🍓On Weightlessness🍓
This week I purchased some of the skimpiest clothes I’ve dallied with in awhile- chocolate brown low rise culottes with a built in thong and a matching ruffly halter from Emily Watson, a “business suit” with booty shorts instead of wide leg pants from Bye Bambi, a low rise cobalt string bikini from Ratboi, the cut of which will likely encourage me to become reacquainted with a lady’s razor. This fit of shopping pique could be due to the sickening summer sales, or perhaps the hair-curling humidity in NYC, but I credit something a bit deeper.
Since childhood I’ve had a distinctly counterphobic response to criticism- being told I shouldn’t or can’t has entirely the opposite effect, a quality that has only occasionally paid dividends. So why, in this modern, sex-positive world I inhabit, is buying some harlot-y separates considered reactionary? Isn’t there an ass themed party I can go and hug the wall at every night of the week? Well, yes and no. Yes, because I do hear about more of those parties than you’d think considering I’m pushing forty! But no, because it turns out my world is not a microcosm but in fact a separate cosmos, a pocket of illusion that serves to blur the truth about what the average viewer, consumer or commenter feels about bodies that deviate from a narrow (literal and figurative) norm.
It’s no secret my run on Girls introduced me to the body discourse on both sides. There was enormous kindness and connection, but I also heard every insult known to man, was compared in memes to uncooked chickens and billowing tubes of Pillsbury dough. Some might say that I invited that kind of attention through the very act of making the work, but that bad faith argument is only a short walk from the age old “she shouldn’t have been walking at night in that skirt” theory. Are any of us, by making our art or by being ourselves, ever inviting abuse, verbal or physical? Not in my America!
The culture hasn’t gotten less conservative or judgmental since Girls went off the air in 2017. The internet hasn’t gotten much kinder, safe for certain corners of the web where like minded people gather, such as this one. And I also haven’t gotten any thinner.
I try really, really hard not to read about myself online- but when faced with a TikTok or YouTube comments section, it’s a bit like being offered a massive McFlurry or- for the aliens who don’t like ice cream- a tray of shots: you know you’ll feel like shit later, but fuck it, you only live once. Dipping my toe back into a press cycle, I’ve seen a few things- and it’s wild how often the first comment- and the second, and the third- is something in the vein of “so Lena Dunham ate Lena Dunham?” or “Lena Dunkham’s” or maybe a cool GIF of that trash monster from Fraggle Rock if the person has wit and flair. The only exception in my public life was the year I was felled by a hospital infection and lost 50 pounds of pure despair (and something else that starts with a d.) I was routinely congratulated and asked for my fitness secrets.
For years, I thought my job was to pretend this had no effect on me. I got so good at pretending that I sort of thought it didn’t. It’s only when I look back at the choices I made- in work, in life, in dating- that I realize how much pain I was sublimating. Because the fact is, I came into this business feeling beautiful. Most of the time I still do. But the belief that I was battling an army of perception, that any friend or lover or even my mother might start to see me the way that the larger world seemed to, led to choices that were at best random and at worst dangerous.
For a long time, I did not have a name for what ailed me. I did always know that I was having a different experience than many of the people around me- as a kid, I would look at the others in gym class, running or kicking a red rubber ball, and wonder how they could possibly feel so boundless, so in their bodies. It was literally beyond my comprehension that someone could run without feeling a profound heaviness, like their joints were made of lead. Were they all just better at pretending than I was? Was I lazy, clumsy or just not trying hard enough? It was only in the water that I felt free- I would stay in the lake (or the pool, or the tub) until my hands grew prune-y, so enamored with the feeling of finally being weightless.
It wasn’t until 2017, after going round and round the mulberry bush with doctors of all kinds, that I was finally diagnosed with Ehler-Danlos Syndrome. EDS is a group of inherited connective tissue disorders that affect the body’s production of collagen. In strictest medical terms, it translates to “I am made of Elmer’s Glue and popsicle sticks.” It’s telling that the person who finally sent me in the right direction was not a doctor but a Girls viewer with EDS who wrote me an email, saying she thought that the frequent illnesses I detailed in my writing might have a throughline- was I sensitive to alcohol, she asked? Check. Sun? Check. Frequent rashes? Check. GI issues? Check. Joint pain, bruising, dizziness and fatigue? Check, check, check, check. She had even noticed my unusual run in an episode of the show, gently calling out the inconsistency of my flailing gait. She sent me to an expert at Johns Hopkins, who brought an organizing principle to a very disorganized experience. Looking back, that was the beginning of my real life. I am so thankful for her.
