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

