Good job today.

I remember a lot of days feeling like an egg; an intact shell that looked smooth and clean, with an inside that was messy and maybe even rotten. You’d have to break it to find out, I guess, but it never quite broke. A thin membrane was all that was keeping it together.

White-knuckling, I described it to my doctor.

When you’re just barely holding it together, every day is a long and tiresome struggle, every challenge of every size potentially ruinous. Maybe you’re just barely holding it together financially—many people are; death by a thousand expenses. Maybe it’s a threadbare social network that’s left your nerves feeling stripped and exposed. Maybe it’s a marriage, maybe it’s parenting, maybe it’s the desire to parent and the inability to, maybe it’s systemic racism that keeps you working twice as hard for half as much, and maybe it’s some combination of these and more.

In spite of whatever it is that keeps picking, picking, picking little pieces of your shell away, you still manage to make it to school or work, or to pick up the kids, or to go to the store, or hell, to walk the dog. And for that, I want to say: Good job.

When you’re just barely holding it together, every day is a long and tiresome struggle.

I saw you yesterday in traffic as you let your head roll back and bump softly into the headrest, eyes looking at the moonroof, shoulders slumped.

I saw you walking briskly to the bus, jaw jutted as if the tension there would keep the tears in a little longer.

I saw you confidently shake a hand with a hand that had no fingernails to speak of.

I saw your inner arm as you handed me my change.

Good job today. You did what you had to do. And good job tomorrow, when you do it again. If no one has told you that recently, I want to tell you that. Good job.

How Magic Helps Me Live With Pain And Trauma

When you’re sitting across from someone who you actually really do like but all you can think is you don’t know me at all.

When your constant mantras are what was I thinking or why did I do that but then it’s ok it’s ok it’s ok it turned out ok.

When you’re in a meeting and smiling politely but what you really want to do is yell and storm out.

When you do yell and storm out and it feels so damn good but then you get home and cry because there’s an unexpected bill in the mailbox.

When someone dies. When someone leaves. When something breaks. When multiple terrible things happen on the same day.

When you try to seek help in our complex and expensive patchwork of systems only to be turned down and turned away and turned off to the entire horrible process.

Good job.

And if one day you don’t manage to hold it together? If one poke is too many and the shell cracks or outright shatters? Good job for making it as long as you did and good job for not protecting anyone from your own internal tempest anymore. Good job for starting the process of putting it back together; maybe it will be stronger in the broken places.

Good job for starting the process of putting it back together.

We have so many modern conveniences—the super-computers in our pockets, the medicine that keeps us living longer, the apps that pick us up and drop us off and get our laundry handled and our meals delivered, the machines that squeeze our bags of juice—but we also have so many modern challenges, many with no simple solution. So we just keep going, keep holding it together until conditions improve.

The thing that few people will ever admit is that all of us are feeling for the switch in the dark every day and some days we find it and some days we don’t and some days we do but the bulb is burned out and even just the reaching and reaching is an accomplishment.

So this is just to say, if you are just barely holding it together: Good job.

To Everyone Who’s Just Barely Holding It Together was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Abortion is an economic issue. Abortion is an economic issue.

Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders drew criticism after a Wall Street Journal article cited his tepid response to vocally pro-choice candidate Jon Ossoff’s campaign, while supporting Omaha Mayoral hopeful Heath Mello, who co-sponsored bills requiring physicians to offer medically-unnecessary, highly-politicized trans-vaginal ultrasounds before abortions. Planned Parenthood called the legislation “anti-choice” and stated that they have never endorsed Mello.

Critics saw this as another example of Sanders’ hyper-focus on his own pet issues (free college, single-payer health care) and willingness to abandon those which matter most to marginalized people (abortion, reparations, mass incarceration), despite his stated dedication to them. His supporters countered by noting that Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine, an affirmed Christian, was also not a huge booster for abortion rights (though in a debate with Mike Pence, who is staunchly anti-choice, Kaine stated clearly that he “really feel[s] like you should live fully and with enthusiasm in the commands of your faith, but it is not the role of the public servant to mandate that for everybody else.”) and explaining that economic issues are more likely to unify the left than social ones. With swiftness, they defended a Democratic platform that potentially did not include a staunchly pro-choice message.

But this, I think, is the heart of a false dichotomy that progressives have not only created, but ingested and perpetuated. Again and again and again and again. Regardless of Mello, Kaine, or any other lawmaker and their individual decisions or laws, we must shake this notion that reproductive health is somehow distinct from the economy.

We tend to think of politics in separate spheres; there are economic issues, social issues, Black issues, women’s issues, LGBTQ issues, immigration issues, urban issues, rural issues, the list is endless. Some of these spheres overlap; women’s issues and LGBTQ issues are often forcibly lumped together, while all different folks of color are somehow expected to have the same problems despite being completely different in everything except brown-ness. We decide that the “white working class” somehow has its own precious cadre of troubles that must be addressed. We parse issues of education from social welfare to health care, despite the intimate fibers that link them.

Sanders has adopted a more intersectional approach, in that he’s a firm believer that fixing our economic woes—closing the income gap, providing health care services across the board—will fix every other issue. A rising tide and all that. And in many ways, he’s not wrong; economic issues are at the heart of many, many larger problems.

Unfortunately, as it’s been pointed out before, focusing solely on a few facets of the economy does little to address the systemic ways in which groups of people are kept from achieving and thriving. And similarly, failing to focus on those systems (by focusing only on “economic” and not “social” issues) all but ensures that those people remain oppressed because those systems will remain in place.

Abortion access and reproductive health care is a really, really good example of this.

Writing off abortion as a nice-to-have—i.e., saying that a candidate can get the support of the progressive left even if they’re not staunchly on board with and fighting for open, affordable, and easy access to these legally-protected services—fundamentally misses one of the biggest contributors to the gender wage gap. I would argue that it is impossible to have an economic policy that’s truly comprehensive or effective that does not include access to and coverage for abortion services.