My diagnosis was also my entry point to the world of disability theory. Finding a culture of people- many of them women- who were trying to remix our idea of what a body could do and be, what it meant to have a “good” body, was a full Neo red pill moment (in a strictly Matrix context.) Suddenly I was seeing the way that capitalism, misogyny, fatphobia and ableism- all of the able-isms- had conspired to make me see myself as little more than a tool to be perfected. Pieces like Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory and E Samuels’ Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time broke me open and it was impossible to look back. I started to understand not just the limits of my own perception- even girl power couldn’t save us from all this- but the limits of what we see when we see each other. We look at the body, frozen in an image, and assess it for signs of success and failure. We don’t consider all its taken for the inhabitant to arrive at the present moment, and that this very arrival could, in fact, be miraculous.
As a teen, I had an image that would spring into my head- me, standing in a collapsing room, holding the walls back. It was how I saw my relationship to my own weight- that at any point, I was towing the line between having an acceptable body and an unacceptable one via sheer force of will. But we all know you can only hold the walls for so long before your arms get shaky. It never occurred to me, until I went from seeing myself as sick (a temporary condition) to seeing myself as disabled (an expansive one) that there was a door out of that room.
I feel compelled to say this now because I’ve been surprised- and at times humiliated and angered- by the fact that I cannot joyfully and proudly discuss what I do without being held to a standard I have chosen to opt out of all together. I’m surprised by how much of this commentary comes from people who would likely claim to know better. I understand that this experience isn’t limited to fat people, or disabled ones- that people of all sizes are damned with faint praise and slammed with fierce glee. But it seems almost needless to say that cis male artists are rarely asked to tow the same line- even the most famous movie star on his off time can enjoy the beach with his decades younger lover and his dad bod in relative peace. I have a lot of prayers for our collective future- many of them more pressing than whether or not I get called ugly on the internet- but this is so deeply what my new show Too Much is about, so profoundly a part of why I feel I was brought to earth (despite my protestations!) in the first place.
A few years ago, I wrote some notes on this issue, that feel appropriate for where I am and maybe where some of you may be- and definitely for the release week of a show called Too Much.
For anyone who has gone through life with a big appetite, there are phrases you become accustomed to: “Don’t spoil your supper.” “You’re going to make yourself sick.” “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.”
In reality, my life has been immeasurably enhanced by my appetite, not just for food but for love, for experience, for art. My favorite people are the ones whose appetites cannot be controlled, who are piloted by that kind of hunger. They’re the most interesting, complicated, and desirable people I know. It doesn’t always show on their bodies, that feeling of "too muchness," but I can always see it in the way they move through the world.
In my current body, I feel protected. By my history, by my hard-earned sense of reality, and yes, by my flesh. I know what I think is erotic and it’s not what I was sold. It’s splitting a good dinner with my husband on a Sunday then getting into bed full to watch
British crime shows. It’s staying in the bath so long it drains around me and my thighs skid against the sides. It’s having a center of gravity.
Plenty of people have said all of this in more tender and academic ways. In her book Big Beautiful Female Theory, Eloise Grills writes: “I’m wasting my life thinking my body’s all wrong and if I spent less time hating it I coulda been a female astronaut.” Hard agree. But then again, I am a female astronaut. I went to space, only to realize, while I was floating alone out there in the darkness, how much I missed earth. It had never been perfect. Some days I still want to leave. But it’s my home.
And so I’m staying.
I hope, reading this, you can substitute the idea of weight for whatever quality you feel you’re meant to be ashamed of but deep down but actually just… aren’t.
So if you see me out on these streets this summer in my booty shorts business suit, holla atcha girl.
In all forms,
Lena
Making me feel okay in my body since 2014. Thank you, queen 💪
“In reality, my life has been immeasurably enhanced by my appetite, not just for food but for love, for experience, for art. My favorite people are the ones whose appetites cannot be controlled, who are piloted by that kind of hunger. They’re the most interesting, complicated, and desirable people I know. It doesn’t always show on their bodies, that feeling of "too muchness," but I can always see it in the way they move through the world.” Phew does this hit!!! Thank you thank you thank you.