114. Bodies, Beauty, and Botox

This is the Abbey Normal Podcast, and this episode is just a normal conversation about bodies amongst friends. It contains many emphatic curse words.

It begins with a specific symptom of perimenopause, a hot topic in certain circles. Do you know what Proctelja fugax is? No. You ever get that absolutely searing pain like a sword has been stuck into your fucking butthole around your period? Yes. It is absolutely like crippling, searing, shooting pain. Butthole pain. Like behind your butthole. You will just be living your whole normal ass life singing some Rick Astley.

Chilling thinking about the good times and then all of a sudden you're like what the fuck like levitating off a chair trying to clinch oh no shove your hand behind your asshole to stop this right it has something to do with the nerves of your pelvic floor right being contracted in like tiny little microspasms yep and I have to literally take Ativan when it happens oh my god it's gnarly I was, super embarrassed to ask anybody about it. Yeah.

And you know how I found out what it was called and what it was and that I wasn't a freakazoid. Fucking TikTok. TikTok showed a woman going like, you ever just be... And then be like... There's a lot of really good menopause stuff out on TikTok. I've been looking at it. But you know exactly what I'm talking about. How would you describe that pain?

Really sharp muscle spasm, like right just right between your parts yeah right there like closer to your butt if this is your vagina hole and this is your butt hole like right there right in there yeah so imagine somebody like shoved a puffer fish up there but then blew it up once it was up there but then deflates it and then blows it up again but then deflates it and blows it up again oh it's like a hot poker someone's stabbing you, but not in the butthole, just right next to it.

You heat up a hanger on a stove and just poke, poke, poke, poke. The first time that happens, you're going to text us and you're going to be like, oh my fucking God, I have that butthole pain. I mean, this is why we need to talk about this shit. I thought the first time that happened to me, I was like, oh my God, is this like an internal hemorrhoid? Is this what a hemorrhoid's feel? I thought it was like a VD. And I was like, is this some new VD that like only affects behind your butthole?

I've invented a new VD. It's gonna be named after you. And it'll go sometimes for like 30 minutes. 30 minutes? Yeah, but it's not constant, it's like. It's like you're getting a taser like that you're you're right behind your butthole area is running from the cop and they're like stop and then they taste it picture that but like right next to your and then just real high and kind of hot just. Music. A normal conversation about bodies it does not stay on topic does this happen with your friends.

Like when it gets going, you're just yelling over each other to put your weird two scents into the mix. Oh, you smell like onions? Well, my butthole's on fire. And then buttholes becomes the running joke of the day. You know, normal stuff like that. So we're going to talk about our experiences growing up in different places and in different bodies. Body neutrality, body modifications, skin problems and remedies, and Botox.

And maybe eventually we get to the topic that we agreed in advance to discuss, disordered eating. But here, at the beginning, there's a bit of anxiety. Oh my God. Okay, so what are you nervous about or anxious about? Well, antithetical to my profession. Antithetical to the very nature of your podcast. Yeah. And conversations that we had before, I hate talking about bodies. I hate talking about my body and I hate other people complaining about theirs.

Not that, I don't mind hearing like stuff that's wrong with people but when nothing is more infuriating to me than like some size ass bitch is like oh my god you know i'm going so gross and i'm like yeah uh-huh sickening yeah and i don't have empathy for that not that i don't have empathy it is just not a conversation, that I'm interested in having at any point because not that I'm like one of these body positive people. I'm absolutely not. I strive for body neutrality.

I want to not think about my body. Right. Okay. So we're not going to talk about how hot your body is and we're not going to talk about all the things we don't like about our bodies. Okay. We're just going to be right in the middle. No, you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. I will manage my expectation and anxiety accordingly. Don't allow my bullshit to change the tenor of your super cool vibe you've got going on. Got it. Okay. Are you feeling anxious? I am a little bit, yeah.

Okay. Now, what are you anxious about? I haven't talked about having an eating disorder in a really long time. Like, a very, very long time. And I've never talked about it. Well, do you want to talk about it? Yeah, that's fine. But like, do you want to? You know, like, is there like, do you want to get it out there? I mean, yes and no. I feel like, yes, you know, I should probably talk about it because there's times where I just push it back down and ignore it.

But then there's part of me who doesn't want to talk about it out loud because then it's real. Right. Yeah. Yes. And other people know. Yep. I mean, you know, the like 50 people that listen to the Abbey Normal podcast, you know, it's not like everyone. But that's like kind of everyone, though. Kind of a big deal. I mean, this is the episode that we're on. Right. That's true. So this one will go viral. Literally. For sure. Literally. Okay. Maybe we'll double the listeners.

Okay. The anxiety is on the table. So we'll see where the day takes us. Maylee and Stephanie have arrived both wearing jeans, tennis shoes, and leopard jackets. If you met them, you would think they are beautiful and fashionable and young-ish. Stephanie, you've met before on episode 103, Sexy Paranormal Moment, but what you don't know is that she's an Orange County, California blonde, where she grew up 20 minutes from the beach.

May Lee is born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. And though people make assumptions about Californians, Northern California and Southern California are two very different places. Here's May Lee. I was born in Berkeley, raised in Oakland. I'm just wondering whether you guys have like different experiences. I have no idea how it was like to be born and raised in Northern California. Just like you have no idea how it was like to be born and raised in Southern California.

So I don't know. Yeah. So you didn't get like necessarily negative messages about your body growing up. No, it was a very, no, bodies were pretty neutral territory. I was raised by a single mom. And so I was raised by like a single mom too. That was like a bit of a bohemian. So, and also had grown up in Europe. So nudity didn't occur to me that that was anything weird. Yeah. And like sort of Zafdig's soft mother shapes didn't occur to me as being weird. Also, my mom was an artist.

So there were like drawings and paintings of naked people around my house. Like that didn't occur to me as being anything other than just totally normal. And, you know, things like my period were celebrated with like a party. So like it was a little bit of like that sort of not a quite hippie mentality because on the other hand, I do remember my mom saying like being on diets and stuff, right? But we didn't have talks about like, oh, you're looking kind of chunky today or whatever.

But also I wasn't like I was this big around as a kid, right? Yeah, yeah. Now, however, I ended up probably in the same place that most women end up with disordered eating and really fucked up ideas about how you look and really fucked up ideas about how you feel with your body. But my route to get there was a lot probably different than hers. Yours. Where I grew up in Orange County, land of plastic surgery, land of, you know, blonde hair, blue eyes, this big around.

Yes, absolutely. Okay, so she, I mean, like, that feels healthy to me. Like, that feels like the goal as far as... I don't know, like, just being open about your body with your kids. And I don't like that. That feels good. Did that feel good to you then? Didn't think about it, didn't it? Yeah. There are a lot of things, though, that there were I'm laughing. I shouldn't laugh. There are a lot of things that didn't occur to me about my upbringing that were. I am not white, listener.

