Introduction
Chapter 1
Head, Shoulders, Knees, And Toes
Scoliosis, Spinal Fusion, and Stomach Punches
by Rachael Lippincott
The Body That Betrayed Me
by Eugene Grant
Do You Know About…?
by Eugene Grant
Body Talk FAQs: What are the best terms to use for disabled people?
The Politics of Hair
by Jerlyn M. Thomas
And It’s Fine
by Kati Gardner
Body Talk FAQs: What does accessibility mean?
Embrace Your Booty
by Tyra Banks and Carolyn London
Chapter 2
On The Surface
The Ghosts of Christmas Past, or When the Angel Learned to Shave
by Eric Smith
Sixty-Four Teeth
by Sara Saedi
Flock
by Kelly Bastow
Not by the Hair on My Chinny Chin Chin
by Kelly Jensen
Body Talk FAQs: How and why do tattoos stay on our skin?
Visible Scar Club
by D. M. Moehrle
Marked at Birth
by Libby VanderPloeg
Chapter 3
Cosmic Forms
Fifty Swimsuits
by Julie Murphy
My Body, My Feelings
by Patricia S. Elzie
Body Talk FAQs: Is it OK to use the word fat?
Fat Out Loud
by Alex Gino
Thin
by Yao Xiao
My Body, a Crime
by Mars Sebastian
Body Talk FAQs: What’s the difference between body positivity and fat acceptance?
Non-Skinny People Who I Think Are Sexy as Hell
by Tyra Banks
Loving On Me Is Prayer: Queer Journeys into Black Girl Self-Love
by Junauda Petrus-Nasah
Chapter 4
Below The Belt
Please Laugh: My Cancer Diagnosis
by Benjamin Pu
Kindred
by Kelly Bastow
Your Complete Guide to Shane’s Sex Life
by Shane Burcaw
The Blood on Their Hands
by Anna-Marie McLemore
Body Talk FAQs: What are some normal side effects of menstruation?
Five Things People Want to Know about Their Junk (and Are Afraid to Ask)
by I. W. Gregorio
Cry Like a Girl
by Kate Hart
Body Talk FAQs: What is a pink tax?
Sisterhood, Blood, and Boobs at the London Marathon 2015
by Kiran/Madame Gandhi
Chapter 5
Things You Cannot See
When You’re “Broken” Like Me
by Amanda Lovelace
Your Asexuality Is Valid Whether or Not You…
by Amanda Lovelace
Beneath the Surface
by Abby Sams
Body Talk FAQs: What is self-care?
Trigger Warning
by Nat Razi
Maybe It’s Maybelline, or Maybe It’s Really Not Your Business
by Roshani Chokshi
Body Talk FAQs: How important is sleep?
What’s the Deal with Hormones?
by Alicia Lutes
Fart from the Madding Crowd
by Kara Thomas
Chapter 6
Our Whole Selves
Body Positive
by Aly Raisman
Ode to a Spit Cup
by Alice Wong
Body Talk FAQs: How do things like straw bans impact disabled people?
The White Rabbit
by John McGinty
Roars and Whispers
by Kelly Bastow
Five Ass-ential Tyra Tips for Better Body Image
by Tyra Banks
Looking “Straight”
by Jourdain Searles
How Anyone Can Help Trans People in Their Lives, Written from the Perspective of a Trans Man
by Gavin Grimm
My Back-Brace Year: How I Learned to Stand Tall, Even While Hunched
by Kate Bigam Kaput
Two Tools for Powerful Relaxation
by Kelly Jensen
My Perreo de Shame Playlist
by Lilliam Rivera
Further Reading
Contributor Bios
Acknowledgments
We all experience the world in bodies, but rarely do we take the time to really explore what it means to have and live within them. Just as every single person has a unique personality—shaped both by biology (nature) and by the world around them (nurture)—every single person has a unique body. We may live in a culture that suggests one type of body is the ideal model of what a person should look like and how they should function at a given time and in a given place, but every human body tells its own story, and it’s a story we each write for ourselves.
Bodies aren’t simply biological. They are radical tools. They are physical and political. They impact our mental well-being as much as they impact our social roles.
Body Talk delves into what it means to operate a body within a twenty-first-century Western world, and offers but one perspective among many others around the world and throughout history. This book goes beyond puberty and beyond body confidence to bare it all.
The late chef and author Anthony Bourdain wrote, “Your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.” Body Talk aims to throw open the gates to the park so you can better experience the highs, the lows, the thrills, and the chills of the human body.
We are more than the sum of our parts.
Whether we have ten fingers and ten toes, whether we have two arms and two legs, whether we’ve got metal rods and screws holding us together, or whether we have none of the above, there is so much more to having and living in a human body than our particular structure. Our bodies are political as much as they are physical.
This section delves into the ways our anatomy works for us and the ways our anatomy may differ from—or conform to!—the “ideal” human body. It’ll also question what, if anything, that ideal is.