This isn’t a revolutionary though; Margret Sanger laid it out quite clearly in 1919:

A woman enchained cannot choose but give a measure of bondage to her sons and daughters. No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

There’s also no shortage of data; a 2013 paper studying the 80s and 90s noted that birth control access can close the wage gap by as much as 30%. A 2016 Brookings report found that though single women of all income levels show nearly identical rates of sexual activity, “poor women not trying to conceive are…three times more likely to get pregnant than their higher income counterparts,” leading to “higher rates of poverty, less family stability, and worse outcomes for children.”

And according to the National Women’s Law Center (emphasis mine),

…States that are hostile to abortion (have 4 or more abortion restrictions) have a worse wage gap than states that aren’t hostile. In states that are not hostile to abortion women, on average, make 20 cents less for every $1 a man makes. But, in hostile states women make 23 cents less for every $1 a man makes…

Put simply, economic security and reproductive justice go hand in hand. Women can’t have one without the other. Abortion restrictions, pay discrimination, unaffordable health care, lack of paid sick days, inaccessible childcare, unfair scheduling practices all make it harder for women to have the children they want, not have children, and parent their children they have in safe, healthy environments. Economic justice is deeply interconnected to all other forms of justice, including reproductive justice.

And yet, more than half of the states in the U.S. have some kind of restriction on abortion access. Most are based on ideological or moral beliefs, including those which require a waiting period, a second physician, or a trans-vaginal ultrasound. In most instances, restrictions are designed to reduce abortion rates or make them unaffordable or unaccessible, not to improve the health or safety of the patient.

The Guttmacher Institute reported last year that “11 states restrict coverage of abortion in private insurance plans, most often limiting coverage only to when the woman’s life would be endangered if the pregnancy were carried to term,” adding that “most states allow the purchase of additional abortion coverage at an additional cost.”

Which underscores another major issue with separation of abortion from the broader understanding of economic issues—if the left has collectively decided that health care reform is necessarily, what does that mean for abortion services and coverage? If we achieve single-payer health care but it doesn’t cover abortion services, what does that demonstrate about our commitment to the economy, to our voting population, and to our willingness to uphold the rights granted to our citizens?

Access to birth control and abortion benefits people of all genders for a variety of reasons—it reduces reliance on social services, can help break the cycle of poverty, and as a result, reduce crime-related costs for years and decades to come. When families have access to reproductive health services, they’re more in control of their own mobility and can be more productive members of their community.

It is undeniable that abortion access is a cost-saving mechanism and thus, an economic necessity; limiting abortion access is simply not fiscally responsible.

No lawmaker should be required to believe any one thing; when fewer than one in five Americans believe abortion should be completely illegal (and 60% think it should be legal in either all or most cases), a representative government will certainly contain a few elected officials who oppose.

However, opposing something and legislating against it (or legislating to restrict it) are very, very different things. And, I believe, this is not something to compromise on because statistically it’s not something we need to compromise on. The truth is that abortion access should not be up for debate, and if the left wants to be a party for everyone—and for economic justice—there is no room for waffling on this matter.

Abortion is not simply a social issue; it’s not something for lawmakers to quibble over or use as a bargaining chip. It’s a legally-protected right that has demonstrated economic consequences for literally everyone involved. Not every elected official needs to like it, necessarily, but to truly close the wage gap and increase equity across the board, they do have to get on board.

Turns out, you can’t get healthy and hold on to all your bullshit ideas about sexy tragedy.

Content note: There’s some talk of mental health, suicidal ideations, and eating disorders in here so please be kind to yourself and make a decision that’s good for you. ❤

“You do remind me a bit of tragedy,” read the AOL Instant Message on my computer screen. I was in my college dorm, about to go out for yet another Lucky Strike on the back steps with the other bad kids. “With your, like, big sunglasses and your scarves and stuff.”

It was, at the time, the greatest compliment he could have paid me.

I was listening to a lot of Bob Dylan then and like any number of girls in the last four decades, I identified closely with the character (because truly, it could not have been an accurate portrayal of a complete human) described in “Just Like a Woman.”

You know the details of this kind of character. TVTropes.com refers to her most closely as the Broken Bird, but even if you’ve never heard her referred to in that way, you’re certainly familiar with her traits.

She’s a kind of young, sorrowful Femme Fatale who, perhaps later in life, will turn her toughness into strength and power but for right now is just kind of…dark. She’s a Chill Girl with No Feelings (unless those feelings are sad, but she largely keeps the real emotions to herself). Like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl but much more sorrowful and dark and serious, she exudes sexuality and desire through her brokenness. She is brooding and fierce and somehow inspirational despite being deeply fucked up. She’s Penny Lane, she’s Marla, she’s Sam in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, she’s the woman in Chelsea Hotel №2, she’s the literal girl next door in Breaking Bad.

The Troubled Girl is brooding and fierce and somehow inspirational despite being deeply fucked up.

But perhaps the best name for this trope (for this lifestyle, really) is the Sexy Tragic Muse, who Anne Thériault described beautifully in this 2015 essay.

“She’s damaged, often as a result of sexual assault or other abuse by men. Her life carries with it some kind of Deep Lesson, usually a lesson that a male protagonist needs to learn…The Sexy Tragic Muse fetishizes women’s pain by portraying debilitating mental health disorders filtered dreamily through the male gaze. The trope glamourizes addiction and illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia — diseases that are distinctly unglamorous for those of us who live with them. The Sexy Tragic Muse is vulnerable, and her vulnerability is sexualized. Her inability to properly care for herself or make decisions on her own behalf is presented as being part of her appeal.”

And she was exactly who, in my teens and early twenties, I thought I wanted to be. And that has made it, as I approach 30, all the more difficult to get better.

When you’ve spent most of your life identifying with and even clinging to the worst of you, the most painful of you, it makes being well and healthy feel an awful lot like giving up.

