106. VM: Body Tawk Intro

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This is the Abbey Normal Podcast, here to tell you that you're weird, and that's normal.
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The M is all-encompassing. Voicemails, voice memos, vagina monologues.
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Music.
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Hi, this is Abbey, the host of the Abbey Normal Podcast, And I'm here to share
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an update, one which begins with a little about me.
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So I have a positive view of self.
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Stay with me here. Maybe I achieved that because nature, it's just my general mood.
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Or maybe nurture, because my parents loved and supported me.
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But I also feel good about myself because I learned at a young age to wall off myself from my body.
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And from anything anyone, anywhere would say or think about it.
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Music.
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And that protective strategy has mostly worked. But then, I had the many sedentary
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days of COVID lockdown and remote work, and suddenly this body that I have had
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the privilege of comfortably ignoring started screaming at me.
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Help, it said. I'm so weak. These grocery bags are too heavy.
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Is it weird that I'm talking about my body as distinctly different from myself?
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Anyway, point is that this underappreciated meat shell demanded attention.
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And I had a whole-ass manifesto on what I wasn't interested in in relation to,
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quote, caring for my body, but I had so little around how to connect with it
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in a mentally and spiritually healthy way.
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So, we are going to do some body talk on this show.
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Of course, I've talked about bodies repeatedly on this show,
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perhaps not explicitly, but almost every dang episode. I mean,
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we've covered the terrible middle school stories that soothe us with camaraderie.
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But I want to go more personal, more serious, more grown-ass adult.
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More like, okay, this is all f***ed up, now what can we do about it for real?
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I have no desire to repeat things we've all heard before, or rehash unproductive
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debates, or make anyone feel bad.
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There is quite enough around bodies that make most of us feel bad.
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So I wanted to give you all a heads up that we're making a
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pivot over the coming months we're going to share a lot of different viewpoints
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and experiences and what I've already discovered is that the body is not just
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about our physical parts what we believe about it how we talk about it and how
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we treat it has so many bigger implications for our life and for the world,
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I hope we can learn new stuff about our bodies and tactics for connecting more
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healthily with them both what we can do inside ourselves and what we can do
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in this system that perpetrates our disconnection.
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Here's some of what's coming.
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The expectation is to self-separate. Squelch the way that you actually feel.
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Squelch what you actually think. And then, like, pretend, play along.
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You're literally taught that, like, what's most morally appropriate is for your
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physical body to be chiefly oriented toward others.
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We have been socialized to be human doings. instead of human beings.
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Yeah, figuring out what it feels like to be at home in one's body with embodiment,
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following one's intuition.
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One's intuition knows so much.
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I spent most of my time thinking like, what was my mother like?
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Oh my God. And then we were walking and I could see our legs.
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I mean, I got big hips, you know? But yeah, I look just like her. Yeah.
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So I did 23andMe just because they have some medical stuff that they can look
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for and I'm like well it's better than nothing and then it came back and it
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said do you want to you know put your DNA out there and I was like might as well,
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she didn't even know they were Jewish yeah Jewish blood Russian Jew we're Russian Jew,
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there's some studies about like your cells like your cells have experienced
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the first thing you experience is abandonment you know and I think people.
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Music.
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My hormones started going a little wacky. I started losing hair.
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I started getting hair where I did not want. So I lost head hair,
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but then I started getting chin hair.
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Fun. Fun. I started gaining weight uncontrollably.
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The society we live in has a lot of opinions about how people should look.
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All the opinions. All the opinions. And all that shit is internalized.
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And as a woman, it is internalized in a different way. There is definitely,
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you know, patriarchal internalization of what the standard of beauty is.
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They all say the same thing. They go, whoa, skinny mini. Uh-huh.
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And I'm like, what is that? And then you look great.
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And what did you do? Wow. Wow.
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Two years ago, I was jumped into the diabetic category. And so they put me on Trulicity.
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It's more just like, I'm so tired of them browbeating me about,
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well, if not this drug, then this drug, if not this drug, then this drug.
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And I'm like, I don't want any of the drugs with jingles. Like, I don't.
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As bad as some of the things are about being overweight, like I like myself.
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I don't like some of the limitations that come with it, but I really enjoy my life. Do you?
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Music.
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That's only half the episodes. I hope that you heard something that perked your
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ears up and that you'll tune in next time. Because apparently this is important.
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Honestly it's like i don't think there would be war if we were appropriately self-connected.
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Music.