Scoliosis, Spinal Fusion, and Stomach Punches
by Rachael Lippincott
It was ninety-two degrees out, and I was wearing a baggy blue tie-dyed sweatshirt. It was the only article of clothing I had that hid both my curvature and my back brace. So, naturally, I wore it until the white letters were peeling off, my swim team’s name wiped from legible existence in my endless pursuit to hide my scoliosis.
This day, though, I was in absolute agony. It felt like a bad reenactment of the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, when Keira Knightley passes out from her suffocating corset and tumbles over a ledge into the ocean below.
Except I ended up crying in the back seat of my mom’s forest-green Saturn. The AC blasted as I ripped the Velcro straps open, a waterfall of sweat pouring off my body, like I too had just been rescued from the depths of the ocean. It was there, lying in the back seat while we drove home, that I began to seriously consider if I wanted to keep doing this.
If I didn’t continue with the brace, I’d need surgery. A ten-hour spinal-fusion surgery to correct the steadily progressing S-shaped curve in my back.
I had always been a sloucher.
I remember my grandma pulling my shoulders back when I was sitting at her dining
room table, telling me about the importance of having good posture, like I were an eighteenth-century heiress at finishing school. I remember my flute teacher telling me over and over again to sit up straighter, my slumping making it an absolute nightmare to get any air into my diaphragm.
For the most part, though, I ignored them. It was exhausting not to slouch. It took so much energy for me to suck in my stomach and shove my shoulders back that I didn’t really see the point in doing it.
Until one day, I saw a picture of what I looked like. And I saw what they’d been talking about for all those years.
It was a low-quality photo, taken on a 2004 Razr flip phone. (This baby was the phone to have back in the day. It was the AirPods of the prehistoric era.)
The picture was from the summer before sixth grade. I wasn’t doing anything particularly remarkable. Just chilling at my friend’s birthday party, wearing an old soccer jersey from the four minutes I played soccer, grinning as I talked about whatever I found interesting as a ten-year-old.
I saw it all. The hunch of my shoulders. The way my right shoulder blade poked out farther than my left. The lower-stomach fat that pulled at the jersey fabric of my shirt, accentuated by the slouch of my upper body.
I felt a disdain for myself that I’m not sure I had really felt until that point. And it was devastating.
It was only a few months later that I had a word to put to the appearance of my back. Scoliosis.
I remember bopping into gym class, excited for the usual “Fun Friday” tradition of indoor kickball, and being surprised when our gym teacher rounded us all up for a scheduled back prodding.
It was definitely something a little different for Fun Friday.
We all trotted out of the gym and stood in a line outside the girls’ locker room, wearing our orange-and-black gym clothes, going in one at a time to get checked by a doctor. The number of eye rolls was overwhelming. There’s nothing quite like a group of impatient sixth-grade girls dressed in their pumpkin- colored gym clothes, wanting nothing more than to be playing kickball but instead having some sixty-five-year-old dude we didn’t know telling us if we had weird-shaped backs.
I remember heading into the locker room when “Next!” was called out, my mind already focused on the sound of basketballs reverberating around the gym, this little inspection nothing more than a forgettable pit stop. I followed his instructions, bending over and trying to touch my toes, my arms swinging in the breeze as a display of my unyielding inflexibility.
It’s always reassuring when you get a sharp inhale from a doctor. I remember him holding the measuring device against my spine, my lumpy right shoulder blade nearly poking him in the eye while he prodded away.
“You can stand now,” he said, grabbing a clipboard and scribbling a few notes on it. He tore off a yellow slip and held it out to me. “You definitely have something going on back there. I recommend getting your back looked at as soon as possible.”
I trotted out onto the gym floor, reading the name of the doctor he’d referred me to, a nearly illegible note at the top of the slip noting the curvy nature of my spine.
That yellow slip was the start of it all.
The doctor’s “You definitely have something going on back there” was putting it mildly. I went to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and found out that my spine was in the shape of an S, like my own body were trying to make a morbid Sesame Street alphabet joke. S stands for scoliosis! Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, to get really technical.
I had only a twenty-degree curve in the lumbar, or bottom, part of my spine, but a forty-degree curve in the thoracic, or top, part of my spine. Which explained my weird-looking shoulder and why slouching had become a hobby of mine.
I wasn’t in pain, but I was well on my way to being in an enormous amount of pain within a few years.
So I got a back brace when I was in seventh grade.
The intention behind a back brace is that as the wearer grows, the brace literally suffocates the wearer and pushes the spine back into alignment. Or, at the very least, it stops the curve from becoming curvier until the puberty finish line is passed.
