Weekend Reading

So, change of pace from my usual belly-aching; weekend reading recommendations.

First, this article from The Guardian is a beautiful critique of the whole "wellness blogger" fad and why most of it is pretty much bunk;  unqualified people with no formal training are somehow being seen as holy gurus for how to eat/exercise. Clip:

Within the last decade, being a wellness blogger – someone who writes on nutrition and counsels others on how to change their diet – has overtaken fashion stylist and yoga teacher as the fashionable job option for young women. . .
Instead of qualifications in boring things such as nutrition and science, the wellness guru has a blog and an Instagram account. From these, she advises thousands, even millions, of followers in her friendly, informal tone to avoid the likes of tropical fruits (too high in sugar) and stock up instead on cold-pressed green juices. She makes dark references to the many ways in which today’s food industry is making us all sick. She also includes many, many photos of herself to confirm the efficacy of her recommendations.
The wellness blogger is, crucially, photogenic and young, which is why “wellness” looks so much more desirable than it did a decade ago, when it was Gillian McKeith, say, telling us all to eat more fibre. Eat like me, look like me, is the message. Typical photo poses include sitting on a beach lounger in a bikini while drinking from a coconut, or reclining in a rustic kitchen in skinny jeans, a cute porcelain bowl of vegetables in one hand.

Next, this column in the New York Times hit home in a different way. It's an account of a woman struggling with severe depression and her partner's unflinching support. It reminded me of lucky I am to have/have had Match. With this last relapse especially, I started to worry that eventually this whole thing would get old and he would leave. He has been consistently patient with me, even when every iota of my brain space was devoted to food/body stuff, making conversations boring and probably very frustrating, and even when I was grumpy and touchy and reactive, even when he was worried about what I was doing to my heart and kidneys and brain and bones. Somehow he manages to keep more faith in me than I have in myself, and inexplicably finds it somehow worth his while to ride out the bad times with dogged confidence that "it gets better." Anyway I'll stop gushing now, here is one clip from the article.
I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t angry, why he wasn’t feeling completely betrayed that I had been ready to leave him widowed at 26, bailing on all of our hopes and dreams. I felt angry with myself on his behalf and berated myself for everything I’d failed at as an adult, as a newlywed, as someone who had everything and nothing. . . .
I had been waiting for him to prove with words that he loved me, thinking: “Say it again. Say it three times. And keep saying it because I don’t believe you.”

I had been waiting for the reality of the situation to hit and make him realize how deeply I’d wronged him by duping him into thinking I would be a good wife, when in reality I was depressed and self-destructive. But that realization never came.

Instead, as he stood in the hallway watching me in the midst of a mental breakdown, I saw what he’d been trying to tell me all along.

I love you.

I’m worried about you.

I want you to be happy.

I’m still here.

 

I hope everyone's had a good weekend, love y'all.

DISCLAIMER: I just read this right after posting it and found three typos. I fixed them but am not sure if the original text is what shows up in RSS readers.  I swear I am literate in real life, I just switch more into stream-of-consciousness mode when I blog.