There were, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and still are to some degree, a limited number of role models for girls and young women to look to. In my most impressionable days, they seemed to me to be neatly deliniated into categories. Smart Girls, Good Girls, Rich Girls, Plucky Girls, and of course, Bad Girls. Troubled Girls. For a while there, it was Emo Girls, though that’s its own essay.

Poor, white, and pretty rural, I saw myself a bit in several, but never fit quite comfortably in any one. I was smart (though numerous outside forces attempted to tell me I wasn’t, or at least, that I wasn’t the kind of smart that counted), I was plucky, I was good…but I was also emotionally treading water, beating my stout legs against a then-undiagnosed mental illness.

The Dangers Of The ‘Cool Girl’ Ideal

Going to college has a kind of sharpening effect on a person’s characteristics, or at least, the ones they make the most visible. You come into clearer focus when hundreds of new eyes set upon you and decide who you are and what you’re like.

It was when I moved away that I really found myself identifying with the Troubled Girl. After all, she is always kind of the best character if we’re being honest with ourselves. The Troubled Girl taps into the centuries-old idealization of the Starving Artist; she’s a kind of new beat poet. In the bulk of teen lit and media, the girl who has it going on in the traditional sense is nearly always cast as dull and one-dimensional; the (still hot) Troubled Girl likes cool music and does cool things and attracts cool boys.

See: Vanessa in Gossip Girl. See: Ramona Flowers in the Scott Pilgrim universe. See: Mimi in Rent.

Unfortunately, the Sexy Tragic Muse must also look a certain way to be fully realized. The specific traits of such a character are rote and easy to identify. This character is:

— Thin (always and in the extreme; it is very necessary that she be thin)
 — White (always except in the very rare occasion when she is a hyper sexualized, exoticized non-Black woman of color)
 — A user of something (coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, all of the above, especially if it fuels the aforementioned thinness)
 — Hot (necessarily)
 — Modified in some way (tattoos, piercing, unnatural hair color)
 — Unwell in some way (that must be somewhat sexualized, as well, like depression, bipolar, a restrictive eating disorder, addiction, or cutting; more on this later)

This was, in essence, a trap for every single thing I prized the most as a teen. I wanted to be smart. I wanted to be desired. I wanted to be thin. And I wanted my chaotic inner life to make sense among all of it.

This is the ultimate, dangerous trap of the Sexy Tragic Muse or Troubled Girl ideal — it creates space for people in pain where there’s no other space and allows them to hang on to it with both hands. It’s a map for depression and eating disorders and anxiety and substance abuse and hurting.

The Sexy Tragic Muse must also look a certain way to be fully realized.

When the currents of overwhelming emotions that beat inside of you like a second pulse are sexualized and made to match with other cultural values—attractiveness, the ability for a woman to be a kind of Swiss Army knife, the impacts of rape culture as Not That Bad—that are difficult and toxic, you may find yourself bound up in your pain like the shell of a moth affixed to a web.

It’s not only understandable that a young person would identify this trope, it’s practically a given.

Unfortunately, we have yet to develop a way to grow out of it or beyond it. Sexy Tragic Muses aren’t depicted with a path to a healthy life. They tend to fade away, or live Sadly Ever After, or die.

Here’s the honest truth about life as a Troubled Girl: It’s not really a way that a fully-realized human being can be, and it’s certainly not a way that a person who is loving and caring and helpful and effective can be. But when you identify so thoroughly with a one-dimensional idea of a person, you begin to fear than your other dimensions are boring or undesirable or otherwise repellent in some way.

My body and I have been at odds for some time now, and like a lot of people who have lived with an eating disorder, I’ve gone through fits and starts when it comes to getting better. I’m a pretty firm believer that, a lot like living with mental illness, there’s no such thing as being “cured” entirely. However, there is the possibility to get better.

Here’s the honest truth about life as a Troubled Girl: It’s not really a way that a fully-realized human being can be.

In the last few months, I’ve been taking a hardcore stab at it. Again. And it’s going well—I’ve got my meds and my mental health apps and my exercise routine and my healthy diet all hammered out—except for the fact that every single day, I still have to remind myself that I don’t want to be the Troubled Girl anymore.

The Sexy Tragic Muse represents a lot of things we collectively covet (thin, hot) but her traits are also specifically, systematically designed to keep her from becoming anything more than human. When we sexualize and revel in emotional pain, we all but ensure that the people who live with it can never experience anything else.

The Sexy Tragic Muse is not a good friend or partner. She’s not good at her job. She’s not a productive community member. She can’t be, because, by definition, she’s unwell and able to do anything but emote and maybe fix a sad boy’s heart or give a nice boy a chance to redeem himself.

Though I hit the peak of my Troubled Girl status a decade ago, it’s still evident that these ideals are pervasive. A recent series of advertisements for the startup Fiverr make it clear that the idea of being unhealthy as a point of pride is still alive and well, even if it looks a little less emo than it used to.

The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death

This is the pernicious nature of tropes like the Sexy Tragic Muse, which all but demand a certain kind of weakness (hunger, exhaustion, reduced lung capacity due to cigarette smoking) to portray strength or beauty or desirability. The Sexy Tragic Muse might look a little different in Silicon Valley—call her the Sexy Tragic CEO or the Sexy Tragic Founder or the Sexy Tragic Gig Economist—than she does on a college campus, but the idea is the same and it’s one that is designed to be limiting.

These tropes are seductive; they create thought patterns that are difficult to shed and easy to take advantage of. But this is a choice that I’m making (and in part, I’m writing it for accountability, so welcome to my process).

In order for me to be my healthiest self, I have to be okay with shedding the trope that has kept me from getting better by encouraging me to stay within dangerous parameters.

And I suspect I’m not alone.

