The Pigeon

So for reasons unknown (why does the YouTube algorithm do anything?), my YouTube shorts have given me a pair of videos of fans concerned about her health. And I am begging you:

If she is giving health or diet advice to fans, please do not follow it.

I don't know the whole story here. According to these two fans, she started appearing unwell during the Wicked press tour. The photos and videos I just saw of her current tour demonstrate a serious deterioration since then.

When my mom was in her teens, there was a singer named Karen Carpenter. She developed anorexia, and at her lowest weight reached 83 pounds. She was actually in recovery and had gotten back up to 108 pounds when her heart simply couldn't stand the strain anymore, and she suffered a fatal heart attack. She was 32 years old.

Karen and Ariana have very similar builds. I've seen photos of Karen at her lowest weight.

Ariana looks worse.

Let's be clear: I am saying she looks sicker and in an even more advanced state of anorexia than a woman who weighed the same as a ten-year-old child. This is not normal weight loss. This isn't even "slightly too much" weight loss. This is the point where I very gently tell you all that you may need to prepare yourselves for her to die if nobody steps in to help her. When I saw these images I first wondered if she was trying to perform through late-stage cancer.

She is extremely ill, and it's not her fault. Nobody wakes up one day and says "I think I want to hate my body so much that I'll let it eat me from the inside out for lack of calories." If anyone is to blame here, it's the people around her who may have pressured her to this point and certainly aren't stepping in to help her. She deserves compassion and care.

But something both of these fans mentioned is that when they expressed concern, other fans accused them of body-shaming and asking how dare they speak about other women's bodies. And that is dangerous. Because there's an ocean of difference between "ugh, eat a cheeseburger" and "someone please help her, she's a human being, not a freakshow, and this isn't right," and that difference matters because she is a role model to so many young women. You need to be able to say "she doesn't deserve judgement, but she is unwell."

Ariana Grande is extremely sick, and that sickness is in her brain but is affecting her in a viscerally physical way, and if you look to her as an inspiration I am asking you to please, please understand you can love her music and the version of herself that she puts forward to you without emulating it. Do not assume she's giving good nutritional or exercise advice right now. She is not in a good headspace to be doing so.

I hope for her sake that she has a moment of clarity and enters recovery. I hope it's not too late for her, the way it was for Karen Carpenter. I don't say any of this to wish ill on her or her fans. But I do say it because I know how many of her fans are teenagers. And I don't want to see anyone take her illness as a good thing.

Talk about it. Don't shame. But do be aware. If you see troubling signs in yourself or your friends--obsessive calorie-counting, talking about "deserving" food or "punishing" yourself for eating--please seek help. I've never had full-on anorexia, but I did have an eating disorder as a teen, and it can sneak up on you and have lifelong effects.

Watercolor Mikus!

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.