Buzzfeed News Music

I was 6 years old when I made the most significant decision of my life. While my peers were busy making tough choices in the tangled web of playground politics, I was being asked if I wanted to stay in England with the white British couple who had helped to raise me since I was 10 days old, or go with my biological parents to Nigeria. I remember I was combing my Barbie's blonde hair when I gave my answer:

I want to stay here with Annette and John.

My biological mum said OK, and that was that. She didn’t say much at the time, but with hindsight I don't think I'm imagining the hurt in her eyes. I had confirmed what she already knew – I had chosen another mother figure over her.

I was, of course, unaware of the complex consequences my decision would have on the rest of my life.

My choice saw me spend my teens and my twenties navigating an intricate game of identity politics that went beyond broad terms of race; I was exploring the complications of culture within an ethnicity.

My biological parents’ tale is the all too familiar ballad of the immigrant: They came to the British Isles in search of a better life. My dad came in April 1985 – by day, he got settled and tried to establish some sort of home and by night, he slept on his sister’s sofa. When my mother arrived to an English winter three years later, my dad had tentatively found his feet on the uneven pavements of east London. A year after that, I came along.

Although my parents found work (Dad as a track engineer on the London underground, mum at a frozen food factory), they struggled to afford the expenses that came with living in a two-bed flat in Stratford. They took on further night shifts to supplement their income, leaving me in the care of a childminder, Annette. The situation was more along the lines of a live-in nanny, except I lived with her. I slept in her house, and she did all the obvious things: the school run, bath time, help with homework, and the kind of love that fixes scraped knees and runny noses. At the weekends, I would go “home” to spend time with the people who looked like me – the only people I was allowed to call Mum and Dad – only they didn’t quite feel like my mum and dad. I spent Sunday afternoons sitting on the kitchen counter, glued to the window and wishing the minutes away, waiting to be collected.

When my biological parents left for Nigeria, my dad sought to make me comfortable with my blackness. My bedroom filled with black dolls and books – and since was this was the time of the Spice Girls, Mel B merchandise – that spilled out into and cluttered up the living room. A blend of childhood artefacts and a pop culture phenomenon gave me my first grounding in blackness as an identity.

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed

But my identity was also forged in less rosy circumstances. I remember one time my dad wouldn’t get me an ice cream after school. On the way home, with my face like a wet weekend in Bognor, a stranger – a black man – asked if I was OK, and if I needed help, insinuating that I may have been taken by this white man. Our horror in the moment was secondary only to my realisation that people saw us as different. It was a small thing, but it made me aware I didn’t have the privilege to act like a stroppy 10-year-old in public without raising some eyebrows.

But it wasn’t until my adolescent years that I realised my skin tone wasn’t just an indicator of difference, and that it wasn’t enough to create a fulfilling identity. While I was obviously black, I didn’t feel Nigerian. I looked Nigerian, my name was Nigerian, but I wasn’t Nigerian culturally. I didn’t have any sense of how it felt to be Nigerian. Looking back, it’s clear I felt I was merely "passing" as a Nigerian.

I felt I was merely "passing" as a Nigerian.

When I asked Annette if she'd had any fears about bringing up a Nigerian-British child she told me she just wanted to make sure I was a "good person". When I pressed her about maybe missing out on Nigerian culture, she was pragmatic: "It crossed my mind. There is no manual to raising a child of a different race but for me, it was important that you had personal experiences." We attended a church with a Nigerian community, my parents had Nigerian friends, and then I lucked out at secondary school. "You made great friendships with girls who happened to be Nigerian," my mum told me. "So it was time for me to take a step back and let you form more of those relationships independently." And I did.

My first memorable encounter with "Nigerian-ness" came at 11, courtesy of my best friend, Demi. The first time I entered her home, I made a series of faux pas that no Nigerian-born – and bred – child would ever make.

I walked into her house and simply said “hi” to her parents, with no honorific "Aunty’"or "Uncle", no "how are you?" to cushion my impertinence. A bathroom break a few minutes later led to some confusion when I spotted a bucket in their bathtub. I brought it up upon my return to the living room, and was met with Demi's casual truth bomb: A bucket was literally part of the furniture in many Nigerian bathrooms. At dinner (steaming jollof, fried plantain and meat), I ate the meat first, and asked for more from my generous hosts, who obliged. Later, Demi quietly informed me that you should eat the meat after the rice, a ritual that has stood me in good stead for visits to other Nigerian households since.

Through Demi and subsequent Nigerian friends I formed the misconception that there was a monolithic Nigerian identity: where girls spent chunks of their Saturdays in their mothers' kitchens, learning about the secret ingredients that made their versions of okra soup and fried rice so unique. I heard stories of Nigerian classmates dragged to parties and being "sprayed" with dollars, a novel concept I couldn’t ask about because of the embarrassment of ignorance. I had come to the conclusion that England would never quite be home, and there was a disconnect with my Nigerian side – a disconnect that was cemented when I joined a predominantly Nigerian church at 18, and became more involved in church life. I began to dread a simple question:

How do you pronounce your surname?

Which always led to the next dreaded question:

Do you understand Yoruba?

And to complete the glorious trifecta:

Ah, do you know how to cook jollof rice?

It felt like I was being asked these questions on a weekly basis, a handy checklist to make sure I was as Nigerian as I looked. And without fail, these questions of identity left me flailing. The feeling you’ve failed a verbal identity test is strange, but knowing you will never pass is borderline depressing.

With that in mind, you can imagine my apprehension in 2008, when my (biological) cousin flew me and my mother to Nigeria for her wedding.

My last meeting with my biological mother had been to say goodbye, back in 1996, and our only interaction since had been periodic routine phone calls over the years. At a sweltering Lagos airport, here she was again: my mother, a woman I did not recognise.

As my mothers embraced for a long time, I stood on the sidelines, an observer of a moment from which I was naturally exempt. Our own reunion was a lot more awkward: slight hesitation from us both, a mix of suspicion and suspense, and then eventually – finally – a hug. I’d begun my Nigeria experience. I did a lot that week, but the most important thing is that I finally experienced being “sprayed” – while wearing head-to-toe ankara and a gele, and dancing to a live band. And it was glorious.

But something even more glorious took place on my trip. Every time someone asked me if I understood Yoruba, a random Aunty or Uncle would spring to my defence and say: Ah, she’s English now.

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed

The relief at having that Aunty-cushion for the first time in my life was deep. But it also served to make me realise I was more of a foreigner than ever. Why had I thought my “motherland” would fill the void of unfamiliarity, when I struggled to achieve the comfort I sought in Nigerian communities in London? I knew England would never quite accept me as one of her own, but Nigeria couldn’t either.

I knew England would never quite accept me as one of her own, but Nigeria couldn’t either.

A college friend finally articulated what I had felt. He explained his sense of a “lost identity” being a British-raised Nigerian; even without the added peculiarity of my complicated upbringing, neither England nor Nigeria felt a natural “home” for him. It dawned on me that there is no one definitive Nigerian experience – coming from the most populated country in Africa with communities spread across the globe, each with different social and cultural complications, there is bound to be more than one take on Nigerian identity. I'm a Nigerian-British millennial. We often feel like we're in a no-man's-land, but we are not alone. I grew up eating a Sunday roast rather than pounded yam while watching the EastEnders omnibus, but there is a plurality to the Nigerian identity. It’s OK. We're OK.

After finally getting comfortable in accepting my version of Nigerian-ness I felt like I was back at square one when I met my boyfriend. Once again, my tell was food: When I admitted that I hadn’t had pounded yam in years, he instantly questioned what type of Nigerian household I was living in. I keep learning. Through him I have come to understand that age gaps between siblings sometimes bring titles (I’m so glad his younger siblings don’t call me “Sister Tobi”) and why it’s extremely important to know the difference between someone being an “Aunty” and a “Big Mummy”. (Trust me, it’s too complex to get into here.)

With him, I’ve also experienced another Nigerian pastime visited upon young women in long-term relationships: the constant questioning of when the wedding is. Like many Nigerian brides-to-be, I am sure I will feel the overwhelming anxiety as I organise two (traditional and white) or possibly three (legal) weddings. I know my boyfriend would love for further bonding sessions with his mother to take place over cooking sessions in which I learn her version of jollof rice. And I’m sure he’ll still correct me when I pronounce it as "jellof” rice.