There’s too much tragedy in the world to create more for the sake of sexiness. There’s plenty of sadness in the air to wear it like perfume. There’s too much trouble in me already to cultivate more for the sake of an imaginary ideal meant to keep me simple.

I Don’t Want To Be The ‘Troubled Girl’ Anymore was originally published in The Establishment on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If quitting any habit is hard, quitting patterns of thinking you grew up with is nearly impossible. Leaving behind the bits of understanding that have filled in the circuitry of your brain is perhaps one of the more difficult aspects of human growth.

A lot of what we learn and have reinforced as kids is good—be nice to others, wash your hands. But plenty of it is not.

Raised well before the era of body positivity in a culture that directly linked my physical appearance to my worth, I’m currently in the process of unlearning a lot about the body, strength, thinness, eating, discipline, and what it takes to be loved. And one of the single most apparent (and most tightly-bound) points of conversion of all of those things is running.

Fucking running.

Let me back up.

Like any collection of teenagers, my high school had social strata based on shared interests. But instead of Breakfast Club-like tropes—football players and rich girls and weirdo and nerds—our graduating class was divided and sub-divided into groups which, I found out only after meeting kids who didn’t grow up in the crunchy Willamette Valley, weren’t exactly standards.

Football players weren’t cool at all. Girls who made their own clothes were. Yoga was in, driving an expensive car was out. A Northface liner and a Nalgene bottle (before the big BPA reveal) were the must-have accessories. The most-loved sports were water polo, soccer, and track.

All of the coolest kids ran track. Which isn’t, perhaps, surprising in a city which hosts the Olympic Track & Field trials, which is the birthplace of Nike, and whose most-known moniker is “Tracktown, USA.”

People in Eugene talk about Steve Prefontaine the way people from Minneapolis talk about Prince. Everyone’s parents have a story about the time they saw him, partied with him, or better yet, lost a race to him. Runners leave their racing bibs at Pre’s Rock. They quote him for inspiration. They tell their friends from out of town about Bill Bowerman and the waffle iron shoe.

Running is a big deal. And not running is a big problem.

I’d known I wasn’t a runner since I was young. Neither of my parents ran (though my dad does now and he could easily lap me on his sprints through the foothills) and, in fact, we would often mock runners, perhaps as a method of deflection.

My family aren’t a tall people. We have thick thighs, meaty calves, ample backsides. We are not built to run, nor did we put in the effort to do it. Add in the fact that I wasn’t in any way savvy about health or eating as a kid (the only way I knew to lose weight was “don’t eat”) and was, for years, pretty chubby, and my inability to blow down the trails became…a thing.

In junior high, when we were required to take the Presidential Fitness Test, the running portion — just a short distance, really, about half a mile — left me red in the face, panting, and in pain.

I just wasn’t built to run, I reasoned.

And that made me inferior.

I believed running wasn’t just about being genetically blessed (though that was a big part of it!). It was also plainly about being better.

Running families tended to have money, which my family decidedly did not. People who are making good life decisions and earn a lot of money and have fancy lives run.

Runners were Good People. Runners were Cool People. Runners went on vacations and drove new vehicles that didn’t break down every other week. Runners could do anything. Running long distances was literally the highest achievement a human being could aspire to. Nobel Prize? Pulitzer? Second place to completing a half-marathon.

In essence, running stood for everything I wanted in the world and never had.

Somewhere in my mind, the strands connected. If I wanted to become a Good Person—read: wealthy, upper-middle class, thin—I would need to also be a person who ran.

So I tried. In high school, I would set out on the street in my LA Gears just to see if I could turn my fortune, but was dismayed by how much I hated it and how slow I was. Still, I’d plod up and down the roads in my parents neighborhoods, knowing that every step brought me closer to glory.

By the time I got to college and had access to a gym membership, my determination had solidified and the means were at my disposal. Damnit, I was going to become one of those people. I was going to become a runner.

I ran my first consecutive mile the winter of my freshman year and felt like it was more meaningful than anything else I’d ever do.

After that, running became a constant current in my life. It lived quietly in the background of everything else—graduating from college, moving, breaking up, moving, breaking up—like a ghost or a disease undiagnosed.

Either I was actively running a lot (which meant carving out hours of the week to spend on things other than work or friends) or I was beating myself up for having gone too long between runs (often because I was prioritizing other things).

I would push myself in fits and starts, working my way up to a lap around a lake near my school, then a 5k, and then eventually running my first 10k at the YMCA in Downtown Seattle when I was feeling particularly angsty.

I devoured scientific studies and articles about running. I crafted high-protein diets and stretching regimens. I carefully crafted playlists with songs that were the correct beats-per-minute.

And, I should note, I hated literally every minute of every run.

Running was miserable. It was hard. It was painful. It was slow.

But I kept doing it because I had to. I was endlessly motivated, not by a desire to become stronger or faster, but by my own consuming need to be thin and to be better than other people who could run, too. Every time I’d see someone else I knew sharing their finishing time on Facebook or their bib number on Instagram, I’d seethe. If they could do it, I could do it.

What do you call FOMO that isn’t based on missing out, but rather, feeling inferior?

In my mid-20s, I began setting out on Saturday mornings, regardless of the weather, and running around Lake Union, around Capitol Hill, around Downtown. I’d get stoned sometimes and take the bus to a large expanse of grass and trees and trails and take a lazy, dreamlike jog. I wrote about running for my job, I received free shoes from running companies, I read Runner’s World. I lost a toenail.

Finally, I ran my first double-digit distance while training for a half-marathon. I was finally almost a real runner! I texted my dad to tell him. I was so proud.

Shortly thereafter, the pain the in ball of my foot, which I’d been ignoring until one long run followed by a longer night in heels, would become too much to bear and I’d visit a sports medicine doctor who’d tell me, grimacing at the x-rays, that it was a stress fracture and I needed to stay off it.

