When Our Stories Are Ugly

When Our Stories are Ugly

By Sam J. Miller

When Our Stories are Ugly #ownvoices as a weapon against internalized oppression

When I started to tell my story, I knew that there would be trouble. 

Months before my debut novel The Art of Starving came out, people were upset about it. They saw the synopsis and said it romanticized eating disorders. My protagonist, Matt, is a bullied small-town gay boy with an eating disorder (all of which I was) who believes that starving himself awakened latent supernatural abilities. 

Eating disorder superpowers? Yeah, I get how that sounds problematic. 

But the fact is, that was my experience. I didn’t get superpowers, but my eating disorder made me feel powerful. In control of something. I had absorbed so much hate and fear and toxic masculinity that they were the only weapons I had. And when the demons came - and they came every day - they were what I had to work with. 

This is not an uncommon response. Many other survivors I’ve spoken with have shared a similar experience. I get emails all the time, from eating disorder survivors who have read the book and felt validated for the first time.

#ownvoices can get ugly, because our stories can be ugly. It isn’t all pride and power. And the pride and the power, if we’re fortunate enough to arrive at them, come from the ugliness. From what we’ve been through. From our ability to survive.  

When we tell the truth about who we are and what we’ve been through, not everyone will like it. Adults may think that young people need to be shielded from these ugly truths, as if hiding from horror will make it disappear. Angie C. Thomas’s brilliant The Hate U Give was just banned in a Texas school district, allegedly for sexual content - when there is literally zero sex in the book - when obviously what they were really upset about was how brilliantly the book brought to life the pain and power of a young Black woman fighting back against police brutality. And young people, even ones from our own communities, might prefer not to explore these issues up close. Especially if they’ve been through something similar. They might find these discussions triggering. I have tons of love and support and respect for eating disorder survivors and others struggling with body image issues, who have to take a step back from this book. I have less respect for the grown-up gatekeepers who think that the way to help young people survive into adulthood is to pretend their pain does not exist. 

My protagonist, Matt, is damaged. He’s been traumatized by constant physical and emotional abuse, and the crippling impact of patriarchy. He’s full of hate and anger and shame. He’s also smart and funny and full of love. We’re complicated people - all of us. Like Matt, I had internalized so much toxic masculinity - even as I rejected heteronormativity and embraced my queerness - that my rage took the form of violence. And when I couldn’t turn it on others, I turned it on myself. 

Queer youth are especially susceptible to having complicated and painful body image issues, because we often grow up in a space where there is nobody to tell us we’re beautiful, nobody to fall in love with our minds. We’re having crushes on people that are not reciprocated. We’re being made to feel ugly and awkward and unwanted. That can be crippling. Some of these issues can last a long time. And then you grow up and enter a broader gay culture which is just as obsessed with a certain idea of masculinity and a certain type of body. 

The power of #ownvoices stories to challenge is massive. With The Art of Starving, I wanted to confront the stigma and shame that so many young queer people are living with. I wanted to tell them how awesome they are. How I was there, once, sunk deep in misery and suicidal ideation and (sometimes) bloodthirsty rage, and eventually came out the other end of it being proud and happy and thanking the gods every day that they made me gay. But if someone had told me that then, I wouldn’t have believed them. I’d have assumed they were like every other adult, a complete idiot who didn’t understand me and therefore had nothing to teach me. 

So when I started to tell this story, I knew that I had to honor the darkness that many young people experience. I get that some people won’t want to deal with it.. But it would have been dishonest of me to say “you’re awesome!” without acknowledging the pain folks feel. 

If there’s a message to my book, it’s this: You are beautiful, you are magnificent, no matter what you look like. And if you are having complicated feelings about who you are and what you look like and what people think of you, that’s not weird or unheard of. Respect the darkness, but know that you are so much more.

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His debut novel The Art of Starving (YA/SF) was published by HarperCollins in 2017, and will be followed by Blackfish City from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “year’s best” anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He lives in New York City, and at www.samjmiller.com

The Art of Starving is available for purchase.

One thing I love about cabaret (the movie), is how it understands privilege better than a lot of people nowadays. Like, yes, the cabaret making fun of the Nazis is unequivocally a good thing, but while they're putting on shows and laughing with the crowd, the Jewish lady who lives down the street has to hide in her home while the Nazis are chanting "Juden!" Outside and leaving the corpse of her dog on the stairs, and she can't really join the fun, can she? And it doesn't mean they're doing something wrong, this is just how power disparities work, and we should at least be aware of that.

Do it for the "I'm proud of you" from everyone who loves you.

So... Just watched inside out 2 in the theaters. Where's the fanfic in which ennui one day decides to suck out all the control out of the other emotions' control board, doesn't allow them to touch Riley, because under ennui's control, there's no more energy left for any other emotion, and she's not willing to give the control up, and so she locks herself in an impenetrable bubble and makes Riley constantly exhausted and unfeeling to the point of misery, until the place where she brought Riley into makes the bubble impossible, even for her, to unlock?

So, like... To the Tumblr people who got into ana/mia as a form of self harm, judge their "how sick are you REALLY" status by the number on the scale and are also into the sandman/dead boy detectives:

Despair is the fucking goddess of pain. She understands torturing yourself better than any other being in the universe, she UNDERSTANDS why it gives you a feeling of power to try and chase out the emptiness with more emptiness until you can't see hope anymore. And she doesn't look like fucking thinspo. She doesn't look like regal queen ana. She isn't skinny. She's fat. Because why wouldn't she be? There are so many people who are self destructive and miserable and also overweight, what the fuck is stopping her from being that?

If the fucking goddess of pain can look, not like a 19th century tortured starving artist or like an emaciated goth with no joy left in their eyes, but like a middle-aged fat woman in baggy clothes who sometimes cuts herself to feel something, then your pain is not any less fucking valid if you look more like her than like those fake, imagined thinspo images.

Recovery from your ed won't mean you aren't sick, or miserable, or struggling. I'm not even telling you to get your life and mind together, I know you might really not be in a position to do that. But these disorders could cause damage to you body down the line that there will NEVER be a way out of. (And that's besides the point, but this also applies to drug abuse, so just keep that in mind. Despair of the endless would visit millions of people, every day, who don't need a drug addiction to see her. NOT ALL the cool mentally ill kids are doing this, and neither would you have to to be one of them.) Recovering from the shit that fucks up your body to the point where you can't use it later, will only make it less and less hard for you to get back to the way things were, to when you were able to feel joy and not worry all day every day, one day when you will be ready to try and make your way there.

I'm in recovery now. I've stopped purging, I no longer restrict to the point where I barely have the energy to function. I got out before my body got irreversibly damaged- not that it would matter if I wouldn't have, because this shit can always get worse and you can always put the line as high or as low as you want. And despair still visits me every day, and the misery she brings with her is still real, I haven't suddenly gotten fixed and replaced with a mentally healthy version of myself that doesn't get to complain, I'm STILL SUFFERING, but at least now I A), know that the validity of that doesn't depend on a fucking number, so at least I've got that off my mind, and B), when I will eventually get better and want to, like... Be a functional person, I'll have a body waiting for me to live that happy life through, that will be able to help me with it better than it would have if I kept going. I don't really want to get better just yet, but I do want to want to get better, and one day when I actually will, I'll at least know that my pain on the way there was fucking valid and deserved fucking treatment. Because it always does. Pain always makes you worthy of help against it, no matter what it looks like. Just remember that, and try to stick to the stuff that still leaves the window open for happiness in the future.

Will wood is like if cavetown was David Bowie.