📚 Tired As F*ck Book Club - Week 2

1 day ago
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Week 2

📖 How to Let Everyone Know You Suck → How to Lose Feeling in Half of Your Face (p. 42–84)

😬 How to Let Everyone Know You Suck

This chapter is a really good example of how openly criticizing ourselves in casual social settings (with friends, etc.) just… doesn’t work and more than that, shaming ourselves into “willpowering” our way toward more “successful” disordered eating doesn’t help—and causes harm.

The harm is not only to ourselves, but to others around us who are listening to vocalized anti-fat bias (and all the intersecting harms within that—racist, anti-trans, anti-queer, ableist rhetoric). It creates a sense of unsafety, which is particularly harmful as well since it’s normalized (and celebrated) in mainstream culture.

In terms of body image, it reinforces the false notion that:

👉 everyone is hyper-focused on appearance (they're not)

👉 and that appearance = lovability / acceptance (it's not)

Here’s the tricky part about shame: It’s deceptively convincing.

It can feel like:

accountability
productivity
“doing something about it”

…but it’s not actually doing any of those things.

✨ What actually helps?

…. Drum roll…

Self-compassion 💜

For example, self compassionate self talk might sound like: I can notice these thoughts about my body without believing they define my worth. I can struggle and still treat myself with care

Self-compassion isn’t about pretending something isn’t bothering you. It's about being honest—without turning that honesty into self-attack.

Does that feel impossible sometimes? Absolutely. Completely out of reach, even.

And still—that’s what genuine self-compassion looks like and it is attainable for everyone.

I digress... back to the book/next chapter.

🥗 How to Try Every Diet

She does a really good job here describing her personal experience of chasing thinness as a way to feel “elite”—and therefore safe.

This is such a common pattern & this cycle is perpetuated loudly by the $6.8 trillion diet + wellness industry. In the book she names the deep desire for confidence—and how flawed it is to try to get that through restriction and disordered eating - YES 👏

Because at the end of the day:

👉 your body is trying to keep you alive

👉 and it will fight back against mental, emotional, and physical restriction to keep you alive

🎭 How to Be Extremely Dramatic

I found this one interesting.

There’s a conversation here about distraction / escapism / numbing—and yes, these can absolutely be overused like any coping strategy.

If we only have one way of coping, and we use it all the time, we get stuck.

AND

There’s also a really important counterpoint:

✨ distraction can be healthy

We do not need to be:

mindful
present
processing emotions

…all the time.

In fact, trying to do that when distress is too high actually causes harm.

👉 Sometimes distraction is the kindest, most supportive thing we can do for ourselves in a given moment.

The key is just making sure it’s not our only strategy.

Again, I digress, back to the book/next chapter

How to Pray for a New Face

WILD that she got a nose job at 16.

Such a messy situation—and honestly, not uncommon in terms of the underlying motivations.

I’m glad she names this:

“Plastic surgery is a really great example of something that won’t inherently fix how you feel about yourself… it didn’t actually help me like myself.” (p.64)

Also important: almost no one noticed the change, reinforcing the fact that:

👉 External changes ≠ internal resolution

💄 How to Be Obsessed with Beauty

Some honest reflections on toxic beauty standards and ideals.

No notes 😅

🇫🇷 How to Have a Horrible Time in France

Yikes.

Some very real and difficult examples of medical and emotional invalidation here.

🧠 How to Lose Feeling in Half of Your Face

There are some passages here that explain trauma in a really clear, accessible way:

“The book Waking the Tiger helped me understand that very ordinary experiences can result in trauma, and those experiences can keep you stuck for a long time, sometimes for your whole life if they aren't dealt with. And being stuck in that fight or flight state will very quickly lead to physical and emotional symptoms, including exhaustion and burnout. Here are some of the seemingly ordinary experiences that can be stored as trauma in the body and nervous system: an upsetting social interaction, a physical injury, witnessing violence, being bullied, certain medical and dental procedures, loss of a close family member, illnesses, a financial scare, and a stressful near-miss accident (even just almost getting in a car crash). Basically, nothing dramatic and horrible has to actually happen; it just has to be something you don't know how to process in the moment.” (p.80)

And:

“Trauma is a contributing factor in a lot of physical and mental illnesses, including chronic exhaustion, because it keeps your body in a very stress-activated state for way longer than is ideal, and it also usually has people turning to coping mechanism after coping mechanism to try to avoid the discomfort of the unprocessed event. A scientific article from 2015 noted that if PTSD symptoms go unprocessed, they can eventually manifest as chronic fatigue, immune system problems, or endocrine problems, as well as lots of other anxious behaviors. Long story short: unprocessed trauma is common, and trauma is a huge contributor to general exhaustion.” (p.81)

This overlaps a lot with the work of Gabor Maté in The Myth of Normal—the idea that our mental, emotional, and physical states are deeply interconnected and play a significant role in overall health (another book I am currently reading!)

✨ Week 2 Wrap-Up

This week felt a bit more scattered in structure, but still full of important threads:

shame vs. self-compassion
the pursuit of thinness as safety
coping
and the role of trauma in exhaustion

Curious what stood out for you this week—What resonated? What didn’t? What felt helpful or off?

📖 Coming up next week:

Week 3 (Apr 13 – 19)→ How to Be an Actual Cheese Grater in a Musical → How to Make a Vision Tin (p. 85–124)