Morning Thoughts On Second Languages

Good morning. I set my coffee to brew at 4am on school days because I like a solid 2 hours of Me Time before anyone wakes up for the day. This also guarantees I get the entire first pot of coffee to myself which is good for Donnie as he prefers his coffee.

BUT THIS MORNING HE WOKE UP AT 5:30AM. Ugg.

It’s because it feels a little like Christmas with the Warnock projected win announcement and Ossoff in the lead. He’s refreshing results like he’s watching a football game. So, I’m mad he’s drinking my coffee, but I’m glad he’s enjoying the Hope for the South that these results are giving us. There are LaTosha Browns and Stacey Abrams in every state..you just have to find them and support them. I’m a big fan of Faith in Action Alabama because they do a lot of work here for voter registration AND criminal justice reform.

Anyway – he did tell me I could make the second pot of coffee with my coffee since he drank half of my first pot, so we’re making compromises over here people.

I finished the book The Body Is Not An Apology this morning. I ordered it months ago but it was out of stock and my copy finally came in on 12/30. It was everything I’d hoped it would be. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t always make it through “self help” type books because I tend to feel like they could exist as a TED Talk or a long Medium article and that the book forms of these ideas are often unnecessary.

BUT THIS BOOK WAS NOT LIKE THAT.

I underlined so much, and then I went back and added purple tabs to the underlined passages that I’d want to re-read and focus on again and added pink tabs on the passages that represented other authors or research I wanted to dive into more.

There’s a lot on my mind from this book but some of it I’ve already written about here in different formats. I will say though, that this book is really helping me see even how a lot of our conversations around body set up for what Taylor calls “Body Terrorism” by setting up hierarchies and default bodies. Even just looking at someone and seeing them as a beautiful representation of how you wished you look – EVEN IF THEY ARE FAT – is still feeding into that voice in your head about better/worse.

She uses the metaphor of learning a second language. Our first language is one from the Body-Shame Profit Complex (her term) and it speaks of Body Terrorism (another term she uses) and while we try to learn the second language of Radical Self Love we have to recognize how hard that is and how that first language will pop back in constantly without us even realizing it. We will still think in that first language until we have become fluent enough and use the language of Radical Self Love enough to overwrite those early-programmed languages.

God, I love this book.

Anyway…here’s to people hopefully realizing that there are a lot of progressives/liberals/leftists in the South and not giving up on us when thinking about elections. And here’s to all of us becoming fluent in the language of Radical Self Love.