Sustaining an injury from running felt like a badge of honor in and of itself; I’d run so much that my feet had literally given out from under me. But it was not. My injury wasn’t a symptom of becoming stronger or even becoming a better runner, but rather, becoming less of a person.

My bones were weakened from years of struggling with an eating disorder (which, unsurprisingly, was at its worst when I was running the most because I also believed that Good People don’t eat much) and I was forced into a rather unflattering air-boot and some time off the treadmill and the road.

I subsequently gained weight, lost momentum, lost progress, and stopped running for over a year. I resigned myself to being a Bad Person again.

During that time, the Instagram posts continued. People training. People completing races. People pushing themselves to new distances that I couldn’t even fathom. Without the miracle crutch of running, I felt entirely worthless.

What I have come to realize, through writing and therapy and yes, even a bit of running (and ballet, and weight-lifting, and yoga) post-injury is that I had moralized running to turn it into the action which symbolized every piece of myself that I was insecure about, every one of the worst things I believed were true about me (and everything).

Short. Poor. Chubby. Slow. Undisciplined. Lazy.

For entirely too long, I held toxic, harmful beliefs about thinness, discipline, and morality. So when I believed that running would make me a better person, the actual locus of that is my belief that being thin would make me a better person and that running would make me thin.

Never mind the fact that there are plenty of much better, more swift, more accomplished runners than I who are not thin, or the fact that there’s actually no such thing as a “runner’s body” other than “a body belonging to someone who runs.” I’d swallowed any number of stereotypes about the human body—mostly inwardly turned, though many of those same commonly-held beliefs have real-life consequences—and they sat inside of me like a rock.

At no point would I ever have consciously said that I believed thin people were better people — but now I am can see repulsively clearly that I definitely kind of thought that.

My thinking was as such:

• It takes discipline to do something you don’t want to do for longer than you want to do it (like running a long distance instead of sleeping in or playing with the dog or even doing a kind of exercise you actually like, which I’ll get back to later).
• Thus, it takes discipline to do things that make you thin.
• Thus, it takes discipline to be thin.
• Thus, I must develop and exude discipline so that all of my dreams may come true.

It is uncomfortable and shameful to admit every single one of these points. But, like my sense of smell and my ability to feel the shoes around my feet, they felt baked into my experience of being a person.

And therein was the true moral center of my believe that running was the highest achievement, the most impressive, the acme of human accomplishment. I wanted to run because I wanted to be thin.

And with thinness, I thought, came everything else.

It’s not as if, though, this magnificently upsetting understanding of the world sprung from my own mind or heart, either; socially, anti-fat bias is well-documented and starts alarmingly early. Weight is also often conflated with laziness and a lack of discipline, both in personal beliefs and in pop culture—which can even impact the earning potential of larger people.

Both implicitly and explicitly, we (as a society) actively attach ideas about thinness to ideas about success and financial stability. And for years, I believed it.

If I could just be a runner, I was convinced, I would finally achieve my ultimate goal of thinness. If I could just get that part of it figured out, everything else would shake out, too. My baseline, my foundation, needed to be A Person Who Can Run A Long Distance Somewhat Effortlessly And Enjoy It because that would also assuage my insatiable need to be proving myself to myself (and the world).

I didn’t enjoy it. It didn’t make me stronger. It didn’t clear my head.

But I continued to do it — I have run hundreds, if not thousands of miles — because being a runner was something I thought would make me a better person. And when it failed to do so, I did it anyway.

The truth is, I still run. I went for a run yesterday. I go about every other week now, for short distances (about a 5k), mostly to please my Fitbit. It’s much more common that you’ll find me going to yoga (which I enjoy and am fairly okay at), ballet (which I enjoy and am terrible at), or the gym for weights (which I enjoy and am getting better at every day). I don’t do any of these things to be more impressive or even to get thinner; I just want to be able to lift heavy things, move gracefully, and feel powerful.

Every time someone posts a bib on Instagram, though, a small string is plucked somewhere inside of me and I think oh, I should start adding distance again. I should go back to 10ks. I should go back to training for a half.

Because we really do play up the fact that running is an absolute. That running long distances is what Good People do.

And it’s not as if running is somehow not impressive. Pushing the body to cover miles and miles, well past the point of exhaustion, is an exceptionally difficult and empowering thing to do for a lot of people.

But it is not the best thing any human being can ever do. Because every human being is different and every human being doesn’t have to run a fucking marathon to be the best version of themselves and I can’t believe it took me almost 30 years to get that.

We attach moral purity and to any number of behaviors, traits, professions, measurements, and body types.

We tell ourselves that doing this one thing will somehow create a cascade of positive effects.

We sweat and pant and cough and hack and vomit just to be able to share it on Twitter and make other people say “wow, they managed to run consecutively for two hours without pooping their pants, they must also be great at literally every other facet of their lives.”

Running still makes me feel accomplished, and I like to use it as a way to measure the strength I’m gaining from my other pursuits. And on a nice day, a lap around the lake really can set the tone for a sunny weekend.

But I’m not spending an hour on a treadmill anymore just to feel like it will somehow make me kinder, smarter, or more valued at my job. Just because we link those things in our brains doesn’t mean they’re threaded in the real world.

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Running Didn’t Make Me A Better Person was originally published in The Slant on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here is a fact: Lefties can point out the Donald’s hypocrisies, lies, Russian ties, sexual assault allegations, weird relationship with his incredibly mediocre daughter, and general lack of any semblance of cogent thought until our faces turn even more blue and, as long as people think he’s going to lower their taxes, they’ll continue to support him.

It was apparent after his address to Congress, it was apparent as he’s waffled about Jeff Sessions, and it has been apparent for months.

The truth of the matter is that to a lot of voters, foreign collusion, treason, ICE raids, bomb threats at community centers, and even racially motivated gun violence by radical white terrorists (YEAH I SAID IT) don’t matter if it means they will be able to keep a few hundred dollars a year in their pocket.

