Hello Every Body,

I sure wish I could write the email I thought about at the beginning of the month, but times have changed.

I am a disabled burned out community organizer who has worked for over 20 years with communities that did not have access to reproductive health care.

Not only that, but I AM a person who did not have access to reproductive health care. I was diagnosed with stage 4 endometriosis at 23 years old and I suffered in pain for nearly 20 years before I could get a hysterectomy. Because a woman's pain doesn't matter nearly as much as preserving her fertility. In the middle of that, when I did get pregnant, I could only carry it to viability once. My son was born at 27 weeks and has disabilities due to his prematurity. I rarely tell my birth experience because it was so traumatic. I still find myself saying "when Atti was born" as if I had little to do with it. I had HELLP syndrome and I nearly died on the operating table. I barely made it out alive even without any debates about what to do. My experience is happening right now to someone across the country, and they will not have my happy ending.

I never take any comfort in sugar coating, so I will not pretend things aren't dire. But I also want to tell you some things that give me a lot of hope.

The first thing is that people actually care now. My entire career I've been educating on these issues and people would wave it away as if it didn't apply to them. Well, now we know it applies to all of us. When rights are threatened, all of our rights are threatened. We have numbers and energy and resources we have never had before. 

Another thing I want you to know is that this work didn't start here, and it didn't start at whatever point you join. This work has continued unbroken since the beginning and there are networks and organizations who have painstakingly laid ground work. Don't feel overwhelmed, this problem isn't up to you alone to solve, even as the crisis feels so personal.

There are many of us who didn't lose our bodily autonomy with this court decision, because we never had it. Disabled people, immigrants, incarcerated people, Indigenous and Black people, vulnerable children, there are lots and lots of us out here who have never had it. Lots of people whose bodies don't belong to them and never have. I have never had bodily autonomy, even as I have a lot of privilege in other areas. 

I don't bring that up to shame anyone who did have bodily autonomy and is grieving the loss. Grief is real and deserves respect. I say it to tell you: It's OK. There are people who know what to do. This is bad news, but it's not new news.

A lot of us look to individual heroes as resistance figures - like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker. Everyone wants to be the hero, nobody wants to write the emails or wrangle the volunteers. Everyone wants to think that they are the Special who has the magic to save the world. But that's not what resistance looks like in reality. It's making sure people have rides to the event, that they have food or medical care so they can keep showing up. It's cleaning up after the event and carrying garbage home in your car when there's no dumpster at the site. It's working a phone tree or managing spreadsheets of contact information. It's not glamorous or magic, but it couldn't get more purposeful.

When I have worked with people who were forced to carry pregnancies they didn't want, parent children they don't have support to parent, live with the trauma of surrendering their child, live with a dangerous partner, and on and on, they way we survived was through communities. I have spent so many days in a kitchen surrounded by people I loved as we worked together in common purpose, all the kids running around together in a pack. We threw big camping events where the kids went feral as I cooked chili over a fire for a couple hundred people as we talked strategy and imagined together what possibilities we could create. These bonds are how you sustain yourself in a system that hopes you won't.

In this moment, the most effective approach is hyper local. Find the orgs that are doing work in your community, targeting the laws that affect you. Meet your neighbors. Find the people who you can support who in turn will support you. There is no savior coming to solve this problem. We are who we've got. Follow the experienced voices, find some work to do, and you will find a place to dedicate all that fear and panic to turn it into action.

This month I've been talking the Marrows of Body Loyalty. These are the lifeblood - hence the name - of our self care activities. When there are so many competing options and so much misinformation, how do we know which self care strategies are actually the ones that will help us? How do we know if a food plan is helping us or harming us? How do we know if therapy is productive when we often have to feel the hurt more before we start to heal? All our current events are providing us examples of how easy it is to be led astray into choices that are not in your long term best interest. So how do you find the ones that are? I think it's by keeping an eye on what the ultimate goal of those behaviors are. By deciding on your purpose and holding up any habits to see if it aligns with that purpose. Food that doesn't feel like care is not going to sustain you. Reflection that isn't rooted in self acceptance can just be a toxic inner monologue. A lot of habit advice out there recommends you start with Why. The Marrows are the Why of Body Loyalty.

I've been calling our big Body Loyalty Self Care chart the Body Loyalty Rubric, but that name seems too complicated to be clear to many, so I think I'm going to just start calling it the Body Loyalty Plan.

The next phase of our plan is the Mind of Body Loyalty. If Marrow is the Why, Mind is the How. How are you going to make these behaviors work in your life? Through reframing your beliefs around them.

We'll tackle that in July!