The one thing I’m finally sure of is that at 26, my Nigerian identity is valid.

Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed

The other day, my friend in New York was complaining. This in itself is certainly not remarkable. What got my attention was the subject of his complaint: He and his roommates were throwing a party, and had agreed to each invite a certain number of people. My friend had just discovered that one of the roommates had secretly invited way more than his allotted number.

My friend was furious about this breach of the invitation agreement. “It’s pretty messed up,” he said. This is not a paraphrase. He actually used the words “pretty messed up.”

To me, the phrase “pretty messed up” has always denoted the kind of offense that is so unbelievable that you’re not even going to bother coming up with a better way of expressing how terrible it is. It’s how a Californian might talk about incest. It’s not how I would ever describe a party problem.

For one thing, there is no such thing as a party problem, especially when the “problem” is that there will be too many cool people at your party. This is the very definition of a “first-world problem.” I mean, imagine how someone in a developing country would react to hearing this complaint. They’d be like, “We can’t even have a party because we don’t have water!”

There is no such thing as a party problem, especially when the “problem” is that there will be too many cool people at your party.

And that does suck, but what’s really surprising is that there are actually people right here in the USA who hardly go to any parties — or worse, complain about the ones they do go to. Maybe we should solve these domestic party problems before trying to throw parties in other countries.

I should know: I used to live in New York, where there were so many parties that I would often find myself with more than one party to go to per night. Some people define success by job title or goal weight. For me it’s the ability to be at one party and then leave and go to another party.

I naively assumed that the rest of my life would be one long succession of parties (and some other stuff in between, so I would have something to talk about at all the parties). Then I moved in with my parents on an island in Washington, and the proverbial lights came up.

There was a time when I thought bars were a great alternative to parties. “They’re like parties you don’t have to be invited to!” I would tell anyone who would listen, which was no one, since I was the last of my friends to turn 21 and they were all at the bar.

However, in the years since bars have become available to me, I’ve come to realize that they aren’t like parties at all. They’re more like the United States government: They make a big show about your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, but when it really comes down to it, they don’t encourage talking to strangers. At bars you end up talking only to the friends you came with, which is fine, but not exactly ideal. Friends are just people you’re not interested in sleeping with because they are the wrong gender or have some other gross defect.

Once you grow up a little, you realize that the great thing about parties is that they’re like bars that you have to be invited to. Not only is there a better chance of talking to an intriguing stranger, but there's a better chance you might actually like that person. The invitational nature means that the guests have been put through, if not a fine strainer, at least the kind of strainer that ensures they know what a Facebook event is.

The best thing about parties, besides all the free stuff, is their essential unknowability.

Another great thing about parties is the exchange rate. Where else on Earth do you give someone an $11 bottle of wine and get an all-you-can-drink alcohol buffet plus unfettered access to their medicine cabinet? Japan? I don’t think so.

The best thing about parties, besides all the free stuff, is their essential unknowability. Going into a party, it’s impossible to predict what the night will bring. This is mainly because it’s a private residence, so things can pretty weird before the police are called. Will you fall in love? Will there be roof access? Will they play “Ignition (Remix)”? Will you say something brilliant like, “If that’s the remix, what’s the regular ‘Ignition’?” It’s this potential that makes it almost impossible for me to stay in on a Friday night.

In the last six months, I’ve been to exactly one party, and I only call it that because that’s the term the host used. Looked at objectively, no one with the ability to see and/or hear would have mistaken it for such.

The first sign that this was not a party was when the host tried to cancel the party before it had even begun. He said this was because not enough people were able to come. I’d never heard of such a thing. The reality of parties is that a lot of people don’t come. It doesn’t release the host from their sworn duty to have the party that I was promised via modern blood oath (Facebook message).

The other thing that confused me was the idea that there were people (and I use that word loosely) who weren’t dropping everything in order to go to a party. Remember, we are all on an island with zero parties per square mile; there’s nothing to drop. After considerable whining on my part, the host decided to have the party that no one was coming to.

I was the first to arrive. When you have only one thing to look forward to, you’re probably not going to be late. My hosts, a friend from high school and his wife, were gracious and had a kitten. I brought champagne. OK, it was prosecco, but still, it seemed an auspicious start to the evening. (OK, it was “sparkling wine.”)

Then the children arrived. There were only two, but in my opinion that’s two too many for something that has not been advertised as a children’s party. I felt the possibilities of the night begin to close down around me. Then someone turned on the football game.

Everyone was friendly and the kids were even cute, in their own way, but it just wasn’t a party — a fact that I pretended I hadn’t been warned about when the host tried to cancel. I began drinking at a rapid clip. I was so fixated on my expectations for what a party should be that I couldn't just relax and chat with these nice people. Instead, I was the guest who drank all the champagne she had brought for the host and made fun of football, as if not liking football is a novel position.

I can't get on board with the position that it’s horrible someone invited you to drink in their cozy home for free.

Maybe this specter of dashed expectations is one reason that people (more and more of them every year, it seems) claim not to enjoy parties. They act like parties are the absolute worst, especially around the holidays. “Ugh, I have to go to another party.” I may have had one disappointing experience, but it doesn’t mean I can get on board with the position that it’s horrible someone invited you to drink in their cozy home for free while providing you with open access to their friends and refrigerator.

I think a lot of this has to do with the rise of a certain kind of performative introversion. I say performative because I doubt that a real introvert feels the need to take a quiz about whether they are an introvert and then post the results to Facebook. I find it telling that this introversion does not extend to social media, where these supposedly bashful people have no problem bragging to strangers about being shy. Can you imagine an actual shy person shouting, “I’M SHY!!!” into a room full of strangers?

I have nothing against actual shy people, but pseudo-shy is a breed I cannot abide. You can identify these people because they are always going on about how they watched Netflix all night instead of coming to your party, or are Instagramming themselves swaddled in their bedsheets like overgrown babies. Now, I love bed and Netflix too. The difference is that I feel rightfully ashamed of how much time I spend in the former watching the latter. I would never advertise it like it’s the best thing about me.

When did it become more socially acceptable to binge-watch than to binge-drink?

This intense desire to brand yourself a loser, which includes “I’m such a nerd,” Nice Guy Syndrome, and probably juicing, is most likely a by-product of the internet. Thanks, Steve Jobs, or whoever made that thing! And the worst part about all this faux self-deprecation is that it makes people who know they are amazing (or, at the very least, functionally social) feel ashamed to say so in public. If Carrie Bradshaw had lived to see this sad state of affairs, she’d definitely take a moment to ponder: When did it become more socially acceptable to binge-watch than to binge-drink?

For this reason, when I’m invited to a party, I don’t scream and cry about the injustice of it all, or stay home and Instagram my computer screen. I go, and I make it my business to party like no one is watching, talk like everyone is hard of hearing, and dance like I know how to dance.

It’s not that I think every party is going to be transformative. It’s just that I know sometimes they can be. Any night could be one of those nights where we’re loose, not drunk, but easy with each other and kind, and we’re laughing and just golden. A song comes on that everyone loves, even though they shouldn’t. The crazy guy finally goes home, and everyone ends up on the roof watching the sun rise. By the time you walk home it is very early. You nod to someone coming the other way. You’re young, still, and everything is just fine.

Arianna Vairo for BuzzFeed News

The scale at the gym was a dark blue platform with an LED display that blinked its way to a resolution that I then recorded in my phone. Before I learned not to look so much — once a week instead of every day — the changes were unnerving. If I drank several whiskeys one night, the number would spike. During the week of my period, it would shoot down. I was fascinated but startled that a body’s shape could so easily shift.

Around the same time, I caught myself contemplating items at the grocery store with outsized interest. I inspected the labels on cans of beans I’d eaten for years. I wanted to know what the protein content was, I told myself. But everything in the canned goods aisle, and in the dairy case and bulk section and beyond, contained new interest. Each item prompted new questions, and their answers bestowed familiar products with new significance.

This attentiveness to what I put in my body — and to my body in general — was unprecedented. But I kept it to myself, for the same reason I always looked both ways before I hopped on the scale at the gym. I didn’t mind if anyone in the locker room saw me naked. What I did not want was for them to catch me caring about what I weighed.

