park. I have completely abandoned errands and outings just because I could not figure out how to park without inconveniencing someone else.

The worst part was when I got to the entrance to the car wash and there was a big sign with instructions. Take your valuables. Leave the keys in the car. Leave the car running and in park. I followed the instructions, left the car and then was awkwardly summoned back by one of the workers. How was I supposed to know that I needed to drive the car into the bay myself? The sign was outside–I left the car running (with no valuables inside!) at the sign. How was I supposed to know?!

I have moments like this frequently in my life when it seems like everyone else has received different, much more thorough instructions on how to function in society. How does everyone else know to drive into the bay first and then follow the directions on the sign which you can no longer see? If there had been someone in line ahead of me, I would have watched them for clues, but alas I was the first in line today and left to my own autistic devices I stumbled.

I know having a neurodivergent diagnosis is very trendy these days. I do tend to roll my eyes a little bit when people can’t stop talking about their late-diagnosis ADHD. I have trouble discerning where we draw the line between personality and diagnosis, and I generally want my quirks to be attributed to me being a delightful character and not to an entry in the DSM-5.

But.

It’s nice to know I’m probably not the only person in the world who would have made that mistake at the car wash. And it’s nice to think that it’s not because we are dumb or bad, our brains just interact with the world differently.

Here is another autism story. I have always struggled to focus on a single conversation if there are other conversations going on around me. I am incapable of blocking out the extra stimulus. This is–of course–a massive problem in large group social situations, already a challenging area for me. I recently discovered, while googling something else entirely, that this is a common symptom of autism.

And this: remember in season one of The Pitt when we saw Mel teach Langdon a trick about turning off the lights to make the room more comfortable for an autistic patient? Um, guess who else likes to sit in her own home in the dark all the time? Me! I love natural light, but I come home from work every day and I turn off every single light in the house and no light gets turned on again until other family members start arriving home and turning them on.

Autism: it just makes sense!

The list of diagnostic criteria that map perfectly onto my life could go on forever. Ask my mom about the Great Tag Incident of 1988. Or how we used to run into kids from my class at the grocery store and they would say hello to me and I would not say hello back and I would get in so much trouble for being rude.

(As an aside: I am much better about this now, and I do return greetings and even initiate the greeting process myself sometimes. However, I still struggle with the moral issues around this. Why is it that if someone says hello to me I am now entrapped by social contract in a conversation that I didn’t even want to have in the first place? It seems very unfair. I still think non-response should be an option here.)

I do find the world to be Too Much most of the time, and that’s why I prefer to stay home where it’s quiet and dark and I know where we keep the coffee cups. Navigating new situations and new places is Even More Too Much which is why I have spent my life with one or two favorite restaurants and absolutely no desire to try anything else. It’s probably also why I never really settled in when we lived in New York City where everything is bright and busy and new all the time.

But it’s nice to know that the world isn’t Too Much because I’m lazy, and it’s not because I’m a bad person or because I am Not Enough. Things just hit my brain a little differently, and I really am trying to read your social cues around this damn directions sign at the car wash. I’m just also overstimulated by the bright lights of the world, and the movements around me, and the seams of my clothing and the emotions of the person in the car behind me so yeah… it’s gonna take me a minute. Or never. Maybe just tell me what to do!

I am sick. I was sick all weekend, that kind of sick where you’re miserable but not actually sick enough to just stay in bed.

I woke up feeling even worse this morning; I thought at first that it was just the time change. I often feel a little sick if I get up too early, so I was hopeful I would feel better as the day went on. I shuffled down to the kitchen and searched the mug cupboard for an appropriate coffee mug.

We own exactly sixteen coffee mugs, which is way too many, but I only use three of them. Today there was only one mug left of my Preferred Three, and that was my Yoshi mug.

My Yoshi mug is special. My Yoshi mug is from Epic Universe, and it’s just the right size, just the right weight, and when you finish the coffee a Yoshi egg is revealed at the bottom of the mug. It is my favorite mug, and I like to use it only on weekends, or on weekday mornings when I get up extra early and can sit on the couch and savor it.

I was not up extra early today. Work was already destined to be hell this week due to several factors, and when you add my illness and the time change on top of it well… let’s just say I was not feeling particularly optimistic this morning.

I used the Yoshi mug anyway. Is this what they mean by choosing happiness?

The most stressful part of being sick for me is definitely the exercise aspect. I’m in a pretty good exercise habit now, and I usually exercise on Mondays, but I’m just not sure if I should today. I sometimes try to think through what various friends would say to me if I asked them whether or not I should exercise in my current state.

