Tiana Dodson
With a decade as a body liberation facilitator and a lifetime of lived experience as a fat, biracial, queer, neurodivergent person, Tiana Dodson is well-versed in what it is to exist in a multiply-marginalized body. As an active co-creator of the Syllabus for Liberation, her work addresses how personal, community, and global liberation depend upon each other. Through her consulting services, group offerings, and public speaking, Tiana highlights the ways these systems of oppression are bound together and how we can push back against them.
Mar 21 • 3 min read
Do you have a canary?
Hello, my dear.
I'm dropping in your inbox today to share a little story with you. You see, Wednesdays have become special days for me because they are days I get to spend the morning with my kid. Here in France, kids don't go to school on Wednesdays meaning that children whose parents can afford to take the time use that day for extracurricular activities.
As someone who works for myself, I exchange working a few hours on the weekends for taking the morning hours off for my Small Monster. We usually have a little "adventure," meaning we visit a bakery or grab a delicious snack in the time between speech therapy and music classes before I drop him off at the daycare for lunch and afternoon play.
No matter how thankful I am that I have the privilege to be flexible and financially stable enough to spend this time with my kid, experiences I never had with my own mother, I still sort of hate Kid Wednesdays. Because they are an anxiety fest for me.
Instead of the normal hustle of the one-and-done of the school drop off, I've got to get my child to THREE different locations ON TIME. Find parking THREE times. Get a child to stay on task THREE times.
Yet, no matter how much anxiety I'm feeling, I tend to really enjoy Kid Wednesdays. My Small Monster is a purveyor of wildly fun conversations about planets and Minecraft and creative ideas that seem to be never ending. And those conversations, those moments together giggling over soft pretzels are wonderfully precious to me.
But sometimes it's a lot more tense. I'm a lot more tense. And these are the days that my kid becomes that canary in the coal mine for me.
I'm always actively working to remind myself that in situations where my kid can be stubborn, or even shitty, that this is a CHILD. That this small person cannot be held accountable to an adult standard of reasoning because they don't have the same experiences or cognitive ability. My child is being a child--a small human being who is only interested in enjoying and exploring the world. And often, as a parent, I have to be in the way of that, precipitating the small eruptions of big emotions and stubbornness.
So I remind myself of these facts and am able to respond with compassion because there is no malice here. And that's sometimes so very, very hard to do because I just want to get things done and have my space, my time to unwind.
Surprisingly, this weekly encounter with my dynamic little person is an amazing chance for me to stay in touch with myself. If I can't be kind and patient with my child, then I'm not doing well and must take care of my needs ASAP. Some alone time is definitely on order.
Do you have a canary in your life?
If you don't, what person or experience do you have access to that can begin to serve as your reminder to get checked back in with yourself?
Feel free to reply to this mail, I'd love to hear back from you!
New podcast episode out here in the world! Listen in to another conversation between me and someone I find awesome: the amazing Desiree Adaway, a powerhouse teacher and consultant I’ve been following around on the internet for years.
Get into this conversation where she shares her story, asks us to examine how race first enters our consciousness, tells us how we need to parse people from systems, and talks about why we need to challenge anti-fatness in our liberation spaces.
And listen all the way to the end to hear why you need fountain pens in your best fat life.
Get into it here or wherever you get your podcast listen on.
A bibliophile is a person who loves books and is often referred to as a bookworm.
Tsundoku is a Japanese word roughly translating to "acquiring and piling up books, but not reading them."
So if you're a booklover with too many unread books on your hands, I've got a solution for you.
The Fat Freedom Group Read Membership is a year-long exploration and deep dive into texts about fatness and liberation.
Join in for live discussion calls, an online community space, a growing library of past Group Read texts, prompts that help you digest the text, all delivered with a gentle reading schedule to help you get through to the end.
We get started May 16.
Learn more and sign up by clicking here.
With a decade as a body liberation facilitator and a lifetime of lived experience as a fat, biracial, queer, neurodivergent person, Tiana Dodson is well-versed in what it is to exist in a multiply-marginalized body. As an active co-creator of the Syllabus for Liberation, her work addresses how personal, community, and global liberation depend upon each other. Through her consulting services, group offerings, and public speaking, Tiana highlights the ways these systems of oppression are bound together and how we can push back against them.