- I feel the most beautiful when I remember my body
is not a thing to be looked at
but a moment to enjoy.
I feel the most beautiful when I'm singing or laughing,
when I'm telling the fucking truth.
- [Elisa] We want to extend a huge thank you
to Ergobaby for making this episode
of "What's Underneath" possible.
- [Lily] Can you share how you're feeling
right now in this moment?
- I'm feeling really present with the knowing
that me as an individual is an illusion.
I'm not one person.
Really I'm my children and I'm my husband
and I'm my friends and I'm every creature that's fed me
and I'm every song that I've ever sung
and I'm every song that was sung into me
and I'm every book I ever read to be here at this moment.
I'm the one who gets to sit in the stool
and talk right now. (laughing)
- [Interviewer] So can you talk
about what your style says about you?
- The way that I dress, it has within it
an invitation to be whoever you are.
That's what I hope.
I like this 'cause I always feel
like representing the cosmos.
I bought this for my husband
at like a knockoff Forever 21 in a mall.
You know what I mean?
This isn't, it's not like woven by, you know. (laughing)
It's just made of plastic.
But it reminds me that I am made of stars.
And everything I like to wear the most
always has a rock in the pocket.
My first born when he was like three years old
he started to put rocks in my pockets and I wouldn't know.
And I love it because I don't think
I'm a particularly grounded person.
I think I'm a little more astral than grounded.
And sort of literally a stone in my hand
or in my pocket reminds me
to come back to earth.
- [Interviewer] I'm like sad to have you
take off your cosmos, but I think
that is the next, natural. - The next natural.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- [Interviewer] So can you talk about assumptions
that people make about you based on your appearance?
- Oh, people think I'm like a huge pothead.
Any party I went to
people would always be like,
"Oh she, you know, skip her.
She doesn't need any 'cause she's already hoo hoo."
And literally it's just the way
I absorb the planet. (laughing)
Noises are loud for me.
Lights are bright for me.
Faces are like suns.
Sometimes I can look and sometimes it's too much.
It's just always been true.
My natural state is awe.
I am in a perpetual state of awe
that I'm alive and that you're here too.
The fact that we don't all just sit around
constantly saying to each other. (gasps)
I also have had a lot of shapes in my life.
I was like a 300-pound person for a lot of years of my life.
And there was enormous satisfaction
and sanity and pleasure
in having that body.
And then it needed to change.
And when it did,
I was treated so profoundly differently.
And then the body of a mother.
When I lost my first baby,
when I had my first miscarriage,
which was the beginning of me becoming a parent,
I felt deeply lost.
'Cause I really believed
that this baby was mine.
But now I know that all of your babies are yours
and never yours.
You don't necessarily get to hold them.
You don't necessarily get to be liked by them. (laughing)
You know?
The only thing you definitely get to do is love them.
And now I know that my breasts,
exquisite as they are, (laughing)
don't have enough of the glandular tissue
to make enough milk to feed my baby.
I can't tell you how bad I wanted it.
I want it right now.
I still want to be able to do it
and I'm so sad that I can't.
And so when I give my baby a bottle,
sometimes I'm criticized for not caring
about bonding with my baby
or not caring about (laughing),
you know, breast is best.
So yeah, I think people maybe assume things
about the kind of parent I am.
And let 'em.
I know who I am.
- [Interviewer] What would you say has been
your biggest struggle?
- Whoa. Well, I've had a lot of 'em.
If I had to distill it,
it's that love isn't always enough.
Love isn't a fixer.
There's a lot of mental illness in my family,
legacies of abuse.
And all the grownups in my life
came from the sort of island of trauma.
And all the alcohol to find a way to get through a day.
All the things they did
to not have to grieve.
All the people who hurt one another
and were hurt as babies.
And who grew and survived.
I'm born into this.
And what was done to them they did not do to me.
But still what I was raised within was husk upon husk
of terrible trauma.
There's no one in my family that I don't love
and empathize with and still I'll probably never be
in relationship again with quite a few folks.
I really care about the truth,
that we are not pretending something never happened.
So if what I need is for us
to honor the truth of what happened with each other
and what they need is peace from that,
privacy from that,
then we've got an issue there.
And now that I'm a parent, I see that.
I would like to only offer the very best parts of my story,
but every secret feels like a tumor.
My big job is really the big job
of re-metabolizing all the horror
into some new possible spark of beauty
for the next ones.
That's my gig.
- [Interviewer] So what would you say
is like the biggest insecurity that you're working on?
- I have this wish that my body
would be one thing and stay one thing.
But of course the body is constantly changing.
Bigger, smaller, losing hair,
getting hair in other places.
You know, everything's changing,
changing, changing changing.
And that's hard for me to feel always surprised
and out of control around what I look like.
I got really big probably when I was a teenager
and then stayed big into my early twenties.
Being a 300-pound person, a lot of that had to do
with a really comforting relationship
with my mom and food.
When my dad was at his worst
and then left and she had been terribly sick,
she'd had a really terrible series of infections.
And so we'd eat, man.
We'd watch "Murphy Brown" and "The Nanny".
We'd make a pound of pasta, we'd eat the whole thing,
and then we'd make popcorn, and we'd each have a candy bar.
And it was one kind of relationship to food
that at the time we really needed.
My experience of fatness was my own
and a lot of it was really joyful and whole.
I miss a lot of things about it.
I loved that I had to take up space.
It forced me to never disappear even when I wanted to.
I loved my fat rolls.
I think I looked great.
I liked the way that I looked.