That said, it also doesn’t seem matter that Donald Trump’s plans may not actually even lower taxes for a lot of Americans, or that the dollar amount will be negligible if he does.

Trump: 'I'm smart' for not paying taxes

And it doesn’t matter that the wealthiest folks in this country (like Trump) have been able to gett a screaming deal on taxes for ages (because of breaks, loopholes, capital gains, and a million other reasons) are the ones who stand to benefit the most from Trump’s plan, rather than the voters who supported Trump on the basis of lower taxes.

Note: 51% of Trump's tax cuts go to the top 1%; only 0.8% go to the bottom 20% #JointSession

 — @SteveRattner

From Forbes:

According to the TPC, of the $6.2 trillion in cuts, the richest 1% will enjoy 47% of those cuts, or nearly $3 trillion over ten years. The middle class, however — should we choose to define it as those taxpayers in the wealthiest 20% to 80% of the population, would receive only 20% of the tax cuts combined.

It doesn’t matter that $6.2 trillion in revenue will disappear from the tax base as wealthy folks pocket the equivalent of a downpayment on a house, because Trump supporters know that the average earner will see a reduction in their own tax bill of between $100 and $1000 and that is good news, period, full-stop.

But of course it is not. Because taxes and the economy are not that simple and because tax cuts—regardless of who they’re for—are not the magical balm that supporters believe them to be.

See, because many of the people who are crossing their fingers for lower taxes only even think about taxes once each year in April.

Most of the time, aside from daily interactions with sales tax, when they vote, and the occasional peek at a pay stub, folks rarely think about tax dollars. They don’t think about what they do, where they go, or how we pay them. Then, some time in the spring, they file and either get a check back (yay!) or have to pay The Man (boo!).

And that’s about it. Which is evident in the rhetoric around what Donald Trump says he plans to do; first he’ll lower taxes, then he’ll do a bunch of other stuff that his constituents are expecting, like building a wall and deporting everyone and throwing money at the military.

This is because we tend to compartmentalize the economy, or think of the economy as a separate entity, away from our lives and all of the things we like and want.

It’s also because taxes have largely been spun as an unnecessary evil. For decades, voters have been fed the idea that tax cuts are necessarily beneficial, and that by reducing the taxes that people pay — whether they’re regular earners who stand to see maybe a $400 or so reduction or they’re in the top percent and will see a tax break the size of an average teacher’s salary — we’ll increase the money they spend and the jobs they create.

Tax cuts, the Pauls Ryan on the world believe, means more liquidity, which means fewer problems. When taxes are cut, the government will just have to deal with it and do more with less.

However.

Many of our most pressing societal issues don’t have anything to do with people paying too many taxes or with the government being excessively irresponsible with tax dollars. Instead, many of our issues have to do with our inability or unwillingness to spend the extra money upfront to take preventative action to keep from paying later down the road.

A tax cut doesn’t mean the government will tighten its belt; it just means that someone will have less money to solve problems with, and most likely, it’ll be really fucking expensive later on.

Let’s take this one step at a time.

To increase defense spending (which, let’s be real, we don’t need to do) and also pay for things like the wall and lower taxes for Americans (because lowering your taxes costs money), Trump has suggested cuts to departments like the EPA.

Many voters would shrug at that, because like, whatever, the environment doesn’t put dinner on the table (it does) or impact me (it does) or maybe the EPA should just do a better job with less money (it can’t, really). According to Money, the cuts wouldn’t actually save Americans a whole lot of cash:

Multiple reports suggest President Trump will soon propose cutting the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by about 25% — from $8.1 billion down to $6.1 billion.

With the U.S. population at about 324 million, Trump’s proposed cuts would bring the EPA’s yearly costs down from $25 per American to $18.81 per American.

About half of the EPA’s budget goes to programs which ensure clean and safe water across the country through corporate compliance and actual infrastructure, which means that’s probably where the cuts would come from.

…But hey, lower taxes, right? Kind of! Except for that it’s really expensive when departments like the EPA aren’t fully funded and we all pay for it.

An August, 2016 study found that the social cost of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (which is still ongoing, by the way) is close to $400M—and that just takes into account the long-term net impacts of lead poisoning in children. It doesn’t account for the lost productivity of adults caring for kids or the environmental cost of reliance on bottled water. And that crisis impacted just 100,000 people.

Now imagine it on a national scale. Now imagine if it wasn’t just lead in the water, but other pollutants. Now imagine another BP oil spill. Now imagine if, because Trump has also reduced regulations, the company which causes a $62B spill isn’t even in violation of the law and anyway, the watchdog who’s supposed to protect the environment is more into coal and oil, anyway.

Because this is the cost of lowering your taxes a few hundred dollars while also expecting a $10 billion wall and a historically high budget for defense: The things that gets cut doesn’t disappear without a trace.

The money in our economy is kind of like energy; it never goes away, it just becomes something else. A wick doesn’t disappear. It becomes a flame and gives off heat.

Here are a few other quick examples of the transfers that happen when we cut the things that Trump wants to cut to make room for your lower taxes:

— Cutting the ACA→ poor people rely on the ER → we pay for that through government grants to nonprofit hospitals, public health issues due to lack of preventative care, and our own insurance premiums.

— Paying for the wall (that most people don’t want) with taxes or tariffs which disproportionately impact Latinx families and those in Mexico → economic situation becomes more dire both for Latinx families here and in Mexico → we pay for that through increased cost of goods, increased social services, poor trade deals, lower productivity among the workforce, loss of money exchange in local economies.

Trump Could Really Mess Up Mexico's Economy

—Privatizing education / cutting public ed spending → increasing the achievement gap → trapping low-income students in a lifetime of low paying jobs → lifelong dependence on social services

— Also privatizing education / cutting public ed spending → reducing quality of food served in public schools → increased occurrences of obesity, diabetes, cancer among free- and reduced-lunch kids → shorter lifespan, increased public health cost

— Cutting the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services → hundreds of fewer jobs nationwide, including police officers and training to reduce violence → fewer police generally, more incidents of officer-involved violence → lawsuits, increased crime, death

And the list goes on.