It didn't occur to me that my mom was white until I was like in high school. And somebody pointed out, your mama is white. And I was like, oh, word. Yeah. It didn't occur to me that that was like a different thing. Yeah. And that we were somehow different. Right. Right. So it also, if there was shit around bodies, I don't remember them. Like, it didn't occur to me. What did you think you were? Like, you said you didn't know your mom was white. You didn't even consider

that that was a thing. Yourself. Not really, because, I mean, I think by then I had had, there had been like standardized tests where you have to choose one. And this was at a time, again, dear listener, where you didn't have the option of filling in multiple bubbles, right? That's right. So you had to pick a bubble. But I'm very obviously not white. So I'm going to pick the black bubble every time, right? Now you can pick multiple bubbles. You kids don't know how easy you have it.

I had to walk up and down, back to school, uphill both ways, filling in bubbles. So bubble black. But it didn't still occur to me that somehow that bubble was different than my mom's bubble. Right. Right? Music.

Southern california i grew up in an era where or an area where like we were you know very close to south coast plaza which was all like super affluent people shopping there and my mom was always on wage watchers always on jenny craig always watching her weight and my dad did too for a bit and i don't like i don't feel like they ever foisted that on on me ever i don't recall that ever but i recall you know i was i was a chunky

kid the movie that came out was Goonies and a lot of kids called me Chunk. So I was a chubby little kid. And I remember when I was a little kid, I was so chubby that I didn't like pants cutting into my waist. So my mom had to put elastic waistbands in everything for me. Thank you. They should just always have elastic waistbands. I do love a good pair of stretchy pants. But that wasn't around when you were a little kid. Yeah, that's kind of how I grew up. And my mom never made a point of it.

She would just be like, okay, you just don't like the way they feel on your waist.

Like, we'll just, you know put a pair of elastic in the waist and stuff like that but you know definitely heard kids call me chunky and fat and stuff like that those little fuckers but i mean i do think some of that is just kids are mean when they're little and they just say what's on their mind but i also do think growing up in the area that i grew up has something to do with that for sure i think to also to maybe the time we grew up in really similar times and kids were,

A lot more cruel because we had also been raised by parents who had had cruel parents. And our grandparents were cruel to be cruel. Our grandparents were cruel because they grew up in a fucking depression. That's right. And they washed off fucking tinfoil to reuse. Yes. Or plastic bags. Life was hard. Life was hard. And then our parents overcorrected. The boomers overcorrected with us Gen Xers. And we're like, not participation trophy kids. That's the millennials.

But it was, you can be anything you want to be. Yeah. I'm the first generation of moms that's working full time, right? And you can do this too. They were not particularly cruel, but they were also not particularly present because they were gone and working. Yep. But they weren't cruel. Right. But kids were cruel. Yes. We learned to be cruel, and that cruelness was never put in check. That's true. There were not campaigns with little rainbow stars.

There's no anti-bullying. Yeah, there's no anti-bullying back then. If you say something like at nine years old, you might want to commit suicide. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Not because I was fat. It was because I was ugly and black in a white school. Oh, is that true? I was like a funny looking little kid. I had to grow into a lot of my feet. The one thing about me is that I have looked the exact same my entire life. And I have had this deep voice my entire life. Oh, my God.

So being nine and being very tall and very skinny with giant glasses and very curly, frizzy hair and having a very deep voice does not, like, you're not really fitting into the mold of what is popular, cool, or pretty, considered pretty. Did you really have, like, a majority white school? Mm-hmm. In the Bay? Maybe Montclair. Yes. Oh, I see. Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Gotcha, gotcha. Yes. Yeah. And then also being like not in the same economic bracket too.

The socioeconomic bracket was different with a single white working parent than the kids that came to school and B&Ws and had like ski shares and shit and went skiing.

Music. Stephanie grew three inches between 7th and 8th grade, so the chunk name-calling subsided, but she had a new problem in high school.

I had such bad cystic acne when I was in high school that I had purple like just huge cysts on my face and they were so, back then there wasn't the makeup coverage that there is now like MAC didn't exist in the 90s like none of that stuff and if it did exist it was more like for theatrical stuff and it's like really heavy and you know i'm not wearing that to school so i mean all i had in high school was i think an oczema or, neutrogena or some of these makeup yeah and it

you know the color was never exact but whatever but it never covered that stuff and i remember like going to school i'd cry i would tell my mom i don't want to go to school and i just have these huge purple like just welts all over my face i stopped scarring right here that i you know that's why i'm so crazy about my skincare because I don't ever want to go back to that place again where I was made fun of in high school for having giant purple belts on my face.

And I remember this huge zit on my chin one day and this guy walked up to me and just flicked it on my chin, just popped it. John Brasley, you're a shithead. Let's find him and murder him. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, I remember that as clear as day. I remember telling my mom about that and she's like, let's go to the dermatologist and see if there's something we can do about this. And so then I went on Accutane from there. Oh my God, that hurt my heart. Yeah.

And then when Accutane didn't, as soon as I was off the Accutane, that didn't work. Then I got on the different gel. Yeah. Okay.

So this is a really good time to insert for the listeners and maybe for your own edification. I am 21 year clinical esthetician. Yes. So I work in a med spa and I am also a medical assistant. So everything she's saying is like stuff I see all the time and help shepherd people through until like sort of we hit a point where we're a little limited in our formulary for what we can prescribe and dispense at our clinic. But we see this all the time.

And I will say like Gen Z has no idea how lucky they are because Gen X parents will not let a Gen Z child have like a single zit. Like we are immediately dermatologists, immediately facial, immediately high end skin care products or just skin care products that are going to do something for you. Yeah, that's true. You little motherfucker. If that would have been around, any of that stuff would have been around. My life would have been very different in school.

Very, very different. But you would be a sucky adult now. Because it made you rad. It made you rad. It made you funny. It made you resilient. It made you strong. It made you sassy. It made you sarcastic. It made you empathetic. It made you empathetic. It made you all of those things that are, Like if you were just a beautiful, pretty, skinny bitch the whole time, you'd be insufferable. That's true. We wouldn't be friends. I looked like Chunk from...

You didn't. I refuse to believe that. I brought photos. I'm gonna need to see those. When I was in grade school, I looked like a 40-year-old woman who had nine caps named March. What? I want to meet that kid. I like her. Me too. I want to hug her. Oh my god i just want to hang out with her because i'm pretty sure i know that she keeps snacks in her fresno pocket pulls them out of her titty they're kind of warm.