For a long time, I really had not cared what I weighed. As a living woman, I am aware this makes me unusual. But I had the luck of being raised by a radical feminist mother in a home with neither full-length mirrors nor bodily compliments. And more importantly, over a decade ago, I made an existential bargain with my body image that I had no reason to revisit until this year.

Taking antidepressants that list weight gain as a possible side effect has been as natural and essential a part of my daily self-maintenance as brushing my teeth since I was 12. The exact reason for the side effect is not known, but SSRIs are believed to interfere with the neurotransmitters that tell you when you’re full, as well as affect your metabolism. Some people don’t experience this side effect at all, or only negligibly. But if weight gain is listed on the bottle, I am almost sure to experience it. I took it for granted that my weight was to some extent beyond my control. This was a small price to pay for being alive.

Even as I cut my pills in half, then quarters, the bargain ultimately stood: It was most imperative that I be happy, even at the cost of my weight.

Just over a year ago, I decided to go off the SSRI that helped keep me alive and also made none of my clothes fit. As I emerged from the process of tapering off and finding a workable replacement — functional again, and also significantly thinner — I suddenly found myself confronting a series of conventional body hangups that I’d long considered myself intellectually immune to.

Prior to this year, I hadn’t known what I weighed since I was 15. The last time I’d been informed of the number was in a nutritionist’s pink-carpeted office, having lost a great deal of weight, also as a result of a prescription change. The change happened quickly, followed by a rush of compliments. “You look great!” a family friend cried out, seeing me across a store. I seethed, wanting to yell back that I could have cancer, or anorexia. It was wrong for him to assume I’d wanted this change. But what comments like his told me was that the desire to lose weight was one the world would loudly endorse.

His endorsement angered me, but once I had it, the desire to be smaller materialized. My weight loss had nothing to do with diet, but still I winnowed my appetite down until I was living off mostly berries. I lay on the kitchen floor reading my mom’s '70s-era macrobiotic cookbooks while my family ate meals steps away. Partly it was being dispatched to the nutritionist that snapped me out of it, and partly it was my defiance. Food hangups were time-consuming and, as a teenage girl, too boring a way of being weird.

I couldn’t remember my parents ever commenting on my body, or anyone else’s, in a qualitative way — positive or negative. They are opposed to objectification but what they seemed most opposed to is uninteresting conversation. That, in our family, was something worth disparaging.

And to a large extent, I still agree with them. Is there anything more tiresome than the public bemoaning of pounds gained or the celebration of those lost? When a friend declared, “I’ve gone down two sizes!” I managed a smile and “Congrats.” But something about the exchange rankled me, beyond that I found it boring. When women opened their own bodies to discussion and evaluation, I thought, they opened mine to it too.

I wasn’t better than the girls who tracked and announced the pounds they lost or gained. I’d simply learned very early that, for me, those pounds weren’t worth worrying about. For my many other problems — I could be messy, cold to people I loved, and prone to writing outraged complaint letters over insignificant things — I would never channel my self-hatred toward (or seek validation from) my physical form.

For me, counting calories and cutting out entire food groups (which I didn’t do), or eating a healthy vegetarian diet and walking everywhere (which I did), made no difference. Learning as a teenager that deprivation could not compete with my antidepressants was, in retrospect, a gift. I was spared college years assembling diet-friendly meals from the cafeteria’s meager offerings. I did not have any “goal” size determined by how easily I could zip a particular dress. That number was not something I could claim as either achievement or failure. It was out of my hands completely.

Six months after the summer of the berries, I became seriously depressed and went back on my previous antidepressant. I gained back every pound I lost and took that pill every night for the next 12 years.

Throughout college and my twenties, I gained and lost small amounts of weight whenever the ups and downs of brain chemistry necessitated a dosage change. I noted changes only vaguely, without confirmation, mostly by variation in jean size. I could shop at mainstream stores and I felt no more self-conscious than my friends. I eschewed bodily validation from romantic partners. Pat compliments and sitcom questions like “Do I look fat?” struck me as undignified and tedious, and I didn’t question their attraction to me. I went dancing and slept with new people and wore the same bad rompers as anyone else.

My body, so far as I could see, posed no limitations, whereas to be depressed — this I never forgot — did. And it was a decade before I became seriously depressed again. It did not help that I’d just moved to Iowa for graduate school, where I lived, for the first time, alone.

That first winter was not worse than the subsequent two I spent in the same city, but it remains in my mind the coldest and grayest. I hadn’t yet decorated my beige-walled apartment, where I lay in bed, dependent on a friend who lived next door to come beckon me for a run each morning. I didn’t want to try a new drug — depression often hampers any optimism that it might end — but nothing else I did, none of my good habits or best intentions, helped. I did jumping jacks to summon endorphins in dark hours, was determined to start each day with an earnest if quickly dashed belief that it might be better, and took a trip to California in the worst part of winter to sit in the sun with old friends. None of this made a difference.

The SSRI my doctor suggested was supposed to have one of the smallest chances of weight gain and work fast, unlike many, which can take weeks to become effective. The change to my mood was quick and striking. People remarked on it, my exuberant laughter, how present I seemed, my energy and activity in the months that followed. I spent the summer abroad and came back and hung pictures in my beige-walled apartment. And as I began to participate in the world again in a real way, my body became much bigger — bigger than any other medication had made it.

Because I never weighed myself, it took more than a year — a happy year — for me to acknowledge and then resent its single but visible side effect. There was a brief breakdown in a Goodwill dressing room during a confrontation with a velvet dress, but that alone didn’t convince me to change medications. Then a friend who was researching the fat acceptance movement asked me for my take on it, and I wondered, as I never would have in the past, if he thought my appearance meant I had some special perspective on it. Some kind of reverse body dysphoria, born more of disinterest than denial, made me imagine myself thinner than I was. I was surprised in pictures or that dressing room to learn I wasn’t.

It wasn’t until I went off hormonal birth control at the same time as several friends — spawning a new, shared enthusiasm for “listening to our bodies” — that I finally decided to change antidepressants. We’d begun analyzing food cravings with great seriousness and used apps to track our sleep. Skipping a party due to tiredness became a strident display of self-knowledge.

It was in pursuit of that greater, if abstract, closeness with my body — not some “goal weight” — that I went off the antidepressant that had made me happy and overweight. I still assumed that returning to my pre-SSRI weight, whatever that was, would require an untenable exchange, the forfeiture of a bearable existence for a different body. My apartment was decorated by then, but the walls remained beige, my running partner had moved away, and I did not want to lie sad in that bed again. Even as I cut my pills in half, then quarters, the bargain ultimately stood: It was most imperative that I be happy, even at the cost of my weight.

Treating depression is surprisingly improvisational, and mine is for some reason particularly hard to treat. It took months to taper off the culprit and find a workable replacement. During that time I vibrated with a kind of rage I’d later see was a variation on despair. I couldn’t sleep or focus, my vision at one point blurred, and everyone seemed much less likable, especially me.

But most people who’ve experienced it know that when depression begins to abate, the world literally looks different. One evening, four months after I stopped taking the drug that had made me gain weight and started on a provisional replacement, I noticed that the illuminated snowflakes hanging from the streetlights looked crisper, the people out walking their dogs after work especially content. I’d already lost a fairly significant amount of weight, but I had no sense of this. The effort required to maintain a normal life — going to work, packing lunches, posing as best I could as the friend I wanted to be — precluded any interest in the very thing that ostensibly I had undergone all this to achieve.

The change to my body became real the first time someone commented on it. I was wearing a black dress that admittedly felt different when I pulled it on. I went to a party that was identical to every party I’d been to in the last six months, except now the food tasted better and the wine flush felt good and everything suddenly seemed interesting, rather than infuriating. “Hey,” an acquaintance said to me, and I was excited to talk with her, to catch up on everything I’d missed.

“Have you lost a lot of weight?” she asked brightly.

Later I would feel questions were worse than compliments, because they required answers. I turned red and stumbled to formulate a response.

A friend with social graces intervened: “Well, you’re working out a lot?” she prompted me.

“I always have,” I snapped back.

“What are you doing?” people started asking. It was a confiding question, or a hopeful one. I did not have the answer they were looking for. Nobody cared what I was “doing” as a matter of health or they might have inquired when I was any size. Fitness isn’t limited to a particular weight range, and I’d always eaten a balanced diet, been active, and worked out most days. What I wanted these people to know, but resented having to tell them, was that in the matter of pounds, these habits made no difference for me.