I was absolutely hated by a lot of people
(chuckles) you know?
I would get spit on.
People would drive by in their cars and yell,
"You fucking fat bitch, you ugly whale."
And then I was also hit on, very sexualized.
And at that same time I started to travel by myself.
I remember this sensation of shedding
but it was like shedding skin.
I was really starting the big work of disentangling
what was my mother's story
from what was my own story?
I never tried to lose weight.
My pants fell down one day and I went,
"Oh wow, I think something's changing."
And I got new pants and I didn't think a lot about it.
And then it happened again.
I had adventures that were more exciting
than the comfort of food.
I think that was part of it.
But everyone thought I had
disordered eating when I was very fat.
But I didn't have an eating disorder till I got thin.
Well, I had lost like whatever, 150 pounds,
or you know, a lot of weight.
Then for the first time being in a thin body,
I was subject to the conversations
that thin people have with each other
about the micro, the parts of your body
that need to shrink or grow.
The idea that your body can be separated into parts
and measured and evaluated for its worth.
And I started to starve myself.
I would run 15 miles on a fucking treadmill
and then I'd binge and binge and binge and binge and binge.
I did that thing for a while.
People just perceived me really differently.
And when my body changed, it was like
I had broken our agreement
that I was going to be the friend that looked like this
and they were going to be the friend that looked like that.
If you're not my fat friend I can confide in at this party
about my romantic relationship and you won't judge me.
Little did they know I was fine as fuck.
They were using me but they were incorrect.
I used to go to this gym when I was a fat-bodied person.
People treated me however they treated me
and I just thought, "Oh, then this is the gym."
And then I came back a year later
and I had really really changed.
They didn't recognize me.
And they were like, "Welcome.
Do you want special measurements taken of your body
and here's a bunch of free samples."
They took a picture of me on one of the machines
'cause they wanted to put it up
on the community board.
And the conflict is right there
'cause on the one hand I was like
they want to pick a picture of me and put it on the board.
Especially I was in my twenties.
I was more turned on by that idea than I would be now.
- [Interviewer] Where are you now
and also what did healing from eating disorder,
how long did that last?
- You know, I had lost the weight really quickly
and I remember being really scared
that I would wake up and it would all be back.
Like I'd eat one meal and everything would change.
I don't know why
after finding so much joy in fatness,
amnesia like it was gone,
and I bought into the idea that it was scary and bad.
And then I met my husband at a party.
And about two days later I checked myself into treatment.
When I got back from this treatment process,
we went on our first date and then we got married
three weeks later,
and that was 15 years ago now,
and two kids later, you know.
So now I can say that and people aren't just like,
"Oh, so you're about to get a divorce?"
(laughing) You know what I mean?
He was somehow an enzyme in my life and I wanted to be well.
It was worth it to me.
And really it was about getting close to myself
and his presence making me feel like I could do that.
- [Interviewer] When do you feel the most vulnerable?
- I think it's always vulnerable to talk
about what you love the most.
'Cause what you love the most
you want to protect too.
When I tell you what I love, I tell you what I am.
- [Interviewer] What do you love the most?
- My babies, my husband, my family.
The wild song of the world that I hear
and that I think my job on the planet is to sing
in response to.
See, this is my whole story.
All this extra skin I have from when I was big
that will always be here.
All this like soft tummy I have
that my little boy loves.
Even the tooth I'm missing
from when we couldn't afford real dental care
so we just had to yank it out, you know?
And the gray in my hair.
It's like, it's the whole book of me.
- [Interviewer] When do you feel the most beautiful?
- I feel the most beautiful when I remember my body
is not a thing to be looked at,
but a moment to enjoy.
I feel the most beautiful when I'm singing
or laughing, when I'm telling the fucking truth.
When I'm not thinking about looking the most beautiful.
When I stop thinking of myself as something to be seen,
a thing to be seen,
but instead remember the truth of myself
as I'm a verb, not a noun. (laughing)
I get to do.
- [Interviewer] Okay, so last question.
Why in your skin, in your body,
in your journey,
why is it a good place to be?
- There've been a couple times in my life
where I've wanted to die.
And I don't anymore.
I really want to live.
And I'm so lucky that this body gave me children,
gave children to the world, and gave songs to the world.
I'm incredibly strong
and that's a gift to my body
from my long line of ancestry all the way back
to deep water fish that crawled up onto the land.
- [Interviewer] Is there a wild song of the world
that you'd like to share with us
that you hear right now?
♪ Hey ♪
♪ Hey yo ee ♪
♪ Hey hey ah ♪
(scatting)
♪ Ah ♪
- [Interviewer] Wow. Thank you that...
- Thank you. - What a gift,
the whole thing. - I'm dizzy.
(crew laughing)
- [Elisa] We want to extend a huge thank you
to Ergobaby for making this episode
of "What's Underneath" possible.
- [Lily] Ergobaby is a company
that's supporting your growing family
through every step of the parenthood journey.
What did you use to carry me when I was a baby?
- I'd have to wrap you really tight in a blanket
or somehow put you inside of a shirt.
I would've loved to have had something
like Ergobaby's baby carrier.
Ergobaby's newborn carrier,
the Ergobaby Embrace, is now available in soft air mesh.
Soft, cool, and comfortable,
it's the sweetest way to stay connected from the start.
- On your next Ergobaby purchase,
use code stylelikeu15
for 15% off today.
Thank you for watching this week's episode
of "What's Underneath"-
- With the radiant Abigail Bengson.
- For more interviews like this,
subscribe to StyleLikeU.
(crew chuckling)