Just because tax expenditures are unpopular doesn’t mean they’re ineffective, or that we can cut them and hope they’ll go away. Reducing the teen pregnancy rate has never been achieved through abstinence-only education, but it has been achieved through comprehensive sex ed and providing young people with prophylactics.

And similarly, just because a tax expenditure is popular doesn’t mean it works; there are a thousand misconceptions about the program known as “welfare,” but the truth is that many states spend almost none of the dollars allocated to them on programs which actually offer cash or food assistance.

Lots of voters will consider Donald Trump a successful leader, pussy-grabbing be damned, if, next April, they pay slightly less money at the end of the year or get a credit they didn’t qualify for before. However, don’t be surprised if those same people are railing about the poor quality of schools, the potholes in their roads, the poisoned water in their pipes, and the lack of policemen on the beat that came as a result.

Because even if the man does lower your taxes just a little, the money won’t simply slip out of the government’s paws and into your pocket. Give it some time and you’ll be paying for it in spades.

Sorry, but Trump is Not Going to Lower Your Taxes was originally published in Civic Skunk Works on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But it’s not. It’s for us.

Here is an oddly specific memory about my first encounter with the idea of patriotism. My grandparents have come to visit from California in a rented RV; I’m very small, maybe four or five, and have only met them at a time before I could remember. They come, like good grandparents, bearing gifts.

Among them is a pencil that they give to my brother. It has the print of Old Glory and a picture of a bald eagle on it. My brother, who watches a lot of GI Joe and voraciously reads about war history, is happy to receive it, saying something along the lines of (to my child’s memory, anyway) “I’m proud to live in the U.S. of A.”

I don’t get it at the time. And in fact, I don’t get it for years. I join my first political campaign at 13, fighting a ballot initiative that would have prohibited teachers from even mentioning homosexuality in schools. In the 8th grade, I sit down during the Pledge of Allegiance because I don’t agree with No Child Left Behind or the requirement to say “under God.” I walk out of my high school to protest the Iraq war. I wear a button with a coat-hanger on it that says “Never Again.” I wear black the day after George W. Bush is re-elected.

Everything I found myself fighting for as a young liberal was deemed unpatriotic. It was patriotic, the opposition said, to “defend the sanctity of marriage.” It was patriotic, they said, to be “pro-life.” It was patriotic to grant religious liberty to Christians and it was patriotic to try to restrict the rights and movements of Muslims. And it was definitely patriotic, they said, to errantly invade nations, kill innocent civilians, and send a generation of young people into combat zones from which they would never recover.

Patriotism was saluting the flag but patriotism was also gladly handing over unwieldy governmental control in the name of 60 words with a catchy title. Patriotism was being pro-military, regardless of the cost, and pro-police, regardless of the glaring problems. Patriotism was fireworks on the Fourth of July and Toby Keith saying that putting a boot in someone’s ass is the “American way.”

It wasn’t until I cast my first ballot for President and danced in the streets of Bellingham after Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech that I ever truly felt a sense of patriotism. Patriotism, in that moment (and since then) was doing the right thing by the biggest number of people.

Patriotism was saying “yes we can” and meaning it.

In its purest meaning, patriotism is simply “an vigorous support for one’s country.” But that’s not how it’s been defined colloquially and, I think, that has put American politics at a disadvantage.

I came late to my sense of patriotism because for a very long time I was made to believe that the right to take pride in my country was owned solely by the Republican party and that feeling that pride was inextricable from conservative and religious ideologies. Whereas I always believed that the nation—and my community—could be more inclusive and more equitable, I didn’t believe that was actually what patriotism meant because so many people who used the word did not want that.

I was shown and told in no small number of ways that supporting and loving the United States meant slowing its progress, restricting access to its wealth, tightening its borders, and retaining a white-knuckle grip on its systems of oppression that were baked in from the beginning and have never been dismantled.

And you’d better be damn sure that that’s by design.

It is a clever linguistic and mental trick to tell a person that the constructions which keep them at bay are in their best interest; that enormous defense spending is patriotic while higher taxes on the wealthy to fund schools which will empower children with the power to think critically is not. And that if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

I am with this flawed, uneven, messy country because I believe that there is a foundation we can build on and because I believe that people are good and can do good.

And I have arrived at this belief honestly; I’m a class-ascender and the first in my family to graduate from university. Because of a combination of privilege, luck, love, and work, this nation afforded me—a public school free lunch kid who lived on a dirt road, who comes from generations of poor people, thieves, migrant workers, immigrants, Native Americans, Mexican revolutionaries, and Californios—the American Dream is within reach.

I’m a #ProudPatriot because we got ourselves into this mess and we have to be our own heroes now.

I’m a #ProudPatriot because I think giving up is a cynical thing to do and fuck cynicism.

And I’m a #ProudPatriot because I refuse to let patriotism be owned by voices and parties who stunt our country with self-centered, self-serving policies that exclude people.

Patriotism is, I think, a kind of optimism; it’s loving and supporting your country even when you know it’s flawed because you expect more. And it’s being willing to do what it takes to fix the problem not by going backward, but by going forward. Opening the doors to power to those who have traditionally be kept out has never made an institution weaker; like mending with gold, it makes it stronger.

Patriotism is not, as I thought for a very long time, a pencil or a flag or a country song about racism; it is the determination we feel to keep going and keep growing.

Dear young person,

First let me say that this applies regardless of your gender and the gender of the person you love. Know that people of all genders may experience this, especially in youth but not just then.

However, there is a particular pattern of cis white girls who date cis white boys whose political views “don’t match.” Except it’s not that their political views don’t match. It’s that his views exist in a framework wherein you are less of a person, with less agency, less competency, and less a nuanced inner life.

