4
Tales from a Ragstock dressing room
Content
warning:
Mentions
of
disordered eating
A week before my first class at the
University of Michigan, I wandered
around Ann Arbor as a college student
for the very first time. With friends
who were already familiar with the
city, I was given a grand tour of which
buildings I’d enjoy, which are widely
beloved and which to avoid altogether.
We all swooned for the smells of
Frita Batidos, awed at the beauty of
the Michigan Theater and listened
to the ringing of Burton Memorial
Tower. However, it was Ragstock that
caused the most shrills of excitement
amongst our little crowd. The beloved
clothing chain fit our personal styles
and wallets, so we promptly spent the
next half hour in a perpetual browse
chorused by “oohs” and “ahhs.”
Eventually, the time for try-ons came
and we beelined for the changing
rooms.
COVID-19, naturally, had halted
my in-store purchases for nearly two
years. Even then I tend to only thrift,
so it may have been even longer since
I’ve found myself in the artificial
blinding lights of a dressing room. For
a variety of reasons, I tend to avoid
mirrors, cameras and changing rooms
— The biggest being the quickness and
sharpness of my own self-criticisms,
and how easily these fester into
starvation-based punishments. In this
Ragstock changing room, the pattern
easily picked up where it left off years
prior. In this Ragstock dressing room,
I feel guilty and ashamed for the body
I reside within.
I hope this is a blip, a hiccup in my
progress. It’s humiliating to think one
poorly-lit view of myself could undo a
year’s worth of work and progress and
lovely weight gain. But it is not a blip,
and I spent my fall semester with the
smell of rotten food and lemon green
tea. Four times a week I sleepwalked
from State Street to my bus stop, still
in a dizzy sway. I could sit on the curb
and wait, maybe embarrassingly,
but this is an admission of defeat: my
broken body has not won yet, and
I will continue to push and punish
until it does. In my sways and starved
delirium I’m thinking of the bare
minimum amount of meals I’ll need
in order to stay afloat this week, and
how many iron supplements I’ll need
to take to keep my hair from falling out
in clumps.
Often, an eating disorder is a
learned behavior, not a natural
inclination for harm and discipline.
They are often gifted from mother to
daughter, from media to viewer, friend
to friend. This is what makes the
epidemiology of eating disorders so
mystifyingly unique: they are mental
illnesses that act as social diseases, so
they spread like fatphobic colds and
flus. I can’t pinpoint where I learned
mine, but I can imagine I was taught
it from multiple sources in quick,
successive repetition. Additionally,
there are risk factors for those who are
extra susceptible to these destructive
teachings, like poor psychological
health and trauma, family history,
life changes and even participation
in
extracurricular
activities.
By
common definition, eating disorders
are “patterns of restriction and/or
binging, intense fear of weight gain,
distorted body image, and self-esteem
that is reliant on how the body is
perceived.” Within the ebb and flow of
my disordered eating, I’ve consistently
held all of the above.
I am a public health student, and
this irony doesn’t escape me. I’ll
spend the next two years learning the
science of disease and medicine, and
then I’ll spend 40 hours a week for
the rest of my professional life touting
the social determinants of health
and other systemic failures of the
American healthcare system, all while
I am flailing inside one of the most
prevalent public and mental health
crises. This is especially true of college
campuses, where upwards of 32.6%
of women and 25% of men qualify
as having disordered eating habits,
and even more have them but are
undetected. This is to say that I must
have a multitude of classmates also
living with this ironic contradiction.
College campuses breed eating
disorders with unparalleled spread
and success rates for a variety of
reasons. Whispers and warnings of
the “Freshman 15” begin months,
maybe years, before the first day of
classes. From the get-go, students
are shamed and frightened into the
self-surveillance of nutrients and
dieting. In many cases, these attempts
at harmless diets quickly spiral into
disordered eating. Dieting, especially
amongst college students, is so
normalized that the dangers often do
not register to most people. SoulCycle,
for instance, displays daily words of fat-
burning inspiration for anyone walking
down South University Avenue, and
even while scrolling through The
Michigan Daily’s website weight-loss
advertisements featuring caricatures
of hourglass-shaped women often fill
the ad space. Additionally, the actual
transition to college fits multiple
eating disorder risk factors: major life
change, extracurricular activities and
an uptick in poor psychological health.
At the University in particular, the
Counseling and Psychological Services
(CAPS) is notorious for being too busy
and incredibly unhelpful. The social
pressures of college impact a person’s
exposure to disordered eating habits
as well, and offer more colloquial ways
of picking up disordered eating habits
from friends and peers.