I do carry assorted snacks in my purse at all times oh yes you by the way do you know that i'm conditioning your husband and your husband do you guys know about this oh my god no tell me Okay, so whenever I see them, I have candy and snacks, okay? So I'm like, hey, what's up? How are you guys doing? I don't say a word. I reach into my pocket and I'll pull out Jolly Ranchers and I put my hand out like this. And both Jeremy and Erin will just take candy out of my hand and we're just talking.

They're still talking. They have not broken conversation and they unwrap the candy and put it in their mouth. But I am conditioning them to associate me with candy and snack. Yes. You got to keep this going because at some point we're going to need to leverage that control you have. Absolutely. You know, so. I'll be like, murder someone for me. Kill, what's his name? John Beasley? What was his name? John Brasley. John Brasley? Yeah, we're fine. Have we fucking murder him? Fuck that dude.

Would you need to go to this person's house? Sorry, I think he's a divorced dad and lives with his parents or something. Great. He deserves it. Yeah, I hope he stubs his toe every day of his life. I hope he steps on Legos. I hope he bites the inside of his cheek in the same spot all the time. I hope he knocks his elbow on the door frame. Hell yeah. I hope his AirPods, the cord catches on the door handle when he's really pissed off every single time. Or he loses one of his earbuds. Just one.

Just one. Fuck you. Fuck you, dude. Lame ass. What a piece of shit. Music.

I will say that I think it's wildly interesting that we both experienced a level of bullying that informed how we think about ourselves now, but for really different reasons. But both based on physicality that we couldn't really do anything about.

And that's the whole thing that makes this topic unique. Because you can't do anything about it. I mean, we try now as adults to do different things.

But like you're born the way you're born and your body is the way it is and there's nothing you can do about it well that's where my job i was gonna say but there is something you can do about it there's all sorts of things you can do about it yeah i mean you can't like i mean actually i was just gonna say you can't be taller but now you can be taller so my husband went to school with a girl who had that surgery she was out for a while because she had the surgery where they broke the bones,

bro, and put spreaders. Oh, my God. And it's like lengthened the bones. And it was like you maybe got three or four inches of height additional. But again, I'm sure that it made her feel more, quote unquote, normal. Right. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong. I'm just saying that that's what I assume she must have felt. Do you feel like there is any right and wrong in making adjustments to your body? Like, is there a line for you or is it just not a moral issue?

There is a line for me personally, but I also, like, you, it's, it's like that conundrum that you can't be for restorative justice and be a fan of cancel culture. Like, you can't preach bodily autonomy and then be like, but somebody needs to stop Nicole Kidman. Nicole Kidman can do whatever the fuck she wants to do with her face. It's her fucking face. I have a personal line. Yeah. Right? But I'm not going to tell somebody else how to regulate and do it.

Like, I appreciate the Jocelyn Wildensteins of the world. Do you know who that is? No, tell me. Oh, the cat lady. Oh, okay. So I appreciate her. That's her truth and she's living in it. And that's not a super far off... Train of thought from like people becoming their true selves through identifying as trans and starting body modifications to just I tend to think about it this way. I think there's a really good way to think about it.

All body mods are essentially like Pygmalion, right? Chipping away at marble to reveal the Galatea underneath. Okay. So you're just going and going. And some people sort of knock that plinth way down. And maybe it's not super appealing to everybody else, but it is in the eye of the beholder. But a lot of that is just a lot of this body modification, Botox, filler, tit job, ass job, stretching your goddamn legs out so that you're taller.

All of that stuff is just the means of getting people to where they want to be. Their actualized self-image. Their residual self-image. That's what I'm trying to say. Like how they think of themselves in their mind. Yeah. Or how they want to be. Yeah. And it is an ideal. You get there however you want to get there. I don't give a fuck. Do whatever you want to do. If you're not going into debt and hurting people, what the fuck do I care? Look like a maniac. Good for you.

Good for you. What do you think? Do you think there's a limit? No, I don't. I'm on the same. Do whatever you want. Exactly. If it makes you happy and you're feeling good about yourself and this is the person who you're meant to be, then who am I to say to not do that?

So what makes you feel good about yourself? That I look pretty damn good for somebody who's knocking on the door 50. That's true. You too. But I will say collectively, all Gen Xers look really, we all look really good for our age. Is that true? Like in comparison? Yeah. Millennials are fucking aging like buttermilk. They look like absolute shit.

Why? Sorry. They're carrying the weight of the goddamn world. and they didn't even have the luxury of doing really fun drugs because the drugs that they were doing will kill them right we got to do fun drugs and go to raves and fucking yeah yeah hell yeah right yeah and they didn't true and we also now have the disposable income to do shit like botox right like you have it's just different we are the last i think the last generation that was able to do things like own houses that

are able to like have pretty solid steady careers that pay us a lot of money so that we have disposable income i'm not saying this as like i'm gloating i'm just saying like these are facts yeah so our level of worry and discomfort is a lot different than millennials and and gen z's right they're fucking sweating right major balls right yeah And add on Trump and add on a global pandemic. And yeah, they're going to be looking old. So we have a little bit of luxury, more luxury than they have.

So they look like shit. And they're also worried about everything. Rightfully so. They're inheriting a trash pile. Yeah. That's on fire. So we look good in our old age. Fuck. Also, I mean, like, Botox. And Botox. Okay. tell me all of the things how long do you have I need to know all the things because I'm totally ignorant I'm out of the loop I don't do shit I don't

read shit about shit I don't know anything. Sorry, millennials, but tune in, because we're going to talk about the magic of Botox, even for butthole problems. You can do Botox, too. What? That is a prescribed thing that they'll do to help with some kinds of, not buttholes, yes, we'll talk about Botox. Another episode. Botox and hemorrhoids are a thing. Really? You can, yes. Okay, focus. They will also do this into the vaginal canal for people that are

having, not vaginismus, but bladder control issues, but also pelvic floor issues. Oh, interesting. Literally, you guys are selling Botox short. It is a fucking miracle. It was initially developed to help people recover from and treat Bell's palsy, which causes facial drooping on one side. And then it was repurposed for like beauty purposes, whatever. But it also helps with all of these other things.

It helps people that get TMJ to like not clench their, they inject it into the mass or so they don't clench. Helps people that suffer from chronic migraines. It helps people with things like strabismus or like the eye that's, what do you call it? The wandering eye. The wandering eye. Like it helps with that. Like it helps with bladder control. It helps with pelvic floor issues. Yes, you can inject it into the area around hemorrhoids to kind of retract them back and shrink them.

So, Botox does a fucking lot. You literally use it from head to toe. Literally. I mean, I don't know anybody who Botox... Actually, that's not true. You can Botox your knees. I do know that. Yes! No, I'm sure. That's right. No. I haven't done it yet, but you can literally can if you have, like, sagging skin around your knees. You can Botox that. Oh, I looked into Botox your knees. Okay, but what is it?