This dates back to the pre-Trump days, but has been exacerbated in the era of white nationalism, Pepe, and the guy that got punched. Young white men are finding themselves intoxicated by toxic masculinity and they are grasping at political ideologies that are not simply “controversial” but are, in fact, potentially dangerous and damaging. And it’s ok to note that and act accordingly.

Many of us are conditioned to believe that true tolerance is the ability to stomach and even politely nod along with opinions that are different from our own and that, in doing so, we are making the world a more harmonious place. Young women, especially, are groomed to acquiesce in moments of disagreement.

Never is this more true that when the person you love, as a young person, has what appear to be fully-formed and forceful opinions about politics, current events, and ideologies.

We disagreed on almost everything, but that’s what made him interesting. I started to see the actual human person behind the vote leave badge, something I’d never tried to do before.

After they got over the initial shock of our ‘opposites attract’ relationship, the main reaction to him from my friends and family has been baffled amusement. Upon meeting him for the first time, one of my closest friends, who’s bisexual, got into an argument with him after he claimed her sexuality didn’t exist. Despite this, they’re now both good friends.

—“What happens when you’re a feminist and you fall in love with a Trump supporter”

But young person, I want to say this clearly and without mincing words: You are not required to abide by “political opinions” which question or demean your humanity and in fact, you should not.

“Agree to disagree” reads the now-viral tweet that features the girl in the Nasty Woman shirt with the rainbow flag beside the boy in a Make America Great Again hat and the Meninist crewneck. Click through to see that his Twitter timeline is full of retweets of Tomi Lahren monologues and statements about “Merica.” The girl in the picture is not, as many have assumed, his girlfriend—but that doesn’t change the story that the picture tells much. She is his friend and she is complicit. And anyway, his girlfriend isn’t difficult to find. Her timeline is absent of politics, but peppered with single-line tweets like “i hate that i get soo upset about the little things” and “i’m so dumb” and “i hate how sensitive i can get.”

Of course I don’t know these girls, but in a way I kind of do because I was this girl. And what I needed to hear was that this is not the default.

You don’t need to bend to fit this. This is not good for you. You don’t need this.

There was no Twitter when I was your age, young person, but there were plenty of other ways for lonely, isolated young men to find and cling to ideologies that demeaned others.

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.

 — @sonofbaldwin

“Fuck feminism,” one partner said to me in his car. “Women are fine. Women are already equal. Feminism makes it harder for men to get into college. It makes it harder to get a job. It’s not fair.”

“Equal rights, equal fights,” he’d joke. One of his favorite other jokes was the one about the woman with two black eyes. He told it to me more than twice.

A budding feminist myself, his aggressive disagreement with my understanding of the world—and really, with me and my experience—made me a bit smaller and, more than that, stopped my own concrete ideologies from taking root.

It would be years until I could become more vocal, more sure, and more motivated. His voice was often in my head—a privilege he didn’t deserve.

Because a man who believes he has been victimized by feminism—which, again, is simply the belief in and pursuit of genders equity—doesn’t simply disagree with you. He disagrees with the idea of you as an equal partner. He disagrees with your lived experience.

Bad news: Dating or marrying a woman isn’t a get-out-of-sexism-free card. The most brutally misogynist men often date, marry and claim to love women. Most of the same men who opposed women’s rights to vote, who wrote laws insuring that it was legal to rape your wife and who barred women from colleges and universities were married to women. Most women who are murdered are killed by men with whom they are currently or formerly romantically involved — men who often claim to love them.
—Why You Should Dump That Trump Supporter

And young person, I can tell you from experience: If he doesn’t believe you when you say you need feminism, when you say that a President who is an alleged sexual predator is not who you want leading the country, when you say that you support inclusion and true acceptance—he certainly won’t believe you or trust you in other areas of the world.

Donald J. Trump is, unequivocally, a misogynist. He has shown, time and again, that he fundamentally lacks respect for women. His personality is, dare I say, deplorable—but that’s what so many of his supporters, with their latent sexism, like about him.

And he is, like so many abusers, coming into the lives and feeds of teen girls when they are most vulnerable; depression among young women is up significantly, in large part due to the exact kind of negativity that Trump embodies. Intimate partner violence is fairly common in young couples—about 20% of girls in hetero teen couples report experiencing it—and it is much less likely to be reported if an abuser is also emotionally manipulative.

If you’re experiencing violence in your relationship, there are resources:

Loveisrespect | empowering youth to end dating abuse

When he undermines you for your political views (he seems so sure! He knows so much about it! He’s spent so much time on the message boards!) it’s much harder to know when you’re right about anything.

And young person, you are right: You are right about gender equity. You are right about a President whose ideology is so clearly rooted in hate. You’re right about inclusion and intersectionality and whatever else he’s tried to argue about. But you are not right if you think you have to stay with him. You are not right if you believe that all men are like that.

A partner who voted for and continues to support a candidate who undermines your humanity does not respect your humanity.

It’s important, too, to remember what a privilege it is to “agree to disagree,” young (probably) white feminist. Your peers who are more marginalized bear the brunt of your connivance. Continuing to date someone who undermines you (and them) tacitly permits these views to exist.

You are not being a good ally.

If you’re worried you’ll never find one such partner, young person, don’t forget that Trump supporters are in the minority.

This isn’t to say you must only date those who share your views exactly; you don’t need to align on every issue (especially those that are truly political). But do date someone who doesn’t embrace an ideology (and a candidate) that actively reduces you.

Young person, there are people in the world (of all genders!) who not only agree with your political views, but agree with your fundamental belief that you are a human being who is worth loving. There are people in the world that you can be in a relationship with who don’t make you feel like you’re “too sensitive” for getting upset over an executive order, who don’t need to be asked not to call refugees “illegals,” and who will support you in your various causes.

In short, young person, I hope you at least remember this: Don’t fuck someone whose political actions could fuck you.