I was returning home. In the back, my baby of a few months was sleeping in his seat. I had just given birth to him and was struggling with something that we might very well have been tempted to call “postpartum depression.” However, in my universe which was lived outside the categories of the DSM, I felt rather faced with a new part of my history, with a malaise that I had already experienced, but which, hormonal drop and lack of sleep helping, were only getting more “screaming”.
Stubborn as I was, I continued to avoid reducing my experience to a checklist of behaviors, choosing to practice those same rituals that, to this day, had given me strength and direction to go through my life: to write and to continue my analytical work. To say, to symbolize, to take the base material of my anxieties and to try to extricate from it something which would enlarge me from the inside, this had imposed itself on me from adolescence, when my first visits to the catacombs of my soul had started. Psychoanalysis had been added in the course of his twenties and, from then on, the two had always remained inseparable.
In this period of my postpartum life, writing was necessary, like drinking or eating. I woke up with a form of self-loathing erected into an empire, hating my body as flabby as my energy, being convinced of being the worst of bad mothers and looking for what could have been hidden from me about motherhood so that I was so surprised by all the darkness it could contain.
The trenches, of Fanny Britt, had saved my life, the creation diary Nancy Huston too, as well as other places where I was allowed to say taboos. I used to write some form of journal every day, but more than anything—and I smile thinking about it—I practiced op-ed writing in a completely over the top way, trying to vent my rage out into the big world, that he stops being so ugly, so hard, for the baby I had just given him. (Funny fact, it was also the time when I was bombing The duty of my fiery letters, without any of them ever being published, which caused me to search the column every week to discover that I was not there. Can you imagine, then, the emotion felt when I was offered, twelve years later, a weekly column? Somewhere in me, the memory of a postpartum woman still doesn’t believe it).
I was walking home that day as an exhausted mother’s carcass when a crossed billboard had given me the urge to write one of those letters again. On the billboard, we saw, in close-up, a woman’s belly, in every way similar to mine, grabbed by one hand, the hand of the woman in question, in this gesture that all people concerned about their weight have already had; this gesture which takes the measure of the bead, which seizes it the better to hate it, to give form to what is too much, surplus in this century which does not know what to do with all these bodies which tend to live, only, and let existence work on them.
This panel, which sold me a technique for reducing fat by cold, had allowed me to grasp through affects what my head of shrink had already known for a long time, namely how much the industry of beauty, slimming and of the objectification of bodies will always plant its roots in the rich soil of this famous “self-loathing” that so many people maintain towards themselves.
In my clinic, I had already accompanied some young patients towards hospitalization whose pulse had become too weak, so undernourished were they. I had already held out, for hours, in the catacombs of other souls, in front of the anorexic tyrant, the bulimic monster or the dysphoric pervert who murdered magnificent people before my helpless eyes, leaving them stranded deep inside themselves. , in the greatest desert of love there is.
The letter from my anger had been published in my regional newspaper, so I will not rewrite it here, even if, and this is the whole tragedy, I could retype each of its words, twelve years later, in response to what I heard this week in this “Trends” segment of the show Penelope.
Columnist Sonya Bacon, also a lecturer at the University of Sherbrooke and vice-president of marketing strategy at Archipel, presented the advertisements that are currently besieging the New York subway to praise the merits of Ozempic, a drug by injection which, at the base, is intended for people with diabetes, but which, as we know, causes spectacular weight loss.
We also learned that the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk had recently invested more than 42 million dollars in advertising. I already knew about the existence of the product, the abuse that was made of it as well as the potential dangers that it could involve. However, since I am very sensitive to images, it is the psychological impacts of marketing processes, which the columnist rightly qualifies as “toxic”, which brought me back to the very origin of this good old anger.
On the panel of the Ozempic in New York, a woman’s stomach, again, in which we see her injecting a syringe, with this call: “a weekly dose can make you lose weight”.
Twelve years later, I continue to count in my clinic a staggering number of people, young and old, hungry, complexed or obsessed with achieving a form of beauty absolutely disjointed from an existence that would be inhabited by interior. If I know that there is, in the etiology of these states, more than a simple conformity to ambient norms, I also know how to recognize what uses the sufferer, to only accumulate assets. And something inside me, which I may have brought back from all my trips to the catacombs, my own and those of others, just refuses to get used to it.
Writing is still my only option, combined with the resistance work done every day, every session, to stand before the internalized tyrants of each patient. What if we all wrote, together, something that comes from within, in resistance to what, from outside, encourages us ever more to hate ourselves as we are?