Botox is medication that is injected into the muscle. It is a protein of a botulinum, which is the thing that causes like the potato salad to kill a bunch of people at a church picnic. How it kills people is it paralyzes like the muscles of your lungs. So essentially you drown in a whole bunch of phlegm. Okay. What we figured out was you can take like a little tiny, like a little tiny piece of that. And use it to selectively paralyze certain muscles.

This prevents you from making certain expressions that cause etched in lines into skin. Okay? Okay. That's what Botox is. It is injected into the muscles of your face and other places, as we've discussed earlier in the podcast, to selectively paralyze those muscles. It can be injected in lots of places in the face. and how we determine is like there's sort of a basic guideline, but some people's muscles and their faces are stronger than others.

Erin and I recently saw this like TikTok that was a whole bunch of women, must have been at a med spa or something, like saying how many, whatever the amount of Botox you get, like I get 50 or I get 90 or whatever. And Erin and I were both like, wait, what? Like we had no idea what they were talking about. Can you explain that TikTok? So units of Botox is how dosing is measured and how you pay for Botox.

But what they're talking about when they're talking about units is how many units or like inches or pennies of Botox that they're putting in, essentially. Right? Like, it's just a unit. Like, a CC is too much, but like a teeny fraction of a CC. Right? So, for instance, my masseters on either side, my masseters are really strong and I clench in my sleep. And it causes me lots of neck pain and lots of headaches. So in my masseters, I think I get 22 and 22.

I get a little Botox on the tip of my chin, but I can't remember how many units I get there. If you get a lip flip, you get like usually one or two units right here. I get bunny lines. So on the sides of my nose, I get a little Botox here. It's like a couple of units, like maybe four and four. You get two to 10 around the crow's feet, glabella.

Right here these elevator muscles that kind of are responsible for moving your eyebrows up and down you can get it up here but that's how they calculate okay where they do so lots of times what your aesthetic injector will do was kind of with a little white pencil will mark everywhere where they're going to inject and then they add up the amount of units oh wow that they're going to inject okay and they constitute that many units they they have to you have to reconstitute your Botox.

How long Botox lasts for each person is subjective. We have people who, we see people who are like CrossFit athletes or ultra-marathoners, people with super high metabolisms, they're going to rip through their fucking Botox super quick. So they might be getting Botox like every three months. A normal human being might get Botox like every six to twelve months. Okay. Hopefully that was good and not too much. That was actually very informative

because back to talking to me like I'm a baby. So thank you. Perfect. Okay. Okay, so what are the cons of Botox or the side effects? So, I mean, loads. You could end up looking like Kenny Rogers. Just kidding. Allegedly. He had an eye job on Botox. Anyways, allegedly. There's lots of side effects, you can over treat areas. I will tell you the most common thing that happens is that you could get a ptosis. I want to tell people, ptosis does not occur because you have a bad injector.

Ptosis, which is a drooping of the eye and is only temporary when you do Botox, if you get one, it will wear off. There are drops that we can give to make your eye open up wider too, called upneak. Like, ptosis occurs because you have to think about, even though we have a general idea of anatomy, everybody's anatomy is very slightly different. And so sometimes they can place Botox in a place that can cause this heaviness of the eyelid, but it can be corrected. That's the most common.

I would say the other biggest risk would be that you have an allergy to eggs. You have not disclosed this to your injector. They haven't asked, which makes them a really shitty injector. Yeah. And you would have an allergic reaction. Okay. The other potential is that you could just be really sensitive because it is a protein of a botulinum toxin that you could develop kind of temporary flu-like symptoms.

Okay. The most interesting negative side effect, though, is that long-term Botox use where people freeze your glabella, your forehead, and you freeze your eyebrows, they start to develop a lack of empathy because they cannot fucking emote with their eyebrows. Now, this works in the other way. This is fascinating. This works in the other way because there are people who constantly furrow. It creates a biofeedback loop of them being anxious, worried, and depressed.

And doctors inject them with Botox to keep them from being able to make that expression. Shut the front door. And it helps with their depression. No. But the very far end of that is you overdo, you do too much, too often, too many units, too many areas, and you develop a lack of empathy. Oh, my God. Right? Shut up. Yes. It's fucking fascinating. That is fascinating. I've never heard fascinating like that. That's crazy. Fascinating. That's crazy. Absolutely fascinating.

So, yes, Botox, super, super great. Okay. Benefits outray the risks by a lot. If I'm wrong, you can send all email to www.thespacebetweens.com. TheChina.com.

Jump in the comments. Come at me, bro. I dare you. Music. Botox. We're pivoting towards skincare, which is an obvious direction for us to take, but what you don't know is that Stephanie is here with a black band-aid across her cheek. So I decided that I was going to buy black band-aids to wear. No, they're very cool. You walked in and I was like, it's getting hot. Well, originally I bought them for Halloween. You could have been Nelly for Halloween and you missed out.

I don't know how you were not a Saint lunatic. I am offended, actually. Yeah it's very goth I like it okay oh yeah let's talk about your face, okay no let's talk about your skin I want to know like your journey with the skin cancer shit oh I I'm pretty sure everything that I'm experiencing now is from the damage I did when I was 17 it is and wearing Hawaiian Tropic number four and just laying out like this on the beach in Huntington. Oh my god, but our tans were so good though.

You guys, I was born with one. So rude! But I will say that that goddamn smell. The Hawaiian Tropic. This is why I love coconut flavor shit because it tastes like suntan lotion and my husband is so nostalgic. It is. I love it. I can hear Duran Duran. I'm like, oh, follow the Berlin Wall. What's that? I don't even know. Okay, but you had a tan, an enhanced tan in the 90s, right? And didn't you feel glorious? I mean, I feel glorious about being black all the time.

Like, literally, it's so good. No, I would still tan, but just my skin, not that I don't have sun damage. I have a little bit on my driving side, but my level of sun damage is going to be different than somebody else's. Yeah. Who doesn't have the benefit of the kind of melanin that I have. Right. Right. So back to Stephanie's very white face. Pale. Very pale. Hey, pale face. Tell us more about Skinny, sir. But when I went into the doctor to have the biopsy done, she did tell me I had

some sun damage. Mm-hmm. Okay. I said, yep, living in Southern California, 17 years old, laying on the beach like this with number four. Yeah. Yeah. Never wearing sunscreen. No. That was not a thing. Yeah, I didn't grow up wearing sunscreen. No, never, ever. You put the oil on to make you darker. It was Ben DiSole. Do you guys remember Ben DiSole? Yeah. Yeah. The most beautiful women in the abs. You never saw their faces, but just their perfect tan bodies. Yep.

