fucking headmates can't agree on a blog title

If you start ballet at 16, you are too old to ever expect to be able to do it seriously. If you start at 12 you’re too old. If you want to do ballet as a serious thing, as a career, you need to start at like eight years old or even younger, because your bones and joints need to be trained while they’re still flexible in order for you to be able to perform many of the required motions and stances of ballet. In particular, you need to be able to perform turnout of the hips, but all of your joints in your legs and feet will be affected, and this irreversibly changes your body.

And yet! Nobody talks about this as a negative thing! Little girls say they want to be ballet dancers, and if their parents have enough money, that’s what they get to be! Does it cause problems in later life? Yeah, sometimes! Often, even! But nobody talks about that because it’s a thing for cis people to do and so naturally it’s all fine!

By the time I was done dancing at age 18, I had been through physical therapy for 3 separate issues caused by ballet. The worst one was because of how my hips and muscles developed and it cause discomfort in my knees so bad that I couldn’t walk very far without pain, much less climb stairs. One time at a pt session, a neighboring patient, who was elderly, said I was “too young to be here”. I was in middle school so I rolled my eyes. It was/is funny to me.

I am 23 now, and I still get stiff in some places, and I’m sure it is related to dancing as a kid. I snap, crackle, and pop like Rice Krispies.

I have no regrets because ballet and was a big part of my life. I just know that it will have long term effects on my body and there is nothing I can do to change it.

WOAH. I- whuh… my ceiling :(…

Me 1 day later: I need to be left alone to gather the pieces of Me together

but in my experience 95% of my hallucinations are getting spooked by very clearly hearing someone knocking on my door or calling my name from another room or hearing footsteps walking behind me which are "just" my brain recreating the horror of an abusive childhood

(not trying to put you on blast specifically, you're just a good example to jump off of)

media and pop culture hypes up psychosis a lot as The Worst That Can Happen out of sanism, so even when you try and filter that cultural bias out you still assume it's based on something

when, no, psychosis is actually very simple: it's just hyperactive pattern matching. it's your brain's signal-to-noise ratio being off balance, it's seeing images in random static. it's not always this special uniquely big thing, it's in fact quite mundane a lot of the time.

no one is immune to psychosis, it's not purely the realm of the insane. anyone is one bad night of sleep or one bad case of food poisoning or one bad fever away from being just like me on my worst days.

What they did have was a single spare bed in the small, comfortable, quiet, wildly expensive facility for girls with eating disorders.

They asked each of the young women currently living there if it was acceptable that I might occupy a bed in one of the rooms for a while, just the long weekend while I was waiting for a doctor's evaluation. I hadn't been violent, I had gone with the cops without putting up any fight at all, and I was still and I was small and all those things were sufficient for me to be deemed safe. So up they sent me, to somewhere high in Western Psych, above the smells and sounds of the denser-packed wards, above where the care workers were harried and frustrated, to a gentle space with seven or eight young women in it.

I was five foot three, and I weighed about 115 pounds. I was underweight for my frame, as a fair amount of that weight was martial arts muscle; I would probably have been ten pounds heavier if I were healthy, with the amount of activity I got.

I was at least two inches shorter than pretty much every other young woman there, six or seven inches shorter than one of them, and I had at least thirty pounds on several of them. The tallest was not allowed to walk, she had to sit in a wheelchair and be pushed around, because her condition was so advanced that the motion would undo what good her hard work had done.

And over the course of the four or five days I was there, multiple of them came up to me alone to quietly tell me that I had the *perfect* body, and they wished they could be as skinny as I was. That I needed to live, because I was beautiful, and if they were as beautiful as I was, they wouldn't need to be here.

Their eyes were on me all the time, in the hours that I wasn't sleeping. I spent a lot of time sleeping, and we took our meals separately (I not needing to be monitored while I ate, and not having my food weighed), but we spent a fair amount of time sitting around in the little shared living room space, talking about movies and magazines and books we'd loved, talking about our families. I didn't talk about my family; they didn't pry.

They were all so fucking nice.

And I could have broken any one of them over my narrow knee. They each thought they were bigger than I was.

Their brains lied to them, every time they looked at a mirror. Every time they looked down at their own thighs. What they saw was not what I could see. They had bright, beautiful eyes in dark hollows, and I could count their vertebrae, could see their ribs winging when they breathed, could see the motion of every tendon on the backs of their hands.

They weren't celebrities. They weren't being paid to have particular bodies, nor were they deep in the toxic sea of having strangers take photos of them to sell to gossip rags if they stepped out of doors in old jeans. They had families and loved ones who were doing everything that they could to protect them, to uplift them and help them be healthy. They were just everyday people--a nurse, a couple of students, a couple of recent college grads, a young woman who had decided it was time to really get help because she wanted to be a mother--and still they'd been so injured by the neverending fucking deluge of body-image bullshit that they were dying of it.