Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful
Image is a picture of page 42 from The Sunday Times in the UK (undated). The page is called Style Voice, and the segment is called Dear Dolly, subtitled: “your love, life and friendship dilemmas answered by Dolly Alderton.” At the bottom of the page, there is a note that says “To get your life dilemma answered by Dolly, email or send a voice note to deardolly@sundaytimes.co.uk or DM @theststyle.
Text of the segment reads:
[submission]
Dear Dolly,
I was already a little overweight, but things spiralled during lockdown. As a home-schooling, working-from-home single parent to two children, there was little time for contemplative yoga or solo mini-marathons around the park. After contracting the virus (it dragged on and on) and then not being able to leave our tiny flat much due to the lockdown, the only excitement of the day seemed to be a gin and tonic at 6pm, rounds of Netflix and peanut butter on toast.
I eat when I’m stressed and when I’m bored, and I was very stressed and very bored. And now the buttons are popping off my jeans. My clothes don’t fit, I don’t want to spend a fortune buying pretty new things in “L” when I have to get back to “M.” And how will I ever feel glamorous and attractive again after piling on the pounds and covering my face with a mask? Please help. I don’t want to be single for ever.
[response]
As I read your letter, the first thing I thought was what a challenging time you’ve been through in the past six months. You’ve had to educate, entertain and care for not one but two young children, all day, every day, without the help of a partner, while being mostly confined indoors in a tiny living space. You contracted an illness that was largely unknown and potentially debilitating. All this happened during a time when you couldn’t see friends or extended family, or go to the pub, or go away, or go anywhere for that matter. I want you to read that back and acknowledge what a difficult set of circumstances you’ve been living through recently.
With that in mind, I’m going to present you with a possibility: you haven’t overindulged at all. You haven’t eaten too much, you haven’t messed up a routine. You have been giving yourself exactly what you’ve needed in a time of immense stress – you have been in complete communion with your mind and body. You’ve allowed yourself the gentle anesthesia of a cold gin and tonic after a long day with kids, and restful nights with a comforting and familiar food as you prepare for the following morning. You’ve used your few spare hours to recuperate, instead of flinging yourself around your small flat in front of a YouTube exercise video or making complicated kale salads. All of this makes complete sense. You have not made any mistakes.
A clever thing the diet industry did to the collective consciousness is attach morals to eating: certain foods are bad (peanut butter on toast), certain ways of eating are bad (in front of Netflix). And if we are to believe the fallacy of “you are what you eat,” every time we put food in our mouths, we give ourselves permission to rate our morality. But our chosen meals aren’t proof of our goodness or badness. Deprivation or hyper-control doesn’t equate to health and virtue, appetite isn’t something feral and dangerous to be disciplined. Food is an inanimate object that we can use as we like – to nourish, energize or comfort. How we eat will always be in flux depending on our circumstances, whether that be emotional or physical.
I think the best thing you can do is acquaint yourself with the idea of intuitive eating. It’s a seemingly simple concept that many of us have to relearn at some point in our lives. Intuitive eating is about tuning in to your body, listening to what it wants and responding compassionately. It’s about quietening the chatter you’ve been absorbing your whole life – all the contradictory rules and convoluted calorie counting – and instead focusing on the requirements of your appetite and tastes. We are all born with an innate ability to do this (you never see a toddler leaving 20 per cent of its meal on a plate because it read an article saying this is what French women do), but tragically it is a skill that is stolen from so many of us.
Because another clever thing the diet industry did was make us believe that our instincts are wrong, that if we ate what we want when we wanted it, we’d live off a mountain of éclairs, a river of Baileys and nothing else. That’s just not true. If you can find a way to eat intuitively, without any cycles of restriction and reward, your body will find its way to the weight where it is naturally most comfortable.
And if all that fails, try this: every time you go to feed yourself, imagine that you are feeding one of your children. Every time you finish a meal and you want to berate yourself for the decisions you made: imagine you are speaking to one of your children. If they came to you – tired, anxious or ill – would you give them a calorie-counted meal, or would you give them what they were craving? If they ate something that brought them joy, would you remind them afterwards that they could have eaten something that was less pleasurable but lower in fat? Would you tell them to take notice of the letter on the label in their clothes and attach a sense of self-worth to it? Would you let them believe that the letter on that label was an indicator of whether someone will fall in love with them?
The sad truth is women are conditioned to feel like physical failures if they don’t conform to an impossible specification, so the language of self-hatred is easily accessible to us. I don’t want to pretend that this propaganda isn’t incredibly powerful, and I don’t want you to feel even more self-hatred for taking it on and believing it. So, for now, try a trick instead: imagine you are your own child and care for yourself accordingly. That might be the only way you’ll allow yourself the logic and kindness you deserve.
we are not born to die!! what are you talking about!! do you think a book begins just to finish? do you think a song opens with a beautiful chord just for it to end? you don’t read the book to finish it, you read the book to eat up the excitement and the emotions it evokes!! to learn and to digest and to fall in love and be heartbroken!! you listen to the song to dance and dance and sing your throat raw!!! to cry and smile and swell with the harmonies!! yes, we are born with the inevitable fate of death, we are mortal after all, but that is merely the finale of the play!! the final act, the closing of the curtains - we are not born to take a bow and exit stage left!! we are born to love and be joyous and yell and move and learn and cry and feelfeelfeel!!! we are not born to die, silly, we’re born to live!!!