And the white, she had a white bikini. I remember that. And then they did one, they did one one year where it was like a black bikini. Oh, that's cool. But it was the same bikini. Yeah. Yeah, probably the same body even. I just like colored it. For the Saint-Tropez tan. Yeah. So what has been your journey with the spots and stuff? Well, the first one, this one that's here, the other one, the scar that's below

that, I... She's pointing at her lip because this is an audio medium and not being filmed. I was like right above my lip right here. I had what I thought was honestly a blackhead that would just never go away. Okay. Squeeze it, squeeze it, which you're not supposed to do, people. Not supposed to squeeze. A lot of squeezing wouldn't go away. And then after a while, I noticed about every three to four weeks, it would fester and bleed and like crust.

And I'd be like, oh, maybe it's my skincare products. I don't know. And then I would just ignore it. And then same thing about another month or two later would do the same. And anytime I use any of my like alpha hydroxys or any of that kind of stuff, it would hurt so bad.

And I was like, ow, I don't think I'm supposed to do that. So I finally went to the doctor and they do a 3D image first and I had a phone call already at the end of the day and they're like, how soon can you come in for a biopsy? And I had the biopsy the next day and then I had an appointment for a Mohs like a month later. Do you want to tell people what a Mohs is? Yes, please. A Mohs is when they take cuttings, I guess it's, I'm not sure what it's called. So like slices.

Slices, that's what it is. Yeah. Like a slice. They take a slice out and then they go in and then they look at it under the scope and they see if they've got all the skin cancer cells. If they don't, they go back in and they keep taking slices. So it's supposed to be the least invasive if you have a large area because they're just getting the skin cancer and the perimeter right around it. The perimeter isn't the right word. Margin. Margin, that's what it is.

Just around it so that they've got all of it, but also the tissue next to it. And then they suture you up with the little plastic surgery stuff so by the way what she's saying when they're slicing and then sending it to pathology that is happening contemporaneously yeah so you are not live live time they are oh wow they take a then slice stick it on a slide send it down to a path lab path lab takes its stat, looks at it, says you don't have clear margins. Yep. Calls up, go again.

You do it again. And you do it again until the margin is clear. So this is happening in real time. Real time. It takes about 30 to 45 minutes between each slice. So luckily for me, I had only two slices. So I was out of there by 1 o'clock in the afternoon. Some people have a lot more slices. I had a friend that had one slice, but some people have a little more slices. I know two people that have had most surgeries that then required a reconstructive surgery. Okay.

The client of mine, I had told her multiple times, hey, this isn't like a breakout that keeps recurring. You need to have somebody look at that. Sure enough, it was skin cancer. It's like maybe for her the size of like a dime right here.

So next to her nose it was really textured and really significant shortly like within the first like eight weeks after the surgery right she felt disfigured you can't really fuck with it for a while but now she can fuck with it it's been a year so now she's having some laser resurfacing done and then we'll start microneedling after that's over but the other person i know had to I have a flap surgery. What's that? Yeah, I've seen that kind of stuff happen too. This is way more fucked up.

They had a mose on the side of their nose, slice, slice, slice, left them with almost like a hole, not straight through to the nose holes, but significant enough. It takes a chunk out of your skin, essentially. It's a chunk out of your skin. They cut a flap from here and flip it down over the nose. So I'm in the center of my forehead. They take a flap of skin there and then sew that together and the flap of skin they leave partially attached and they twist it and flip it down over the nose.

And then you have to wait until it's almost like you're grafting skin, your own skin to skin. Right. So then you have to wait for that to take. You hope that it doesn't reject. But the skin between your brows is a really good match for the skin on your nose. So that's why they do that. But it is... Even though in the long run, you will have some scarring. It fades after several years. You can do stuff to minimize that scarring. During that healing process, people feel like monsters.

They feel so disfigured. I can't speak to that. Can you speak? Did you feel like you had a tiny little mose? No, when they were in there doing this one, the doctor was doing it actually said, this is bigger than we thought it was. But it's still not like. No, it wasn't. No, no, no, no. But did you still come out of it feeling like, I'm a monster? Yeah. Like, this is your face. Yeah. I came out with this giant, yeah, I did. I feel like, and I still, to me, I don't think they did a good job.

It's got texture on it. It's rigid. You could see where the sutures were. And I put the derma gel on it at night. I put the little- The hydrocolloid bandage. I put the bandage on it. And I take the little thing and I massage it to try to break down that skin texture. And when I went to the doctor on Monday, I asked her about this. And she said, oh, just contact the clinic that you had it done in. And they'll micropen it. Do stuff to it to minimize the scarring. And I'm like, oh, absolutely.

I will be for sure. Because when I look in the mirror, that's all I see is just this. I literally don't see it at all. And I'm literally a professional facer, looker, or at her. Well, I also, when I look in the mirror, I see huge acne scars over here too. Don't see those either, guys. They don't exist, but they only exist in her eyeballs. I also see my brows that I over-tweezed in the 90s. No, I do see that a little bit.

Look how fine and sparse they are. But I think it suits your eye shape and your nose shape very well. Do you know that artist Tamara Limpeka? Was that her name? She drew those sort of cubist modern ladies. You look like one of those. It looks like Uma Thurman driving a car. It's a green and gray painting of a deco kind of lady.

But kind of cubist but kind of deco and she looks like one of those no i remember so it's because she has that profile it's a very i remember those posters when i worked at d gallery they were very popular they're very she's a very popular poster well no framed framed art they were very popular this is art yeah art with the. Music.

You do that make you look so beautiful aside from just your natural beauty so mine is skincare okay like i have like an eight step skincare in the morning i'm like 12 at night and i spend like 30 minutes of bath in the bathroom at night splashing around like a three-year-old water goes everywhere and i'm got this and this care and this over here so i mostly that's me it's all okay okay pause so tell me why do you do that because i don't want

to have wrinkles i don't want to be six six years old and looking like I'm 60 years old. I live with something inside of me that every day it says I don't want to look my age. Like I don't want to look 60 when I'm 60. I don't want to look 50 and I'm knocking on the door of 50.

I just don't want to look that. And if I can spend money on face care products and pad my eyes and do all this stuff and put the little silicone things underneath or whatever I need to do at night, sleep in a giant thing of Tupperware, like I will do it. Yeah. Okay. Skincare. Great. Now, is there like a product you want to plug? I try whenever I go to the store and I'm like, I'm, I'm, I'm definitely like loyal to one, a couple of certain brands. What?

I use, I use, I use, I use Caudillé. Caudillé. Yeah, that one. Which I found out is a drugstore brand in Europe. Yes. Yeah. I love that. It's fetal therapy. So their whole background is that it's based in things derived from grapes. And it started off as, like, the byproduct of the wine industry. So, Lees. That's called the Lees. Okay, okay. So, the Lees, there's also yeast and stuff and stuff and that stuff. And so, they were like, hey, we have all this byproduct.