“Well, you went to work, so you must be well enough to exercise,” I can hear a reasonable friend say.

“Yes, but work is mostly sitting,” another friend might say. “And it really affects a lot of people if you don’t make it to work so it makes sense to prioritize work but not exercise.”

“Yes, but this might destroy her good exercise habits,” a third friend chimes in. “It’s better to have a crappy workout and keep up the habit than to skip it altogether and let her fall back into Slug Life.”

The problem is that these are all reasonable opinions, and I truly cannot tell which one is correct.

In other news, I watched a documentary the other day that featured some present-day interviews of Bill Clinton, and wow nothing makes me feel old like seeing how old Bill Clinton has become. I don’t know why this hits so hard. I was in third grade when he became the president and a junior in high school when he left office, so I guess that’s a pretty formative series of years in my life. I guess he’s the definitive president in my book, the one to whom all others are compared. And if even Bill Clinton can get old does that mean that I can get old too?!

And like, what if he dies someday? What does that mean?!

We are experiencing Second False Spring here in Minnesota, which means that it’s currently 50 degrees (fleece weather! my favorite!) but also there is snow in the forecast next week.

Despite the inviting weather, I am currently occupied by my favorite afternoon activity: shutting myself up in the den with both doors closed, the space heater on, and a documentary I’ve already watched 53 times playing on the TV. It’s like the nerdiest, dryest sauna in here and I love it. My husband is disturbed every time he finds me engaged in this activity because for the first twenty years of our relationship, I was one of those rare females who never get cold. Well, middle age changes you.

I am currently playing three pieces of music for my piano lessons, and they are all written in a different key: two flats, three flats, and four flats. I am practicing them in that order because I am pretty sure it’s easier to add flats in my brain than it is to take them away.

My piano teacher asked me the other day if I prefer playing in keys with sharps or keys with flats and I had never considered this question before, but I immediately knew the answer: I very much prefer flats.

I guess you could say I’m living my best piano life right now.

A strange thing happened at work the other day, and unfortunately, I can’t really tell the story without betraying the privacy of some people. I am obliged both professionally and morally to protect our students, and this really hobbles me when it comes to writing about work.

I will boil this story down to the basic elements.

A child said something had happened. The three adults who were present (including me) heard this and expressed both sympathy and alarm to the student. After resolving the immediate issue with the student, the adults reconvened and decided that the child’s story needed to be reported.

I was surprised because I have heard similar stories before, second-hand, from other adults. I have, in fact, heard a similar story first-hand myself, and had reported that one months ago. It seemed that nothing was done, and that was the end.

The appearance of non-action read like tolerance.

But I think it’s just an appearance of non-action, not an actual lack of action. And every incident should be reported, every time. I am ashamed that I was ready to just shrug my shoulders and move on with my day.

That’s not how this should work. I’m glad I had this reminder. I learn more about human nature and morality every day at this job.

It’s time for another report on how Casey’s resolutions are going. Recall that this year my resolutions are twofold:

1. A meaningful but simple fitness and nutrition goal that lasts the entire year
2. One additional rotating goal per month

This month I am happy to report that I actually met my fitness and nutrition goals. And, as if the universe was trying to double down on the message, my last workout of the month (on Thursday) was the first workout I’ve done since the beginning of the year that actually made me feel strong. It has been a true fucking slog, let me tell you.

My additional goal this month was a fun one: learn a new ASL sign every day.

The school I work at has a small population of deaf staff and deaf students and while I know I’ll never acquire enough ASL to have a full conversation with them, I want to do better. I’m actually pretty good at fingerspelling, already, so I kept my ears open and tried to come up with a list of frequently used words at school that might come in handy. The post before this one is the list of ASL I learned.

(Note: I already knew a number of useful school signs like “name” and “attendance” and “poop,” so this is a list of additional signs.)

As you can see, I only made it to 26 signs, not 28. As I pointed out to my youngest, that’s like 92% of my goal: an A-. I am okay with that.

This was a fun and useful resolution, but I’m happy it’s over. Now I get to use what I learned and also move forward with a new resolution next month.

Fine (can be used as a response to “thank you”)

Interpreter

Teacher

Sick

Where

Phone

Help (as in “how can I help you?)

Hot

Cold

Lunch

Delicious

Lucky

Sorry

Stop

Wait

Squirrel

Science

Music

Dance

Fire

Clean

Doctor

Color

Broken

Printer

How do you sign…?

I had a weird Saturday.

We had a nice family trip to one of the local Asian supermarkets. Our goals: to find some snacks that we fondly remember from our trip to Japan last summer, and to acquire mochi donuts.