This is so violently hopeful and uplifting everyone needs to see it
it takes years to learn the difference between who to let go and who to be patient with. the same way it takes years to know what you deserve and what you don’t. so hang on there, growth and experience come with time.
New music may be released in a few months that you’ll fall in love with
There might be perfect weather tomorrow
You might pick up some rubbish from the beach one day that would have killed a creature
Solar eclipses are pretty cool, you could see one
If you stick around long enough you might adopt an animal in the future and that animal needs you to be there for that
You might stumble across a talent or interest you don’t even know about yet
The plants like it when you water them
You never know, this could be your worst night ever so you just have to pull through this one
Is there life on other planets? You wanna know? Stick around to increase your chance of finding out
Ever seen your favourite painting? Maybe you will one day, accidentally even, like street art you never expected to love
You might eat really nice food next week and have that comfortable full feeling
That perfect outfit feeling could be coming up soon
You could have clear skin in like 3 months time it happens
Has a cute bird ever landed on you? No? Stick around for that blessed moment
You know what even simple things like you could reblog a suicide helpline next year that saves a follower and you need to be here to play your part in that
Stay around long enough and your painful present will become your personal past that prepares you for that future you’re struggling to remember right now
I like staying to prove the petty little voice in my head wrong,, like bitch you thought you could make me take us both out??? If I gotta put up with you, you’re stuck with me I ain’t going anywhere
Literally be stubborn with that voice, outlast it cause you deserve to have space in your mind more than that negative little shit that hasn’t done anything good for you
Also ever swam in a lake and felt like a woodland creature? Try it try it try it (but be careful not every lake is safe to swim in)
New memes
You might miss the perfect moment to quote a vine
That new haircut that gets you feeling yourself when you see it in the mirror for a few days after
im going to come out and say it: isolating is a self-destructive behavior. it might not be as obvious and immediately self-destructive as say, impulsive spending, drug use or risky behaviors, but it gradually decays relationships and can deepen your mental health issues. often, our impulse is to retreat from others and responsibilities for “self care” or to “work on ourselves” and obviously sometimes we need mental health breaks, but there’s a line you cross from “taking a break” to full on neglecting your relationships with others and your social needs that can be incredibly damaging to yourself and others over time
SHOUT OUT TO EVERYONE WHO STILL TRIES TO GET BACK INTO THE SWING OF THINGS AFTER DEPRESSION HIT THEM HARD. THERE ISN’T ENOUGH RECOGNITION FOR THOSE PEOPLE WHO KNOW THAT THEY’RE GOING TO LOSE INTEREST AND MOTIVATION AGAIN BUT PUSH THEMSELVES TO DO STUFF ANYWAYS. YOU ARE FIGHTING A DAILY BATTLE WITH YOUR OWN THOUGHTS AND YOU’RE STILL COMING OUT ON TOP, YOU’RE ALL BRAVE AS FUCK
nobody is irrelevant. nobody is invisible. your neighbors know your name and see you set off to school or work or the backyard everyday, sometimes with a spring in your step and sometimes with hunched over shoulders. there was this one time some stranger pointed you out to their friends and said “that’s the haircut I want” or “I have that shirt, too” or “they go to my school”. someone has admired the way you carry yourself or gave a presentation or even the way you’re so polite when you first meet a person. you’ve made comments or jokes that have stuck in minds of overhearers and eavesdroppers. when old classmates of yours think back to kindergarten or fourth grade or sophomore year they remember you and have an opinion of you. you’ve made recommendations of songs and restaurants and even cookie brands and actually introduced people to their all-time favorites. the cashier at the grocery store knows exactly what laundry detergent your household uses, or even if you don’t do your laundry at all.
you can never be irrelevant. there’s pieces of you everywhere, in a dozen lives, in a hundred dreams, in a million memories. maybe it’s true that you don’t have any friends, and you have a sucky relationship with your family or no family at all and no-one ever checks up on you, and you’re really very lonely, but that doesn’t determine your worth. you do. and so do the billions of small attributions you’ve already made to the world, both long-term and short-term. so thank you.
an author i love just tweeted about how “big joy and small joy are the same” and how she was just as content the other night eating chocolate and cuddling her dog as she was on her Big Trip to new york and honestly. i think that’s it. this morning i was listening to an audiobook while baking shortbread in my joggers and i realised i really didn’t care what Big Things happened in my future as long as i could keep baking and reading at the weekend and maybe that is the kind of bar we have to set to guard ourselves against disappointment. just appreciate and cherish the mundane stuff and see everything else as a bonus.
found it - she was replying to this thread that starts “unpopular opinion: i don’t think your life has to have a purpose, or you a grand ambition; i think it’s okay to just wander through life finding interesting things until you die” and i for one think that’s fucking brilliant
life hack from art school: instead of saying you cant draw something or that you dont like something about your art, just say the element “wasn’t working”
had to change a pose because it was too difficult to draw? it “didn’t work” compositionally!
feel like something is off about the background? it doesn’t suck, it’s just not working for the piece!
art is all about finding ways to convey an idea or emotion in a VERY subjective way, so thinking about it in terms of “working/not working for this piece” instead of “good/bad” is very helpful for me personally. it’s a small step you can take towards having a healthy outlook on your work!
If courage isn’t the absence of fear but doing the right thing regardless of it, maybe confidence isn’t the absence of insecurity but knowing you have real worth despite it
this is beautiful
By this same token, maybe goodness isn’t the absence of bad thoughts or impulses, but the conscious choice to behave according to your moral ideals in spite of them.