Maybe it makes good fertilizer, but maybe it makes fucking phenomenal skincare. It's great. It's, like, a lot of antioxidants and a lot of, like, probably, like, plant growth factor peptide bullshit now. But anyways. So, when it first started, it was business. Typically just that. It was just literally face wash, two different moisturizers, a day and a night one. And I've been using that for 20 plus years. Yeah. So and every time they come out with a new formula and I'm like, I'll try it.

Well, during the day. So I have adult acne. I use Proactive still. Oh my gosh, really? Yeah. Every morning I use Proactive. I don't use Proactive. If I like don't use it or I run out of it and I don't have enough time, I look like I'm 16 again. Okay. And Proactive is like a medication. Is it face wash or whatever? That's the salicylic acid face wash. Benzo peroxide. That's what it is. Yeah. And I mean, you know, maybe part of me still using it is because my skin has been so clear using it.

And then I always see stuff on Reddit. Like if you stop using it, then your face will break out. So I'm like, is it my face just conditioned to using it? I don't know. You're going to be 90 just like still. Oh, I'm still going to be like, oh, I had to buy light colored towels because all my towels bleached out. That's the benzo. Yeah. Yeah. I use that and I use like two different moisturizers during the day and at night and my eye cream. Music.

So that was your skincare routine that you're very into. I don't even know. How long is this story going to be if I ask you what your skincare routine is? My skincare routine is super minimal. Oh, interesting. Okay, tell us. This is somebody said, well, what's the beauty product? My work answer is sunscreen, motherfucker. Wear it. Retinol. Retinol, bitch. Also do that. But my actual answer is lid scrub.

It is a foam that my eye doctor told me to get to get the crust out of your gross ass eyes when you wake up in the morning okay very interesting in the morning so I take this foam and I like put it on my fingertips and I like rub it into my lash line and I get all the crust out of my eyes in the morning so I'm not like eye booger city and then I wipe that off with a wet washcloth And then in the morning, I do a little pigment regulator, like just a pigment brightener,

and then a little vitamin C. And then I use good old-fashioned embryo laced as my moisturizer, bitch. It makes an amazing base for putting on any kind of makeup. But also, it just feels good as fuck on your skin, and you need like a pea-sized drop. So that's my morning. My night time is that I'll do like maybe an oil, if I'm like not being a lazy fat bitch, I'll do an oil cleanse. And then I switch between two cleansers, the Skin Medica Purifying Acne Cleanser, because I love an acidy cleanser.

Or the Zio Xenobagi Gentle Cleanser, because I just, I like a foaming cleanser is what I just realized. Both of those are foaming cleansers. I don't even wear moisturizer at the nighttime. Like a real fucking heathen. Do you wear makeup every day? Not every day, no. Okay.

I have to go to work. I have to like, I have to sell the vibes, bro. Music. I am very minimal with my home care because I'm very maximal with all the other stuff. Okay, yes. Let's go there, let's go there. So what else do you do? I want to preface what I'm going to say with, this is not a normal, regimen for normal human beings. Okay. My access is very different because of my job. This is not sustainable for the normal human being. It might not even be sustainable for like an actress on the WB.

It's potentially sustainable for Courtney Cox. It's definitely sustainable for Nicole Kidman. Okay. You feel me? Yes, I do. So the latest thing that I did, and I do this like once a year because it is fucking dramatic, is that I did a Fatona laser peel. This is a laser that, I think it's an Erbium laser. It's a laser that has a lot of applications and it's pretty precise so you can calibrate it even for darker skin tones. So prior to like the last five years, lasers were only for white people.

They are not only for white people now. So this laser can be calibrated for darker skin types. They do it on me like a peel, which sounds innocuous, but it feels like Satan shitting fire onto your face. Not while they're doing it. It just feels warm. Once you turn the Zimmer, which is this thing that blows super cold air on your face, off and you turn the laser off, your face heats up to like 45 million degrees. And again, Satan shitting Doritos Locos Tacos onto your face.

It's so hot it stays hot for 24 hours and you swell up and you're red and then over the course of a couple days that kind of gets kind of gross like rough and then a little dark and then it peels off okay and you have the skin of like a nine-year-old child so that's pretty cool i did that that would be the most recent thing that i've done okay so the skin of a nine-year-old child so So that means it's like smooth, soft, plump and soft.

And if you have discoloration, it like kind of lightens that discoloration. Okay. But I also do things like Botox, filler, Morpheus, threads. What's Morpheus? Morpheus is radiofrequency microneedling. Oh, my God! Oh, I want to do that. You are not allowed to do anything. You have the worst outcomes of anyone. There's a list of outcomes, and it's like, could cause potential. She's like, oh, number one on the call sheet. I'm the photo next to it. I'm the number one.

I'm the number one. but it is radio frequency micronadling that can go penetrate up to eight millimeters now eight millimeters is a lot more than you think and burns fat so they use that on your body some motherfuckers in the world are doing that to do things like get rid of like buckle fat on faces and fucking people up because you need your bitches listen you need your buckle fat not when you're 20 which is why all these 20 year olds

are having their buckle fat sucked out of the face but You need that shit when you are a 50-year-old woman. I have so many questions. Please. You are speaking a foreign language. Oh, ask me everything. I just love reading up on all this stuff. Okay, what is buckle fat was my initial question. And the cheek. So, okay, this is my normal face. Yes. I'm talking in my buckle fat. Mm-hmm. And you see how it makes hollows in the cheek. Mm-hmm. So you have, like, do you know who Zoe Kravitz is? Yes.

Okay. have you looked at a picture of her lately no prefacing this with an allegedly she had a normal face then she had buckle fat removal she's like and she looks like she's sucked on a sour lollipop for like days she's like this she looks like a taco like i don't know how like it's zoe kravitz, buckle fat just b-u-c-c-a-l and it's buckle fat not bugle fat i don't want i'll take no emails about my pronunciation, I work in the industry and you don't.

Okay, so you see a nice, round, full face, and then hollowed out. I'm talking like this. Yeah. Yeah, it's horrifying. Oh, no. And you add that on top of the very disordered or restrictive eating that most people in that industry do, and then you just look like you have a pointy-ass chin and a strong-ass jaw.

Scary. It's horrifying. Yeah. All right. It's horrifying. Sorry, Zoe. So, but keep your buckle fat. Okay. Super important later. Abby is like coming to grips with this. She's like, you're a monster. Here's my thing. I like living in ignorant. Opening a can. Go ahead. Okay. Because like, I feel fine. And then you're like, oh, FYI, there's this thing called buckle fat in your

cheeks. And now I'm going to be looking at myself in the mirror thinking about my buckle fat and whether it is too much or not enough. And I feel like that's the way it is anytime I go do, I don't know, whatever. I have a facial or whatever. They're like, oh, did you know you've got this thing? And like I didn't even need to know because it wasn't bothering me. I want to have an advertisement that's like, the less you know,

you know. Not the more you know. The less you know. The star goes backwards. The rainbow folds up. Yeah. You're being marketed to. Maybe I'm like crazy jaded. But I just, I decide to buy in on what I'm going to buy in on, right? And I think, like, the more that I know, the less likely I am to buy in. Yeah. Even though it sounds like I buy in all the time. How do you choose, like, what you want to buy into and what you don't?

