Embracing Your Creative Muse and Learning to Face the Enemy Within
Embracing Your Creative Muse and Learning to Face the Enemy Within
Plus more interesting reads from the last week
Thanks for reading Almost Sated, a newsletter about the messy process of detoxing from diets, diet culture and self-suppression. Occasionally, I venture off topic. If you like what you’re reading, please consider subscribing and sharing! It’s free to join, and subscribing ensures you never miss a post!
I’m back in Texas after almost two weeks of a working vacay in Oregon, mostly in the Portland area, and I can’t say I’m excited too excited since the highs here have been clocking in at over 100 degrees. Meanwhile, we needed sweaters for some of our days in Portland. Every day, I was able to get outside and enjoy some amazing hikes. I fell in love with this jewel of a park outside the city limits called Tryon Creek State Natural Area that was a lush jungle forest with eight miles of hiking trails. But I’m back and ready to sweat.
As a reminder, Monday’s post is a roundup of the most interesting reads (or listens) from the last week, and I’m kicking it off with my one of my plane reads.
The War of Art, a Classic Must-Read for Creatives
On the way back from Portland, I started (and finished) the War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Let’s call this what it is—required reading for writers. I started it a few months ago when I was looking for direction on how to be a writer (despite writing and editing professionally my entire adult life, I still didn’t think of myself as a writer). But it fell by the waist side, languishing among my other Amazon kindle samples until I was trolling the shelves of Powell’s Books in Portland and found a used copy.
The title so perfectly encapsulates the war that dwells within us creatives. The book is short. At times, painfully so. My carpal tunnel-plagued wrist tired of having to turn the pages so fast, and yet I couldn’t stop.
I don’t know what I would have made of the book had I read it when I originally downloaded it. Sure, I read enough to know I wanted to keep reading, but when I originally picked it up, I was still waffling on my status as a writer. The Resistance, the name Pressfield gives to the creative’s own internal enemy, was loud then, and it took everything I had to tune it out. Fortunately, I’m in a different place today.
The War of Art outlines exactly what we creatives have to do to overcome the Resistance and more importantly why it matters. It’s more practical than personal, more motivational than inspirational. Spiritual too. Pressfield devotes the last third of the book to angels and muses. It caught me off guard, in a good way, but dang, I hate when I end up crying on an airplane.
Have you read it? I’d love to hear your take.
Virginia Sole-Smith Talks Eating Disorders in Boys and Men
There are so many myths around eating disorders, and one of the biggest is about who gets them. Spoiler alert: It’s not just thin white females.
For her podcast last week,
interviewed Kyle Ganson, PhD., about eating disorders and disordered behaviors with food and exercise among boys and men. Ganson is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work, who focuses on eating disorders, muscle dysmorphia, and muscle building behaviors among adolescents and young adults. He was also one of Sole-Smith’s sources for her recent best-seller Fat Talk, which I highly recommend for every parent trying to raise healthy children in the age of diet culture (here’s my review of the book).Ganson outlines a list of reasons why males aren’t diagnosed with eating disorders as often as females and offers suggestions on what parents can do.
“It goes back to culture of course, too, but females are often more socialized to talk about feelings and food and body. Whereas males—and I think we could talk about gender as being a lot more diverse than that—but males are a lot more focused on the performance of their bodies. … they may not be perceived as having a problem because that male is just exercising to become faster in their sport or stronger in their sport or to be able to lift this amount of weight or have the six pack abs.” —Kyle Ganson
The topic of males and eating disorders is an important one, because we can end up rewarding destructive eating behavior and exercise habits if we’re not aware. It’s a lengthy interview and worth a listen (or a read).
More Reasons to Be Wary of Eating Disorders
I’ve mentioned before that one of my guilty pleasures is reading the Daily Mail UK. This is generally not journalism at its finest, but occasionally amid the salacious and gossip headlines are some educational reads.
Dr. Max Pemberton, a psychiatrist for Britain’s National Health Service and weekly Daily Mail columnist, writes this week about how he learned first-hand how deadly anorexia could be when one of his first patients—a young woman with chest pains was brought into the A&E (the U.S. equivalent of the ER) by her parents and died of a heart attack 30 minutes later.
It’s a sad state of affairs, but he makes a few key points that should be a wake up call.
“While at medical school I was taught nothing about eating disorders. Not how to spot them, not how to treat them and certainly not the risks associated with them, although they have the highest mortality rate of any mental health condition.”
To reiterate, eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental health disorders in both the U.S. and the U.K., with anorexia being the most deadly eating disorder. These are serious medical issues.
The article was yet one more reminder how important it is for parents to be advocates for their children, especially if they suspect an eating disorder. Given the lack of training among general practitioners, it’s important to seek out specialists, and I say this from first-hand experience.
What the ‘Bear’ Teaches Us About Grief
One of my favorite reads this week was a New York Times opinion piece on “The Bear,” FX’s gritty series about an acclaimed chef who returns home after he inherits his dead brother’s sandwich shop. The first season drew praise from critics for its real-life depiction of what it’s really like to work in a kitchen. Cultural critic Chris Vognar tackles the show from a different angle—grief—comparing it to the pain he experienced in losing his partner to dementia.
As Kate was disappearing and then after her death, I felt like a needy child who’d gone mad, then been sucked into a black hole. What I experienced wasn’t the sanitized version of grieving I see reflected in “Shrinking” or “Ted Lasso.” This was the roaring, chaotic, unleashed beast of “The Bear.”
Season 2 of “The Bear” was released Thursday on Hulu. Have you started watching? Let me know what you think!
Read anything interesting lately? Drop me the link in comments below!
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Eating disorders are no joke, and there's a much wider range of them than most folks realize. We need to work to destigmatize these.