Through research and studies, the
University has repeatedly confirmed
that our student body suffers from the
same shame, control and punishment
that creates eating disorders amongst
young people. In a recent study,
Michigan Medicine found that 27.8%
of female undergraduates and 11.8% of
male undergraduates screen positive
for an eating disorder. Furthermore,
almost all (82% of women and 96%
of men) of the positively screened
students are not receiving treatment for
their disorders in the past year. These
startlingly-high numbers of untreated
students can be accounted for by the
normalization of disordered eating on
college campuses, especially one with
high-stakes stress and a competitive
culture like the University’s. It’s
common to hear of peers not eating or
sleeping during exam seasons, often
wearing it as a perverse badge of pride
to show just how dedicated they are to
their work. Additionally, the pressure
to party and appeal to male-dominated
hookup culture while still maintaining
thinness leads to the commonplace
habit of skipping meals on the day of
parties, dubbed “drunkorexia.” These
are habits that I’ve known myself
and my other partially-recovered
friends to partake in, even when the
dangers of dabbling in starvation are
devastatingly clear.
S T A T E M E N T
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4 — Wednesday, August 10, 2022
I am sitting in a chair at my job,
looking down at the smartphone
resting in my hands. There is a lull in
work-related activity during this mid-
afternoon, and I am left to my own
devices; my only duty is to answer the
door and assist when packages arrive.
I turn off my phone and redirect my
attention upwards to the desk I sit at
where a computer monitor is turned
on. Its web browser features a few open
tabs, and I use a mouse to click on the
one housing Slack.
While at my job at the University
of Michigan’s Tech Shop in the
Michigan Union, I am supposed to
use the Slack interface to be alerted of
new protocols, communicate progress
on daily tasks and find answers to
questions or roadblocks I encounter
throughout the workday. My digital
behavior frequently diverges from
these expectations, however, and today
is no exception.
A few hours ago, I received an
email from one of my editors at The
Michigan Daily approving my story
idea about Slack and the people and
places that use it (I rarely use The
Daily’s own Slack workspace, except
for instructions on how to enter
the Student Publications Building).
Now given the go-ahead to conduct
interviews, I begin to type a message
in ITS’s #social-watercooler channel.
Scrolling up in the feed, I see a meme
with a Bugs Bunny in formalwear that
reads: “i wish all people with cats a very
pleasant can i see them.” Under it is a
thread of 28 replies, the vast majority
containing feline photos. I begin to
type my own new message outside the
thread:
“hi all! I am writing an article for The
Michigan Daily about the use of Slack
in U-M workspaces and student orgs.
If anyone would like to participate in
a short interview on their experiences,
react to this message or DM me here on
Slack. thank you for considering!”
I click on the green paper plane
icon that sends the message, and
moments later it appears in the public
record. On Slack’s sidebar, where all of
the channels I am a part of are listed,
I click on the #tech-shop-student-
managers channel in order to revive
the impression that I am actually doing
work for the job I am sitting at, hiding
the #social-watercooler feed.
My smartphone buzzes, and I
receive a notification from my co-op’s
workspace. Linder House uses Slack
as the primary mode of electronic
communication among the 20 of us that
live there. I received said notification
because one of my housemates sent
“@channel,” thereby notifying all
members, in #linderfarts. The purpose
of this channel is to alert everyone else
when one farts, and it is by far the most
active channel in our house’s Slack
workspace.
I smirk a little, and then put my
phone down in my lap to look at the
computer on my desk. Now, in my ITS
Ann Arbor workspace, there is a bright
red oval hovering over the navigation
sidebar, telling me that I have unread
messages. I scroll down within the
sidebar, and see that I have a direct
message from Madi Atkins, a fellow
member of ITS Ann Arbor whom I
have never met. She expresses interest
in sharing her experiences using Slack
with me, and after a few messages back
and forth we arrange to meet virtually
the following afternoon using Slack’s
Huddle feature.
Within this 20-minute span of non-
urgent virtual chat, five more users
have reacted to my additional call for
interviews using the :eyes: emoji, and
several others have sent me a private
message. Overwhelmed with the emoji
users, I stick to the direct responses,
and arrange virtual meeting times
with those people as well.
A few hours later, I clock out and
head home for the day. Late that
evening, from my bedroom, I open
the ITS Ann Arbor Slack once again
to paste Zoom virtual meeting links
to those that requested. I schedule
these messages to go out the next
morning rather than the current time
of midnight to give the illusion of a
healthy sleep schedule.
#first-impressions
The next afternoon, I log back
into the ITS Slack and find my direct
messages with Atkins. I open new tabs
in my web browser that contain the
other materials needed to conduct and
record this interview. At our agreed-
upon time, I click on the headphone-
icon toggle button that then turns blue,
signifying that the Huddle has begun.
AVA BURZYCKI
Statement Columnist
Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com
OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI
Statement Correspondent
Slack, Laugh, Love