I wanted to make my peers and the acquaintances I saw at parties feel ashamed for asking, and I often did. But causing them discomfort never eased mine. My jaw clenched, and when I blushed it was not from shy pride. I was angry that my desire for my body to be within my control had suddenly made it open to commentary. And the commentary was about how I looked in a dress, not that I could move through my life again as though I had any stake in it.

What was I doing? “I went off an antidepressant that was keeping me alive,” I wanted to say, but never did.

I was familiar with the concepts of body positivity, which my feminist friends embraced, and body negativity, which the rest of the world enforced. But it took losing a lot of weight very quickly to understand why body positivity had never resonated with me. Body positivity doesn’t reject our preoccupation with the body, it just broadens the range of acceptable bodies. What I really want is body neutrality: for none of it to matter. For our bodies to move through the world unremarked upon. Because if a body can be the object of support or approval or acceptance, even from within, it then can necessarily be the object of the opposite: distaste, disapproval, rejection.

But I found I didn’t know how to treat my own transforming body outside that framework of qualitative judgment. I didn’t know how to confront it in the mirror, narrower here, sharper there, without either that acceptance or rejection. The changes came rapidly and dramatically, until the neutrality I wanted to insist on seemed impossible.

Body positivity doesn’t reject our preoccupation with the body, it just broadens the range of acceptable bodies. What I really want is body neutrality: for none of it to matter.

One day, I woke up to different hipbones. I lay there, prodding them, startled at this new topography. I’d been recording my weight for maybe a month already, and the thrill of weight loss had not yet turned into neuroses. The changes were jarring but undeniably interesting. I marveled that my neck felt longer, but I wasn’t yet engrossed in nutritional information, or keeping mental tallies of my workouts.

As I turned on my side, to explore how my bones felt from this angle, I thought of my boyfriend. I was sleeping with a different body, and it now occurred to me that he was too.

“It is different,” he said, when I finally asked if he’d noticed the changes, “but I’m not sure I could say how.” I hadn’t been sure what answer I wanted, but his response was exactly the right one. It acknowledged a physical change that was just starting to preoccupy me. But the acknowledgment was neutral and, most importantly, solicited.

Elsewhere, from people who did not see me unclothed, I was not granted the same impartiality. One day, a guy I enjoyed bantering with pulled me aside. I was drinking a beer, vaguely wondering what the effect would be when I next weighed myself, if it would be comparable to the whiskey spike. It was strange to feel both lighter as I moved through my days and slightly slowed by the new awareness of that lightness, always conscious of what might affect it. An unusual expression of sincerity now appeared on the guy’s face.

“I’ve just been wanting to say that you’re looking very fit,” he said, peering at me. “I see you at the gym all the time, and I don’t say anything — you know, that’d be weird — but I know you’re doing a lot of work and that’s really hard. I just want to say it’s really impressive.”

He meant it kindly, but his earnestness suddenly struck me as worse than flirtation. Like the family friend at the grocery store years earlier, it presumed knowledge of my desires and motives.

“I hope you don’t mind me saying that,” he continued, clearly expecting that I wouldn’t.

“Actually,” I replied, somehow emboldened, “I think people should never comment on each other’s bodies.” Now it was him who blushed, defensive.

“I just felt that after two years I was entitled to say something.”

There’d been a time when I might be told I “looked great” if I dressed up or wore my hair differently. Now when people tell me I “look great,” I know it is not a general compliment but a euphemism. I know that nothing is different except this one thing. I know that by great, they mean I am less.

I’d long found it irritating when women said, “I don’t feel right in my body” as an excuse for wanting to lose weight. I interpreted it as a code for what really was driving them to Weight Watchers: They wanted to look different, conform to the standards of the world. I know that by the standards of the world — which have inevitably become my own — I look better now than I did before, but I wouldn’t say I feel more “right” in my body. It still feels tentative and foreign. But I do know that I feel slightly more right in the world.

What angered me most about the newfound attention was how little it really had to do with me. I’d rejected bodily weirdness as a teenager, but I realized few other people had. They looked at me and saw their own diets, regimens, or goal weights. Absorbed in this projection, they didn’t notice the change in my mood or how quick I was to laugh again, that I was really, finally alive.

Though I resent knowing that my body is seen, I am unavoidably relieved to know that it is seen with approval. And it is hard to ignore that what I must have been experiencing during the years when I was more blissfully unaware of observation was not a polite berth with which all people regarded bodies. What I mistook for body neutrality, it seems, was something unvoiced, a silent judgment, or invisibility at best.

The blackest I felt all year was in early November, when I yelled the title of Ta-Nehisi Coates's book, Between the World and Me, in the general direction of Claudia Rankine. Ms Rankine – multiple award-winning poet and thinker – was sitting onstage at Sage Gateshead, thinking and speaking about race at the BBC Radio 3 Free Thinking Festival.

"I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background," wrote Zora Neale Hurston in 1928, and as I sat in that hall in Gateshead, one of only a few people of colour there, watching a black woman speak with humour, authority, and intelligence, I felt so black. In the moment I called out the fifth and final word of the title, I felt almost solidly opaque – the blackest black I could possibly be.

In 2015 there was #BoycottStarWarsVII. There was “Miley, what’s good?” There was an Ava DuVernay Barbie. There was an almost Serena Slam. There was Sir Lenny Henry and his roll call of giants on the MOBOs stage. For our sins, there was even a Rachel Dolezal. It was, by any measure, a pretty black year. Even when (or especially when) blackness was being questioned, and asked to defend itself.

Lenny Henry, Kascion Franklin and Cecilia Noble in Danny and The Human Zoo

Adrian Rogers / BBC / Red Productions

Was there a different tenor to blackness in 2015? Perhaps. Was there something especially 2015-ish in the way John Boyega tweeted: "Inaccurate. Stereotypical. NOT my story" about a newspaper story on him and his Peckham beginnings? I saw so many people trying to claim their own narratives – and by extension themselves – back. This year, I saw a lot of black people – regular black people – just saying they were done trying to persuade (white) people that they were human, that they bled the same, and that life for them is often a demonstrably unfair business.

I saw a lot more calls for self-care: encouragement for people of colour to seek professional help for the upkeep of good mental health, to take time off, to be kind to themselves. Was there something particularly enjoyable about a whole bunch of black people talking to one another without a handy glossary to explain ourselves to other people this year? A determination to be carefree wherever possible sounds like an oxymoron but it wasn't, not in practice.

Pantheon

The second blackest I felt in 2015 was at several thousand feet somewhere over Canada, watching Bessie, Dee Rees's biopic of the blues legend Bessie Smith. When Bessie (Queen Latifah) turned the conventions of the "paper bag test" on their head for the casting of her show, I cheered audibly in Seat 32K. I felt as black as midnight, as obsidian. As black as jollof rice and plantain washed down with a Supermalt, while seated on a balmy veranda.

I felt black and moisturised when I read so many great writers this year: Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Sara Bivigou, Karen Onojaife, Danielle Henderson, Syreeta McFadden, Doreen St. Félix, Musa Okwonga, Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Carvell Wallace, Zadie Smith, Bridget Minamore... and so many others (including a good number writing under amusing pseudonyms on Tumblr and elsewhere). There weren't nearly enough black voices (it feels sometimes like there never will be) but there seemed to be so many more than usual, yes? In books in 2015, my blackness resided in so many I either never finished, or never had the time to pick up: new work from American writers like Mat Johnson (Loving Day), Paul Beatty (The Sellout), and Margo Jefferson (Negroland). I felt black when I asked for suggestions of nonfiction titles by black British women and got almost no replies. There was blackness to be felt in that yawning absence too.

I watched Selma at the cinema twice – dry-eyed and serious the first time, and with great racking sobs the second – and felt black as hell as David Oyelowo walked across that bridge arm in arm with Carmen Ejogo. And I watched Dope, and felt black in a different way, a way that felt on display and grossly commodified. I felt black and surprised when I watched Jurassic World, and (SPOILER) the black guy made it to the end. I felt specifically like a black woman during the Domina scenes in Magic Mike XXL. I felt bemused and black when I watched Trainwreck and found myself cheering for LeBron James even as I hated almost every other element of that movie. I felt giddily, effervescently, and extravagantly black watching Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Nate Parker fall in love in Beyond the Lights. I anticipate feeling something similar when Star Wars: The Force Awakens rolls around.