The kids and I were discussing this Asian market and how it compared to one that we had gone to in a local suburb.

“I don’t know why, but this one feels more real,” my oldest said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I always feel a little out of place here, and that’s how I know it’s authentic.”

I got a taro-flavored mochi donut and it was delicious.

The next outing of the day was to a funeral. It was in a lovely old church that smelled properly of old stone and generations of careful care. Wooden pews and stained glass. I opened the bulletin, located the first hymn in the new red hymnal, and I was ready to go.

I was not ready to go. Guys, did you know that you can just forget how to do church if you don’t go frequently enough? I did not know this. I couldn’t remember the responses to the readings and the gospel without looking. We sang the Lord’s Prayer. Who sings the Lord’s Prayer? At one point during the preparation of communion I got extremely lost in the bulletin and just stopped trying to figure it out. I mumbled along enthusiastically, hoping to look like I fit in.

Am I bad at church now? I didn’t realize that attending a church service was a skill that I might lose. I guess I thought all the Lutheran churches would always be out there reciting the Lord’s Prayer with the word “trespasses” intact and that everyone would always sing the same version of Lamb of God as the first song during communion. How many versions of Lamb of God could there possibly be and why would anyone ever pick anything else for communion?

I felt so out of place, an obvious foreigner fumbling with the psalmody as if she’s never sung a psalm in her entire life.

The last outing of the day was to a fancy dinner with my husband’s work team. This is an annual event that I dread. What are appropriate topics of conversation when you struggle to relate to anything about another person’s life? For the most part, this is the generational wealth set: they travel internationally with their kids every year, they have never and will never set foot in a public school. Inevitably the conversation will turn to the details of a recent SEC filing and I will struggle to maintain my interest in the conversation. Even the open bar does nothing to help–I am too concerned with maintaining appropriate behavior to allow myself to imbibe much.

Usually it’s just an evening of cocktails and a buffet of heavy hors d’oeuvres, but this year it was a fancy sit-down dinner: the kind with multiple layers of utensils. Which bread plate is mine? Which water cup? Dear Lord, it’s only a matter of time before they all realize that we are frauds, raised in households that resemble the Roseanne sitcom while they just walked off the set of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

Out of place.

So it was a weird Saturday indeed.

One thing that has surprised me about life is how many different lifetimes I am actually fitting into this one life.

I am only 42 years old, but here are, approximately, all the lifetimes I have lived:

1983-1992: Pre-divorce childhood

1992-1998ish: Post-divorce childhood

1999-2002: High School

2002-2006: College

2006-2012: Young adult years in New York City

2013-2021: Young motherhood years as a stay-at-home parent

2022-2024: Weird lost years when I wasn’t working but the kids were both in school full-time, weekly existential crisis and bored out of my mind but damn I hate volunteering

2024-present: working half-time with older kids, living the dream

You could potentially collapse those last two eras into one, and that would still leave me with seven distinct lifetimes within this one life. And if all goes according to plan, I am only halfway through!

There are so many other ways to divide up my life.

What about time zones?
1983-1984: Central Time
1984-2002: Pacific Time
2002-2006: Central Time
2006-2012: Eastern Time
2012-2026: Central TIme

Camping
1983-2002: Camping years
2002-2012: Non-camping years
2013-2021: Camping years
2021-present: Non-camping years

Cabin Ownership
1983-2021: No cabin
2021-present: Cabin

Number of Living Parents
1983-2019: Two parents
2019-present: One parent

And it’s interesting to think about how these things overlap. I could list the years that I’ve lived with a piano and the years I have lived with a cat and they would be roughly the same, but not quite. My knitting years line up very neatly with those young adult years in New York City.

I think I have finally entered the part of life where there will be fewer changes. Adulthood and parenthood are supposed to be a long plod where nothing changes and you’re just fixing up shit that breaks around your house and getting your kid through their education and puberty.

It does feel like my life has held more lifetimes than most people. My childhood comes in a set of two due to the divorce. Moving to New York City as a young adult created a distinct NYC lifetime. When I stopped working to stay home with the kids that broke things up further, and then the pandemic and my inability to figure out what to do with my life (and my struggle to figure out what had changed with job applications in the fifteen years since I had last applied to anything) gave me that weird little interregnum of boredom and wondering if I would spend the rest of my life just cleaning and cooking.

So I think there is less change ahead, although we will eventually become empty nesters (maybe?), and then have to deal with retirement. I think the chances of becoming a grandparent are fairly low (I think this is true for all millennial parents, not just me), but then there’s the ultimate or penultimate lifetime that I am very much eagerly anticipating: assisted living.