Everybody has a seat at the table, Everybody has a seat at the table…every body has a seat at the table…I can’t stop mulling this year’s theme over in my mind-body again and again; I break it apart and put it back together like a lego tower that is off by just one block. But what’s the missing piece? What is making it feel difficult for me to pursue this topic as someone both in recovery from an eating disorder and body dysmorphia, and as someone who works as a therapist with people who are either also in recovery or are in an active state of their eating disorder and seeking additional somatic support to add to their care team.

Everybody has a seat at the table. Along with the markers of my identity named above, I am also intersectional in my identities – inhabiting a body comprised of multiple ethnicities, who identifies as a queer nonbinary femme, who is chronically ill/disabled (shout-out to any fellow Crohn’s Disease or IBD warriors who understand the added layer of complexity around the digestive system), but who more visibly than any of these things; is fat. Not fat, as in “holy shame spiral, this is a negative word to fear,” but fat as in, “literal body descriptor.” Average height. Brown Hair. Browner eyes. Thighs that touch. Arms that jiggle. Belly of abundance. Fat. (please notice here any sensations, emotions, memories, feelings, or images that may have arisen for you in this moment of experiencing the word fat and please take time separately to sit with and reflect upon that).

Everybody has a seat at the table. So here’s the thing about being fat; we often don’t have any seats at any tables – they may be too small or have un-moveable arms or no backs or be attached to tiny desks or even contained within moving vehicles or sat staring back at us from therapy office waiting rooms. Not only that, but all-too-often we are overlooked within the eating disorder community and treatment interventions because of how fatness is wrongly perceived (if anyone wants to educate themselves further on this topic, “Fearing the Fat Body,” by Sabrina Strings is an integral place to start). In fact, for many of us, it is actually the medical system and its wrongful, antiquated, and continued use of arbitrary numbers such as BMI’s that are the source of our eating disorders to begin with – then, making them actually medically-supported. I’ve sat in a lot of seats in a lot of doctor’s offices all over the country, some of them accommodate my body, most didn’t. Many of them were elaborate infusion suite chairs, some of them came in the form of cafeteria tables, and others in the form of MRI’s – none of them have truly ever made my body feel welcome.

So I think what I’m realizing I needed to speak on this year, as we loop-back upon the pandemic’s arrival date, surviving a truly tragic and devastating year, is that many of us have perhaps been finding other seats in other rooms of our homes (both tangibly and metaphorically-speaking). And if your body is your ultimate home, then the questions that remain are: how have you been inviting yourself to sit on your own so that once it’s safe for us to all come back together at the biggest, most inclusive and expansive table ever, with benches, spaces for mobility devices, and chairs in every ergonomic variation known to humankind, we can actually all enjoy a meal together. What conditions are you creating both within and without you to make all of our homes the safest, most joyful, most pleasurable places we can inhabit? What does your dream table/seating scenario look like and who are you inviting into that healing space with you?  I know it can be difficult or even scary, but I believe now is the time to do it anyway, and to finally find ourselves on the other side we all deserve so badly.