On television, my melanin shone brighter when I watched Danny and the Human Zoo and saw Dee Dee (Cherrelle Skeete) shove her police truncheon into the soft underside of a racist's jaw. I felt awkward and black when Tracey (Michaela Coel) did pretty much anything in Chewing Gum. I felt black and vulnerable as Zawe Ashton's Katherine failed over and over and stifled her emotions in Not Safe for Work. I felt resplendently black when I saw GIFs from The Wiz Live! on Twitter. I felt incredulously black as I rolled my eyes when The X Factor judge Rita Ora let down a black contestant with the words "you're a strong, independent, gorgeous woman..." I felt black and loved when Uzo won her Emmy, and Viola won hers, and Taraji and Kerry really fucking cheered. I felt black and joyous and pretty as a picture every time Solange stepped out of her house.

Poet Claudia Rankine

Lynzy Billing / BuzzFeed

There seemed to be an uptick in people decrying the favourite disclaimer for black victims of structural state violence: "[Dead or Abused Black Person] was no angel/saint" as a means of justifying their treatment. So in the aftermath of the death of Sandra Bland, people tweeted things like "If I die in police custody, I want you to know I didn't kill myself." I felt black and bleak as more and more names became hashtags this year.

I felt black and scared when I saw the name of Sheku Bayoh, a Sierra Leonean father of two who died after he was arrested and pinned down by police officers. I felt black and quietly terrified when I saw that Bayoh's name was followed by the words "Kirkcaldy" and "Scotland". I felt black and weary when I read about the mass shooting in Charleston. I felt black and Muslim and diasporic and heavy when news about death and suffering came in from Nigeria, Mali, Syria, Libya, Burundi, France, and beyond. I felt black and exhausted by the waves of negative immigration dispatches from across Europe. And I alternated between feeling black and indignant (which I often was) and black and hopeful (which I have to be), lest everything unravel.

I felt black and possible when I reread Maya Angelou and when I listened to Kamasi Washington's saxophone. I felt black and British and excited when I saw the photography of Adama Jalloh, and again when I heard Nao's "Bad Blood" for the first time. I felt black and delighted when I watched Lady Leshurr sing "brush your teeth!" with a robust Brum accent on her smash hit "Queen's Speech 4". I felt black and transcendent when I listened to Benjamin Clementine singing "Edmonton" in a church in east London. I felt black and Nigerian when I read actor John Boyega say: "I'm grounded in who I am, and I am a confident black man. A confident, Nigerian, black, chocolate man. I’m proud of my heritage, and no man can take that away from me."

Queen Latifah as Bessie Smith in HBO's Bessie.

Frank Masi / HBO

I felt black and carefree when Janet released new music, and again when Missy Elliott did. I felt black and proud when I watched I Love Lucy and Bekka and Ackee and Saltfish. I felt black and so very London when I watched Kayode Ewumi's Hood Documentary, when Uncle_Mos said "Izz a lie!" in this sketch, and when I clicked on any one of Face in the News' videos. I felt black and creative while watching Dear Jesus and what felt like a million wildly inventive and hilarious Vines created by young black people the world over.

I felt black and oddly moved when the "diverse" emoji rocked up, forcing me to examine the politics of choosing between skin tone 4 and skin tone 5 to represent myself. I felt bewildered and black when some people got upset Serena Williams was named Sports Illustrated's Sportsperson of the Year, over a racehorse. And by the way, was there something in Serena's continued smiling domination of her sport, even when she wasn't smiling? I felt black and infinite as I joined in with the rest of black Twitter on countless hashtag games, laughing as we saw ourselves in one another. It is important, as Gene Demby wrote this year, to remember that blackness is not merely "a parade of calamities and disadvantage". I felt very black when I laughed – and I laughed a lot in 2015.

2016 will throw up any number of opportunities to find new ways of being and feeling black. I'm ready, though. 2015 gave me a lot of practice.

A scene from Snervous.

snervous.com

The other day, the 26-year-old YouTube star Tyler Oakley had just finished two weeks of shooting season 28 (yes, 28) of the CBS reality show The Amazing Race, and was on the phone doing a series of interviews to promote the documentary Snervous, which chronicles his year on tour with his live show, and was released digitally on Dec. 11. "I'm so delirious from the race — I'm so scatterbrained!" he exclaimed, in his characteristically chipper Michigan accent. "This is, like, my first day back. All I can think about is like, running around the countries that I've never been to in my life. It's still on my mind. I was having race dreams last night."

If you were to look for an avatar of what fame means in 2015, you would probably conjure Oakley's bespectacled, impish visage, with his shock of blond hair sticking straight up and his mouth usually in a smile that is just this side of a smirk, from one of his hundreds of YouTube videos (his channel has 7.8 million followers) or maybe the cover of his bestselling book of essays, Binge, which came out in October and reached #2 on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction. There, his disembodied face is floating in a sea of shiny hard candy wrappers, his eyes squinched shut, his teeth clutching a single wrapped piece of hard candy between his perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth.

Simon & Schuster

Or you could look to Snervous, about Oakley's life on the road with his show Tyler Oakley's Slumber Party, a kind of Pee-Wee's Playhouse meets Ellen DeGeneres in which he dresses up in a onesie and entertains a screaming audience of mostly teenage girls (and some of their parents) for an hour or so. There's lots of audience participation and frequent appearances (occasionally live, usually remotely) from his mother, whom he calls Queen Jackie.

His tone, whether on his videos or in print or on the big screen, is relentlessly upbeat. But more important, there's always the gee-whiz tone of "I can't believe all these great things are happening to lil' ole me!" that seems to be a prerequisite for popularity beyond YouTube. "I've been really taken aback by the success" of Binge, Oakley said. "I saw that it was on the bestseller list for the last 5 or 6 weeks, and it blows my mind! It never crossed my mind that that could happen. I thought maybe a lot of people will buy it the first week and it'll probably die down, but it really hasn't. So I feel really lucky that people are enjoying it and spreading the word about it and reading it in book clubs. Like that's crazy to me."

youtube.com

After all, on YouTube, success is predicated on accessibility and "authenticity" — here I am, broadcasting from my bedroom straight to YOU, and doesn't it feel like we are BEST FRIENDS? — and there is an expectation among fans that their stars will continue to be accessible once they've expanded the purview of their fame.The Oakley creed is summed in Snervous up by a fan in Ireland who's waiting for him to arrive at the venue before his show. "He reminds people to be the best version of themselves they can be, not a version of somebody else," she says earnestly. So for Oakley — who is gay, but is also an attractive cis white male, with all of those attendant privileges — it's important to amplify the idea that he relates to being the outcast, the loner, the kid who got bullied, even while he's interviewing Michelle Obama and walking red carpets.

Because no matter what, "relatability" has become the coin of the realm for an audience that's mostly under 25, largely white (if the audience shots in Snervous are any indication), and able to afford a $40 ticket. Oakley knows that if he walks the red carpet at the Snervous premiere in Los Angeles wearing an Armani tux, he'd better put it on Instagram with a self-deprecating comment.

Instagram: @tyleroakley

Oakley has been making videos since 2007, when he turned on his webcam in his freshman dorm room at Michigan State. By now, he's part of a coterie of longtime YouTube stars who have managed to amplify their popularity on the video platform (Oakley has 7.8 million subscribers to his channel) by publishing books and appearing on broadcast TV and going on tour — all activities that are also potentially much more lucrative. The last couple years in particular have seen a spate of bestselling books published by YouTube stars including Grace Helbig, Mamrie Hart, My Drunk Kitchen's Hannah Hart, the Swedish gamer PewDiePie, the British lifestyle vlogger Zoella, and the British duo Dan and Phil. They're all white, they're all conventionally attractive, they are all in their 20s or early 30s. If YouTube was supposed to democratize entertainment, it's ended up looking a lot like... the rest of the entertainment industry.