Or you just get to try it because you have a discount or whatever. Yeah, I get it for free. But, so I get to try it because I get it for free. But also, too, like, yes, Zoe Kravitz allegedly has this thing, has bodily autonomy. Do I think she looks like a maniac fuck yes bro, I don't want that for my life. That's not going to resonate with me. I might consider it for like two seconds. Like, do I know?

I'm fucking new. Right? So I think like the more that you, A, know what the longitudinal outcome is of something. Right. And how that ages. Yeah. I'm making these decisions as somebody who's turning 48 in a week. Zoe Kravitz is making those decisions as somebody, I think, I believe she's still in her 20s.

Right again allegedly that thinking is a real different thinking than 48 year old lady thing 40 year old lady thinking is making better choices with more information right predicated usually on personal happiness and not public perception does that make sense for me yeah yeah yeah and also be wary of anybody unless you're asking for an unsolicited opinion like you walk into the office of an aesthetic injector or you walk into the office of a plastic surgeon and be like, what do I need to do?

Be wary of anybody that tells you what you should be doing. Right. Because they're selling their perception. Right. And even still, people walk into my trusted aesthetic injectors and it's like, what would you do? I know what they'd say is like, what do you think needs to be done? They'll hand you a mirror and be like, tell me what you see.

Right. and they'll either say yes yes yes or no no no right or yes no yes and then if this is a like okay i see what you're seeing here's how what i would do right but not unsolicited that's fucked up and weird yeah terrible

so don't look at joey kravitz and think you need to have your buckle fat removed. Music. A rough transition into the one topic we've been avoiding. Eating disorder. Eating disorder. Hit it. She's like, no. I know. I'm like, what actual question can I ask here to pivot naturally to this? I don't know. How are you doing now? It's a lifelong struggle. It's a daily struggle. I guess daily isn't the right word, but it's definitely a struggle.

I would say on the weekly, like I weigh myself all the time. Like I'm on a scale everyday type situation and I'm in the mirror doing this kind of thing and seeing how I would look if I lost five pounds or if I look like this. And I stand, and this is a daily thing.

Almost every day I'll stand in the mirror and I'll, you know, suck it in and be like, okay, if I just lost three more pounds, I could, you know, I'll look like this and I'll, you know, I'll look even better for somebody who's knocking on the door at 50. Like, so that kind of stuff happens. That happens daily for sure. That's a lot. Yeah. What kind of treatment have you gotten? Therapy. Like just like talk therapy? Yeah, just psychology therapy. I mean, this all was triggered when I was 19.

I was triggered by a guy who told me I would look way hotter if I was as skinny as Kate Moss. And it just went down from there. And I spent a lot of my early years just not eating. Yeah. So like what was your daily during that time? I would live on coffee, cigarettes. And I think for my meals, I would eat a Slurpee and maybe a salad once in a while. But I didn't eat a whole lot. Like my calorie intake was pretty low.

It was always calorie restriction 100 calorie restriction and i did when i was younger and i was it was more prevalent i did try other like i was like well if i was bulimic instead of like just restricting calories and i'm like i don't enjoy barfing at all so that was off the table so it was just easier for me to restrict my calories i brought some photos on my phone at my thinnest i was 116 pounds old photos of each other

did you get compliments when you were that small absolutely 100 a thousand percent i got told all the time how hot i was how cute i was, and i look back and it was it was all because of that really just bad body dysmorphia yeah did you have any of that before that dipshit said that to you nope really nope. At what point were you like, oh, this is actually a problem for me? I was so skinny that I could barely move. I remember I was wearing a Adidas, a size extra small crop top and green pants

matching jogging outfit with the gray stripes on. I can remember as clear as day. It was so loose on me. It was like sagging everywhere. And I remember like getting up to go to the bathroom to get in the shower and I passed out on the floor. And then I remember like trying to take a shower and I was like, oh, I'm going to go over. I'm going to go over. And I remember just like that was it for me. It was like, oh, I don't this isn't really healthy.

It's really not sustainable. But that also was coupled with therapy and like learning to like eat again and not restrict the calories and like slowly, slowly trying to incorporate foods back into my life and trying to eat healthy. Like when I stopped restricting the calories, I would only eat healthy foods.

So then I went down this whole rabbit hole of, well, I'm going to be a vegetarian and a vegan because I'll still get food that I want, but I'm not going to have all the high cholesterol and all that kind of stuff. So when I was a vegetarian and vegan, well, I was a vegan for two years, which I missed out on a lot of things. But when I was vegetarian, I lived on a slice of toast and some peanut butter. And I ate a lot of rice cakes with peanut butter and stuff like that.

And I just still, I guess it was still restrictive calorie eating. And now I look back and a lot of my food stuff still to this day is very much disordered eating. And I just learned very recently what disordered eating was. And I was like, holy shit, that is tick, tick, tick, tick all the way down. And I, so do I still suffer from eating disorder? A hundred percent because I have serious disordered eating issues,

serious disordered eating issues. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, just ruining my stomach from not eating calories and just have that searing kind of stomach acid pain. Now I have all sorts of GI problems. But on the other side of it, you know, I'm pretty healthy. I'm fairly happy. Like, I, you know, feel like I've been managing it for a really long time. And there's been a couple times in the last, like, 15, 20 years that I've had a couple, like, backslides into that.

Crash outs. Yeah. I have a couple photos of me. there was a photo of me a couple of Christmases ago and I was so skinny that I looked skeletal and I had like layers on to kind of cover up the skinniness. And I look back and I'm like, when I, things are stressful for me, like work stress, home stress, whatever stress, my go-to is the restricted calorie eating because I can control that. Right.

Right. So, yep. And that's how I deal with stress and anxiety is I go immediately to the restrictive calorie and disordered eating because I can control that.

So but that the photo of me at christmas when i realized how bad a lot of that stuff was i ended up going to seeing a therapist i ended up getting on a very low dosage antidepressant to kind of help with a lot of that got it mentality so good so here i am all right your turn i still do have food issues but there are more like if i have too much dairy i'm in the bathroom for like, Don't stand next to her downwind. I could propel a car from here to Southern California.

