STATEMENT

Tales from a Ragstock dressing room

AVA BURZYCKI Statement Columnist

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 fatburning 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.

Slack, Laugh, Love

OSCAR NOLLETTE-PATULSKI Statement Correspondent

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 midafternoon, 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-studentmanagers 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 nonurgent 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 agreedupon time, I click on the headphoneicon toggle button that then turns blue, signifying that the Huddle has begun.