H. Hart, Helbig, PewDiePie: APImages (3) / M. Hart, M. Hart, Dan and Phil, Zoella: Getty (3)"

Which makes some of Oakley's earlier videos especially cringeworthy — in particular, a 2008 video "Why Diversity Sucks," that he's since taken off his official YouTube channel (though it's still easily found online). In it, he holds up a brochure labeled Birth Control Facts that has a photo of a diverse group of young people on the cover, and proceeds to go on a "funny" rant: "Now, don't get me wrong. Diversity? It's top notch. When it's so obviously and blatantly forced, it makes me want to eat my own shit." The video seems to have gone relatively unnoticed until 2012, when he started getting called out for it on Tumblr. His initial response was defensive; the black comedian Franchesca Leigh, a friend of Oakley's, wrote on Tumblr that Oakley told her he was "too bored/exhausted to defend himself based on being witch-hunted regarding videos and tweets from 4 years ago."

Almost a year later, in November 2013, he wrote a Tumblr post called "On Privilege" that many read as a response to the controversy: "I guess another ah-ha moment is realizing that privilege is having your feelings hurt by being called racist or sexist or transphobic or problematic, but not actually having to face racism or sexism or transphobia day to day." Still, he seemed reluctant to address the diversity video specifically, writing that "A lot of things I’ve been accused of being problematic for happened years and years and years ago, but I still wanted to keep you in the loop, so thanks for getting through this mess of a blog post."

What felt "authentic" when Oakley was 19 feels cringeworthy now. And at the very least, he's refined his talking points — and acknowledging that, whether he signed on for it or not, he's a role model, with all of the (yes) privilege that entails. "I never went into it thinking, oh I'm gonna do this YouTube thing to become a role model, or whatever. But it's something that I would never want to deny, and just because it's not my intention doesn't mean it's the reality. So I try my darndest to be my best self and be really honest and open and say I will fuck up, and please hold me accountable and let's grow together."

Oakley is emphatic that that growth will continue to happen on YouTube, no matter what other platforms he embraces; in Snervous, he says, "My next step is adding things to what I'm doing, not leaving YouTube behind." But when I asked Oakley what was coming up for him in 2016, he was coy. "2015 was like, packed from January. 2016 is simultaneously open and packed — but I'm trying to keep 2016 open as possible so I can do weird, crazy, kooky stuff. But big stuff is coming up also. Big stuff that I can't say."

Like maybe TV, I asked? I could hear his manager laughing in the background. "Who knooooooows," said Oakley. "Who knows."

One of my earliest memories is the feeling that my cheeks were very, very hot. Everything was in slow motion, and the feeling that I’d done something really bad was stronger than ever. I’d opened my grandmother’s drawer, a well-stocked pharmacy, and eaten all the candy in there. I had a fever, gave my family chills, and my mouth tasted like chemicals for days.

My grandmother took — at least — eight aspirins a day. She downed them with a Coke and an endless chain of Raleigh cigarettes. It was her way of coping. Divorced mother of seven, victim of domestic violence, bored: the cliché of a Mexican housewife, through and through. They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and, as one might expect, my mother is also addicted to pills.

There is an anecdote that perfectly sums up my mother’s predicament. When she was a teenager, as she was leaving on a school trip that involved traveling by night, her mom — my grandmother — opened her mouth and gave her two roofies. That way she wouldn’t have trouble sleeping. Yes, Rohypnol, the same drug Zach Galifianakis uses in The Hangover to knock out his out-of-control friends. After that, “Rohypnolating” became a common word in her life and, therefore, in mine.

Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed

Living with and accepting a mother with addiction problems is an extreme sport. If we learn about love directly from our parents, how could I learn about loving others — and myself — from someone who needed sedatives to get to sleep every night? How could I learn the true meaning of happiness, if happiness came unconsciously, with side effects? Plus, Rohypnol wasn’t the only permanent visitor in my household: There were pills for indigestion, migraine, and colic; Bach flower remedies for a more natural approach; and so on. Rx was a constant. Grandma’s pharmacy opened more branches. Fortunately, I implemented my own safety measures: No way would I ever take another candy cocktail again. The problem was that the pharmacy in my mother’s drawer was stocked with no oversight. Prescriptions were a joke. First-hand knowledge of the effects of drugs was worth more than the opinion of any doctor.

School helped. I could see how ~normal~ kids lived, and I secretly envied them. I wanted the type of relationships they had with their moms, with their families, the way they related to others: their confidence. I learned how to behave from them, from my teachers, and from the moments when I had functional parents. I floated through childhood, without really noticing that the steam was building in the pressure cooker of my life. As I neared adolescence, weekends brought reality into focus. “Mom’s tired because she couldn’t sleep,” my father would say. “Let’s take your little sister out and bring back some lunch for her.” Our afternoons were fairly uneventful, until we came home, a catastrophe unfolding, one we tried not to acknowledge with words. Emotions filled the silence instead. The memory of going into her room still feels like a punch in the stomach. The smell of stale sheets, closed curtains, speaking to her from the dark, sensing her tears without needing to see them. My fingers tremble as I write this even after all these years.

Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed

“Tired” was replaced by more grown-up terms like “insomnia” before arriving at “depressed.” Depression led to the psychiatrist, and the psychiatrist led to more pills. My family grew. Now I shared a home with Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, Valium. Many came and went. They were there for the most complicated moments of my life. “Mom has to go to the psychiatrist.” “The psychiatrist makes me crazy.” “I need a prescription to get my pills.” “I’m going to have to see another doctor.” “Mom and Dad are getting a divorce.”

Like many teenagers, I found refuge in music. Heavy metal understood my anxiety. Guitars shredding, lyrics conjuring the suffering of war, anti-religious and always defiant messages were my best friends. My guitar and my amp managed to drown out the outside noise: yelling and suffering. I hid from my broken home under my headphones, in my black clothes and long hair. I buried all that resentment in a very deep place and decided to abandon my mother and my sister. I went to live with my father, and suddenly, everything seemed to get better: my relationship with my mom, my ability to relate to other human beings. My deep sadness was disappearing…or so it seemed.

As we grow up, we learn to judge. It’s inevitable. We do this on the basis of our newly acquired “personal” values. We develop an ethic, get better at choosing the people we surround ourselves with, and somehow we learn to see things in black and white. Distance allowed me to judge my mother by the harshest standards. It’s easy to judge someone who seems perfect on the outside, but inside is going through hell. I guess that's why depression is so complex. As much as people tried to explain it to me, I never fully understood. You have to learn the hard lessons for yourself.

The depression the psychiatrist had diagnosed was changing shape. A misstep in an aerobics class at the gym became a spinal injury. Diagnosis: herniated disc. My conclusion was immediate: She caused it herself, a pretext to stay depressed. It was logical, the perfect excuse to close the curtains, stay in bed, and make the whole world stop: “If anybody asks, I’m not here.” And in my simplest, most immature form, I responded with resentment and fury. It was a good thing we mostly kept our distance, but separation never breaks family ties. I’ve never been able to stop feeling for my mother. She never stops affecting me.

Naturally, the spinal injury brought more doctors, more pills, more reasons to stay in bed, shut the windows, dedicate her days to the TV lineup of El Canal de las Estrellas. The pharmacy expanded its inventory: muscle relaxants, tranquilizers, sleeping pills, pills to go to the bathroom, antidepressants, medicines for gastritis, orthopedic braces, heating pads. Pains, laments, more depression. Her back problem lasted years. Every birthday, every Mother's Day, every Christmas served as a marker that she was getting worse. There was no way for us to help. The only way to make ourselves useful was to take her to the hospital so they could inject her spine with increasingly powerful muscle relaxants. That was the case until nothing had an effect anymore and the doctors determined they had to operate. Just a fairly simple surgery, and she would be “like new.” My sister and I saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Finally her back would feel better. Her attitude toward life would change. We'd have the mother we always wanted. Blessed innocence.

Andrew Richard / BuzzFeed

Around that time I began seeing a psychologist. I had resisted going to therapy on more than one occasion, but halfway through my twenties it finally made sense. A place to talk to someone, to explain why I would suddenly feel so alone, why I was sabotaging my life, and why I had become this arrogant, negative person. The first thing my therapist asked about was — you guessed it — my relationship with my mother! And… you guessed it again: I considered abandoning therapy then and there.

“Thank you, but I’ve seen all those movies where you end up paying millions just for the therapist to insist that all your problems are your parents’ fault. Thanks, but no thanks.” I resisted the first few months, probably the hardest time. I talked about all the problems in my life, my desire to get out of radio and to leave my job, my resentment toward society in general. Gradually, my therapist was helping me to talk about what I didn’t address: my relationship with my mother. “Your mom is not going to change,” she repeated session after session. “You are not going to save her.” She demanded I say it to myself. “You cannot choose your mother, but you can choose how you're going to relate to her for the rest of your life. First, you need to resolve your relationship with her.”