Can you go far into my Tesla, please? So I don't have to charge a later thing. Yeah. And i think we have to go eat dinner that's what i was afraid of hungry and i don't want to talk about my eating stuff because that gets weird quick we didn't yeah we never even oh she's like no bitch i want you to talk about your shit now we never even got to you we did it it's okay it is okay a menopausal butthole we got all the weird shit you can do to your face we got eating Disorders.

Not eating disordered. I would say disordered eating. Disordered eating. Is there anything you want to add about your disordered eating in order to make Stephanie feel better about the fact that she already shared hers? I used to be very skinny. Now I'm very fat. You are not very fat, but we will let that ride. I was able to commoditize, minimally, commoditize the less amount of space that I used to take up.

Now I take up more space and sometimes you feel invisible, but sometimes you feel powerful, but sometimes you feel like kind of grody. And sometimes you eat dinner for breakfast a lot.

And sometimes even if you move your body a whole lot and you do all of these things and you join a community that's like move your body and lift up heavy things and put them down you still have a body that takes up a lot of space even if you eat and cook most of your food and it's whole foods you still have this body that takes up oh you're told the body that you're in takes up a lot of space by society right yes and you feel like you take up a lot of space and um because you

have a very busy work life when you're not at work you don't really eat and then you have these like weird spikes of insulin because you spend eight hours not eating and then you whatever it is you eat even if you ate a carrot you're because you haven't eaten all day your insulin goes like go find yourself you know like And you find it very challenging to lose weight and you don't love your body. The thing that you can control, like your face or your hair or your toenails, you do.

And you're also a perfectionist with anxiety and ADHD. So you're fucking dealing with that. And getting older and having pain in between your asshole and your vagina.

And there you go. The end of this episode. Yeah, no, no. Music. Great synopsis, but we're not quite done with this whole episode. Because next, I ask a very hard-hitting question. What is your favorite thing about your body right now? Ooh. Because, again, I'm intent on just trying to practice body neutrality.

Um why can't you be body positive because i i feel like toxic positivity has taken like a root hold in our culture that like your life is not meaningful unless you are deliriously happy or positive got it like people are like how are you doing if i tell people fine they think something's wrong right i strive for contentment and i love the fact that i'm content in my life if i tell people i'm content they think that there's something wrong

because i'm not like i'm terrific got it i'm terrific go fuck yourself who's terrific who wants to be if you're deliriously happy all the time you're on the upswing of a mania buddy you're get help seek help so same thing with the body i don't need to be deliriously happy about my body does my body move yeah do i I nourish my body, sure. Is it fine and I'm not in pain? Yep, totally. Am I grateful for that? Yeah, kinda. Got it. That's all it needs to be. Best part, go.

You know it's coming to you next, Stephanie, so I really hope you're thinking

about it. Maybe like, well, okay. Sometimes I feel, the inside of my arm on accident like i'll be scratching or something and i realize like how soft my skin is and i remember like my mom's skin is she's gotten older she's always had soft skin but she has like really soft skin and it it just feel it feels really it feels really good and i and i'm like oh like i have like really really soft skin like i have really soft hands Even though I wash my hands like 40 or 50 times a day,

that is not an exaggeration. I have really, like, skin. My husband will touch my hands and he's like, your hands are so soft. Your arm is so soft. I'm going to, I'll close on that. I like it. Yeah. Your turn. I'm going to go with my belly button. Oh. Absolutely not. I don't want to. Here's why. Because my belly button is in a very abnormal place. What? my belly button is you had to know that it was coming.

My belly button is not the normal spot where people's are mine is your belly mine's like this high no it's not look how high it is what normally it should be down like two or three inches so like my natural waist is like way high yeah oh my god so i do i see jeremy makes fun of me because i'll stand like this and he goes why do you do that i'm like because that's my natural waist and he's like you look like ed grimly like do you and

you haven't any do you light on yes i clean it all the time just i clean mine in the shower all the time i don't like the way it feels no it's, It makes my skin crawl. Talk about pelvic floor exercise. Nothing will make you clench that goddamn pelvic floor more than touching the ends of my belly. Even just talking about it right now. It's horrifying. It's a horrifying thought. I have to hold myself because I don't like it.

When I came to the shower, I have to like steal myself and put like a little soap on my beard and just like.

Drink it around and then like rinse it out and you have to dry it out otherwise it'll smell like it was horrible the worst smell in the whole wide world but it's kind of a good smell but it's connected to your vagina but not in a good way no belly buttons are yeah yeah so do you want to know what my favorite part is yes oh abby thank you abby would you mind telling me what your favorite part of your body is i would love to tell you so it used

to be see we could all go through this rigmarole, but it used to be my hair. My hair was like a key component of my identity. Now it's thinning and so now I'm questioning my whole existence as a human being. But, I think that my favorite part of my body is Show me. Oh, I do like that sort of expanse of smooth, soft skin in between your under tit but above your like fuba. Yeah. Yeah. It's such a good Right? Like what? Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like very smooth. What do you call that?

I don't know, but it reminds me. It just seems so fecund and fertile and feminine. Like it's a very feminine part of your body. It is your trunk, which is not a feminine word. Yeah. Yeah. It's your abdomen. Your abdomen. What quadrant of your abdomen is that? It's like gross, but yeah,

that's nice. That's a good part. Thank you. That part should be in museums. Music.

To stephanie's phone to see the photo she mentioned earlier the one of her in grade school looking like a 40 year old with nine cats here's my frizzy hair when i saw the old lady named march you were super cute get out of here you were a really cute little girl let me see i like that little girl, i know that that little girl is the white feather one did you ever watch freaks and geeks yes and so you remember what was the um kid bill have her check no

what was his last name yes bill i I fucking love him. Havertzek, was that what he was called? It feels right. He would go home, and the most joy he had in his life was being a latchkey kid and watching whatever he wanted on TV and laughing his ass off watching, like, Johnny Carson reruns or whatever.

And the pure joy that he had in doing that, I feel like is the same, that same kid, is that somewhere that they were finding these moments of joy where they didn't have to feel like they needed to be cool because they were unobserved and they just had like these very private moments of being their true self. Music.

And back to the thing I was saying before is like maybe becoming an adult is chipping away at that marble plinth to get to the private moments of joy person all the time that doesn't give a shit about how they're observed by others. Like I'm constantly chipping. Music. Getting back that moment of joy, kid. Before you knew different meant wrong. Before the big glasses and the acne. Before filling in bubbles.

Before the compliments that kept you sick. Back when you took up all the space your little heart wanted and needed. So chip what you need to friends keep on chipping on. Music.

In honor of our weird and normal bodies please enjoy these vagina poems selected from a coloring book are you okay my vag is a taco filled with glistening meat hangs out with other tacos no need to compete bringing joy to the world my badge is santa spreading love and cheer from kyoto to atlanta my badge is an owl hoot hoot motherfuckers keeping you up all night full feathers no pluckers. Music.