Back braces are made of a hard plastic, the inside a slippery padding that does nothing but retain body heat and generate sweat. I was even given these brace-specific knitted tank tops (complete with armpit padding) that were supposed to make the whole setup more comfortable but succeeded only in multiplying my discomfort. Every back brace is different, depending on the type of curvature you have and the severity of the curvature. Since both the upper and lower parts of my spine were affected, my back brace had a curvy U-shaped piece of plastic jutting straight into my left armpit to attack the thoracic curve, and an awkward plastic hip extension that attempted to literally press my lumbar spine back into alignment. Three Velcro straps in the back were used to tighten this modern-day corset to a point where my scoliosis just might stop progressing, but it felt like I was one pull away from breaking a rib or suffocating.
Or both, if I was lucky enough.
I had to wear it every day. And every night, ideally. Sixteen to twenty hours per day was the recommended amount of time, and I remember waking up at three in the morning in sweaty, strangulated discomfort, sleepily ripping it off my body in an attempt to savor a few hours of brace-free sleep before I got up.
Don’t get me wrong. Wearing a back brace certainly had a few perks. My middle school party trick was letting people punch me in the stomach, because I “couldn’t feel it” through my back brace. I’d be standing next to the bounce house at a weekend birthday bash, an unpaid sideshow ready to get an eighth grader’s mean left hook right in the gut.
Another perk for me, one that is sad to admit now, was that it made me skinnier. After seeing that picture of myself at my friend’s birthday party, I had become a bit obsessed with my weight. Not only was it hard for me to eat a lot with the brace straps tightened all the way, but the constant pressing on my stomach sucked everything in, in a very “Kardashian waist trainer” kind of way. There was even a time after my surgery when I dug the brace out of my closet and stupidly wore it before a first date, hoping to slim myself down before I went out to sit in a dark movie theater where it didn’t matter anyway.
Sometimes I wish I could tell my younger self that. That it didn’t matter. That the body I had then carried me up hills at cross-country meets and through the water during the painful last lap at a swim meet, and that it should be celebrated instead of picked away at and filled with hunger pangs.
I should’ve gotten both the popcorn and the box of candy at the movies that night, instead of sipping away at a Diet Coke from the concession stand.
A few years went by, I grew a few more inches, and I showed up for one of my checkups, hoping that the brace was doing what it was supposed to do, only to find out that it was absolutely not.
The curve in my upper (thoracic) spine had increased to fifty-three degrees, and the curve of my lower (lumbar) spine had more than doubled to a whopping forty-eight degrees.
I felt defeated.
I had essentially worn a back brace for two years for absolutely nothing. I had spent countless nights tossing and turning, unable to sleep, because I couldn’t freaking breathe. I had overheated in the summer, cried in the back of cars, and let people punch me in the stomach, hoping that I could just be “normal” at the end of it all. I had started high school wearing a back brace, which wasn’t exactly a rousing way to start off my social life.
I remember sitting in the doctor’s office, feeling angry. I barely listened as he talked with my mom about how much worse my back could get. About how much pain I likely had in store for me as I got older.
There were two options. One was to continue with what we had been doing, which was pretty much just pain manage
ment and wearing a brace that didn’t work for me. And the other was surgery. A spinal-fusion surgery that would span from L3 to T3, thirteen vertebrae drilled through with pedicle screws and connected to metal rods, which would slowly squeeze the spine into the proper shape.
We went for a second opinion at another hospital, St. Christopher’s, hoping that we would hear something different. Some solution that didn’t include surgery.
We didn’t. That orthopedic surgeon even wanted to extend the fusion to T1, in which case I would have had no hip flexibility.
So we returned to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and set a date. July 8. Ten weeks.
We were handed a thick packet of information detailing the process behind the surgery. The success rate, the failures, the “worst-case scenarios,” the “absolute worst-case scenarios.” I was even handed a hunk of metal hardware, surprised at the weight of what I’d be carrying around in a few short months.
I don’t know why I didn’t, but I never read that packet of information. I trusted my surgeon, and I trusted my family. Looking back on it, it was probably a smart decision that I never did my own research. Since then, I’ve watched videos on YouTube of the process, the physical slicing open of the back and the drilling into the spine, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to go through with it had I known exactly what it entailed. At fifteen or sixteen, that blind trust was the best decision I unintentionally made for myself.
The surgery date slowly crept closer and closer. I got MRIs and started the summer swim season. I donated my own blood for the surgery, and I hung out with my friends from school.
And soon it was July 7, the day before my surgery.
I remember being woken up by my mom, surprised when she asked me what I would do if I could do anything in the world (within reason). That should have been an aha moment for me. A moment when I realized the severity of what I was getting into.
But it wasn’t.
In Pennsylvania, you need to be sixteen years old to obtain a learner’s permit. I didn’t have my learner’s permit yet, but my last hurrah was zipping around in an empty parking lot, my mom holding the grab handle and trying not to puke.
In some stupid act of bravery, I didn’t tell anyone about my surgery until the morning of. At five in the morning, in the hospital waiting room, I typed out a quick Facebook post, sending it off for my sleeping friends to discover in a few hours.