I had to stop seeing her. One day I took her to lunch and explained that some time would pass without us seeing each other. Her eyes filled with tears, and she immediately offered me an apology for so many years. She opened the door to a long process of reconciliation and forgiveness. That day I cried all the tears I hadn’t cried as a teenager. To explain them, I yelled, scolded, and blamed her for everything blameworthy. I left, determined not to see her for months. But two events exacerbated the situation and put my relationship with my mother in shock. I had to take her to check herself into a psychiatric hospital. She was there a little over a month. For a week I didn’t go to work. The work of accepting reality became my priority. I started writing. I read Bret Easton Ellis like crazy. I faced it as well as I could. Months later I got a call from my sister. “Mom had an accident. She fell off her bike and destroyed her face. She’s stable.” You can imagine how hard it was for me to visit her, to confront a living metaphor.

It was not until some months after the accident that I finally realized how angry I was with her, and how badly I needed to put things into perspective. All the rage, the fury began to emerge. I went through all the moods and experienced all the feelings that a person can feel: from resentment to hatred, anger, frustration, indifference, enthusiasm, affection, empathy, fear, and, of course, sadness.

It took me months to understand that feeling sad for someone else is OK and that nothing we do or fail to do can change their situation. The process caused me dozens of emotional setbacks, ups and downs in my way of dealing with life, until I discovered the true meaning of one key word: acceptance. Finally, after so many years, I freed myself, I let go and learned to love unconditionally. Bit by bit, my hatred, frustration, and resentment were slipping away and disappearing. Along the way I found a love I’d forgotten, and a respect I’d lost.

Being able to discuss my family situation honestly was the first positive sign. Seeing my mother without feeling stressed or anxious about her behavior was the second. The third, and most important, was precisely what saved my life the first time: vomiting. Getting it all out. Speaking in a calm and orderly way, with confidence and assertiveness. Explaining the “why” behind my situation. Returning all the behaviors that didn’t belong to me. Phew. It really felt good.

When I took all my grandmother’s pills, they made me vomit. They made me bring up everything that didn’t belong inside me and which by accident — unavoidable accident — I happened to eat. This is precisely what acceptance is: knowing that things happen in spite of us. It is returning what does not belong to us. It is being responsible for our own lives. Today, I talk to my mother, I visit her from time to time, and we talk like adults, happy to see and embrace each other. As mother and son. She acts from her problems and I from mine, knowing that the pills will still be there until she finds a way to help herself.

This post was translated from Spanish by Kristina Marie Fullerton Rico.

According to their social media PDA, at least, actors Holland Taylor (age 72) and Sarah Paulson (age 40), are ridiculously, deeply in love. My colleague Sarah Karlan recently rounded up the sweetest tweets exchanged between the newly public couple. The post, which went viral, has garnered a largely mixed response, but with a definitive tilt toward Aw-They’re-So-Cute-I’m-Glad-They’re-Happy. I’ve seen nothing but positively gleeful reactions from the lesbian faction, who are thrilled that Peggy Peabody from the L Word is gaying it up IRL. But there are also plenty of people who are uncomfortable with Taylor and Paulson’s 32-year age difference. One of the most-liked Facebook comments on the article reads: “This is really gross. Not because they are gay, but because Sarah Paulson is dating the crypt keeper.”

Depictions of significant lesbian age differences were mostly the stuff of subculture before this year, when a number of films pushed the phenomenon into the mainstream spotlight. Three films released in 2015 that centered on lesbian characters — Paul Weitz’s Grandma, Peter Sollett’s Freeheld, and most recently, Todd Haynes’ Carol — all involved intergenerational romantic relationships. None were in wide release, but both Freeheld and Carol had big distribution backing, and Carol, which just got nominated for five Golden Globes, is well en route to mass critical acclaim. This year, a whole lot of people have watched lesbians of varying age differences fall in love — and some witnesses have been nothing short of scandalized. That these age differences are oftentimes considered gross or salacious is pretty galling, since we’re all quite comfortable seeing older men date much younger women: Take all the James Bond films. Take Emma Stone, Scarlett Johansson, and Jennifer Lawrence’s entire careers. Everybody’s cool with women dating up, so long as the older person they’re dating is a man.

Greta Martela and Nina Chaubal are a queer couple with a 22-year age difference.

Miley Cyrus for the Happy Hippie Foundation’s Happy Hippie Presents: #InstaPride”

Increased visibility for intergenerational lesbian relationships doesn’t only shed light on the public discomfort they inspire — these depictions also reflect the real-life lesbians who’ve been dating like this since the dawn of always. According to 2014 data compiled by the Williams Institute, 31% of married same-sex female couples have a 5- to 10-year age difference, compared to 21% of married different-sex couples; for 10-plus years, those numbers are 16% and 8%, respectively. Basically: This isn’t a new, or rare, phenomenon.

While naysayers insist that relationships like Holland Taylor and Sarah Paulson’s don't make them uncomfortable for an explicitly gay reason, significant age differences between lesbians aren’t actually divorced from their queerness at all — these differences are a nontraditional aspect of coupledom borne from queerness itself. Women who date significantly up or significantly down radically subvert heteronormative standards for what’s appropriate when it comes to sex and love.

Getty Images

Misunderstandings with warped oedipal undertones often plague queer women in intergenerational relationships. Once, the author and poet Eileen Myles was checking out at a store with a younger woman she was dating at the time, when the cashier asked her, “How are you doing today, Mom?”

Myles, who recounted the incident during a recent phone call, groans. “You want to put a stake through the guy’s heart.”

Myles, 66, has been romantically involved with a number of women a few decades her junior. The epigram which opens Grandma, Paul Weitz’s 2015 film about a gay woman in her sixties and her teenage granddaughter, is a quote from Myles: “Time passes. That’s for sure.” Myles is clearly a model upon which Weitz crafted his titular character, played with some serious panache by Lily Tomlin: She’s a lapsed academic; she’s a poet; and she’s dating a younger woman, played by 40-year-old Judy Greer. In the newly released season two of Transparent, there's another distinctly Myles-like older dyke poet character (Myles and Transparent's creator, Jill Soloway, are currently dating), who, when hanging around with a younger woman, deals with an awkward Is-that-your-girlfriend-or-your-daughter mixup.

Sarah Paulson and Holland Taylor.

Getty images

M, a 30-year-old living in Los Angeles with her partner, T, who’s 19 years older, says they also receive some scrutiny when they’re out in public. (Both women requested not to be named for this story, to protect the sensitive nature of T’s professional life.) Strangers are always trying to figure out how they’re related. T has a 5-year-old son; when the whole family is out together, M is sometimes assumed to be the nanny. Race, too, is a contributing factor. “As a mixed black woman,” M says, “that plays into [other people’s] assumptions whenever [T] walks into the room.”

M finds that when she does get prying age-related questions, they tend to be from straight men, who will openly question her and T’s compatibility. “I’ve been shocked at the audacity of that,” says M. “I don’t go around asking people about their relationships. Straight men think that’s OK to ask.”

Greta Martela, 46, and Nina Chaubal, 24, also say their relationship gets misinterpreted. The two started hanging out as just friends a few years ago, beginning with a trip to get their nails done. It was Chaubal’s first time at a salon, when both women were in the early stages of their gender transitions; a lot of traditionally feminine activities still had the sparkling sheen of newness.

Eileen Myles and Jill Soloway.

Charley Gallay / Getty Images

“If we’d been the same age, we would have hooked up that first weekend,” says Martela. “I didn’t want her to feel taken advantage of later on. I just wanted to hang back and let her be a young woman in the city.” Both women were living in the Bay Area at the time, working as software engineers. They joked about their jobs and Dungeons & Dragons. “I hadn’t had that close a friendship in years, honestly,” Martela adds. “We just kind of got each other, a right away thing. Being older, I realize how rare it is to really mesh with somebody like that.” Their friendship inevitably evolved. This past March, they got married, and in April they moved to Chicago to build a life together.

But they’re rarely read as the wives that they are. “We’re an interracial couple, a queer couple — when we’re out, people don’t normally make the connection,” says Chaubal.

“It’s that awkward thing socially,” adds Martela. “Like, ‘Oh, is that your daughter?’ Ahhhhh. Stop.”

“Power exchanges between women are always pathologized,” Myles says. In an intergenerational lesbian relationship, according to public perception, “[the older woman] becomes the mom — predatory, pathologized — and the younger person becomes someone who was abused, someone with with family issues. On and on.” Myles thinks that public discomfort with significant age differences between queer women boils down to discrediting these women’s agency. “Female power is at the heart of this.”

That an older lesbian is often assumed the Mother, either literally or figuratively, aligns with the ways we archetypically assign identities to women of a certain age. Mothers, and grandmothers even more so, are not usually afforded the status of sexiness. When internet commenters decried Sarah Paulson and Taylor Holland’s relationship, there were a lot of people who assumed that Paulson “could do better” — which certainly has nothing to do with Holland’s talent and intellect (which are automatically called into question anyway) and everything to do with her 72-year-old body.

“Women become invisible in the aging process,” says Myles. “We’re afraid of aging because of what will happen to us — we’ll be erased, become stupid and slow. The great female disaster is aging.”

With different-sex couples, it’s far more common to see a guy as the older figure in an intergenerational relationship, since an older man is a sugar daddy at worst; a suave, handsome, savvy gentleman at best. A woman, however, should she enter into a relationship with a much younger person, is desperate, sloppy, a cougar, an anomaly — quite possibly a fetish.

Queer people, as they are wont to do, often upset these cultural scripts. While same-sex female couples with significant age differences are more common than different-sex ones, same-sex male relationships are actually the most common of all: 25% of unmarried queer male couples have an age gap of 10 or more years between them. Though gay men dating intergenerationally can cause stirs (when 58-year-old Stephen Fry, the English actor, married stand-up comic Elliott Spencer this year, who’s 30 years his junior, there were certainly some titters), it is older women, in particular, who are scorned for dating younger — regardless of their sexuality. As Amy Schumer and Julia Louis-Dreyfus will tell you, every woman will face her last fuckable day all too soon.

The Williams Institute

But queer women, at least, benefit from a certain level of liberation from traditional beauty ideals, which privilege the young and nubile. Many lesbians are capable of looking at other women in ways straight men have not been taught to look. “A female face or body gets more interesting in age: cooler, deeper,” says Myles. “[Their] style, affectations, attitudes. … Every single one of them has an eros.”

Whereas film and television have hammered home that straight women’s sex appeal has an expiration date, the dearth of mainstream queer representation before the past decade can almost seem like a backward kind of blessing. “We don’t have so many years of media telling us what our relationships should look like,” says Chaubal.

Of course, queer people, who are freed from certain heteronormative restrictions, are not similarly liberated from the beauty and behavior standards established by white-privileging capitalism. “When you look at the queer women's community in the big cities, [it’s all] young white girls,” says M. In those circles, there are most definitely standards: “Everyone has to look a certain way, a certain kind of queer, with their Tegan and Sara haircuts.”

The 19-year age difference between her and her partner, T, serves as its own kind of deliverance. “We don’t have to look a certain way, because we already don’t fit a certain box.” That’s because — even though significant age differences are more common among queers than they are among straight people — they’re still outside of the norm. Myles names the phenomenon: Dating much younger women has led to the experience of “being treated as doubly queer.”

Wilson Webb / The Weinstein Company

But even in gender-role-defying, expectation-smashing relationships like these, there are unavoidable obstacles.

“There’s a very big age difference between us, which I’m sure shocks a lot of people, and it startles me,” said Holland Taylor on WYNC’s Death, Sex & Money, referencing her relationship with Paulson. “But as they say, ‘If she dies, she dies.’”

This is something T and M think about too.

“I remind [M] all the time,” T says. “I’m probably gonna die before her.”

“And I’m like, ‘Let’s just not talk about that right now,’” says M.

“We don’t have to look a certain way, because we already don’t fit a certain box.”

For Martela and Chaubal, their worries about the future led them to seriously consider leaving the country. Martela can’t imagine herself ever being in a financial situation that would allow her to retire in the U.S. They were already moving out of San Francisco, since it had become too expensive. They became enchanted with the idea of relocating to Sweden, where Martela planned to work for five years and then retire. “When you get older, they take care of you — which doesn’t happen in our country,” says Chaubal.

They ended up deciding on Chicago instead, where they together started Trans Lifeline, a hotline for transgender people in need. But they haven’t stopped worrying about the decades to come. “Because of the age difference, I’ll be an old lady when she’s still relatively young,” says Martela.

“We don’t talk about it much because it’s kind of depressing,” says M. “But that’s the plan, to stay together. I’m often reminded that we might not be here during the same time.”

T points out that no matter what happens, she’ll live on with in her son, who’s now 5. “He’ll be around, so [M] and I can keep cruising together.” The couple are also thinking about how to integrate a new baby into their busy schedules.

In the end, despite uncertainties, some relationships are worth fighting for. “Nina’s gonna be my best friend for the rest of my life,” says Martela. “I expect our roles will shift depending on when we are in our lives. And I think that’s beautiful.”

One of the particularly beautiful things about those roles, says Martela, is that they aren’t automatically demarcated by gender (the Older Male Breadwinner/the Younger Female Homemaker). Martela was primarily in straight relationships before transitioning in her forties. “To be free of the heteronormative garbage that goes along with that is the most freeing thing in my life.”

Right after Martela and Chaubal moved in together, Martela lost her job. It was the first time in her career she’d faced significant unemployment, while trying to stay afloat in a male-dominated field. She was out of work for a year. “That would have been really difficult in a hetero relationship, but in a queer one it wasn’t a problem,” Martela says. “Nina took care of me.”

Miley Cyrus for the Happy Hippie Foundation

While significant age differences between queer women remain a statistical norm, Myles has seen the landscape shift since she first arrived in New York City in the '70s. Then, she saw a good deal of intergenerational dating; now, there’s an “intensifying of difference” as lesbians keep to their own insular peer groups, since they don’t necessarily need or want to surround themselves exclusively with other queers — we’re more welcome in mainstream society than ever before. In today’s dating age, lesbians are finding one another on apps, unconsciously swiping according to a limited set of preferences, rather than picking each other up at queer bars and bookshops (where people’s ages are not as immediately apparent as they would be, say, in online profiles).

Lily Tomlin in Grandma.

Sony Pictures Classics

Increasing queer acceptance is far from a bad thing, and apps also have plenty to offer (full disclosure: I met my girlfriend on Tinder). Social media, particularly for queer teens, has been nothing short of a godsend. “We have a higher level of seeing now,” Myles says of the internet. But, for better or worse, these changing trends in interaction do mark a distinct cultural shift in the way queers — particularly of different generations — are interacting with one another, up close and in person, in the post-marriage-equality age.

Dating isn’t the only way to build bridges between two queer eras, but it’s one of the simplest and most poignant. Especially in a time when the amorphous idea of Queer Community — provided that’s even a thing, or ever has been — seems to be losing relevance and power, relationships between women of different ages are small and intimate microcosms of intergenerational queer connection.

“I’m thrilled about what I learn from women and queers younger than me,” says Myles.

Chaubal, for her part, also says she’s learned plenty from Martela. “We’ve been traveling a lot recently, so we decided to build ourselves a little camper trailer,” she says. “Some time many years ago, Greta used to be a metalworker. So there’s stuff we’re doing right now that’s possible because of experiences she’s had in her life. And that is really cool.”

Martela clarifies that the learning goes both ways, even though she’s the older person in their relationship. “There are areas in which [Chaubal] is an expert. If she says something’s a bad idea, I’m not gonna do it. We are both experts at different things.”

The idea of honoring women’s expertise is, ridiculously, rather a radical one, especially when you take the stereotypes of womanhood at either end of a lifetime into account. Young women are supposed to be silly and naive and vain; older women are supposed to be slow and boring and clueless. When one dates the other, she’s actively choosing to thwart such reductive expectations.

“I know how to fight for what I want, to say no, when to wait,” says Myles. “I’ve been in time for 65 years. I have a lot to share. That supposedly should only be in my teaching life — that’s not the case. It’s amazing on both sides to be able to share the world from different angles. It’s lively. It’s hot.”