Violence Lies

"What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead."

- James 2:14-17

faith without works is dead. peoples children are dead. childrens mothers and fathers are dead. brothers, sisters, grandparents, nieces, nephews, students are dead. teachers are dead. husbands and wives and boyfriends and girlfriends and friends are dead. and your prayers aren't doing anything to help them. your prayers make you feel good, they make you feel like you've done something when you pray or you share an image on facebook or you discuss your outrage on your lunch break and sadly shake your head saying, "what a tragedy."

it is a tragedy. children are dead. every single person laying in the morgue or a cemetery today was someone's child--including the people who killed the rest of them. we talk about gun control and freedom and fear and terrorism, and we debate and take sides and politicize all of it, and somehow in all the conversation that takes place nothing ever happens. the hate continues, the violence continues, the tragedy continues, and whether its the queer community or an elementary school or a movie theater, the motive is the same. it's hate. someone has to hate to do something so awful. and we can't wrap our heads around it, and so the people who commit these awful crimes are demonized. "they're not even human." but you know what? they ARE human. they're someone's child, too. and if i can steal a few words from jed bartlet, who has something to say for all of these unimaginable horrors, they weren't born wanting to do this.

these shooters, these murderers, these rapists and gangbangers and terrorists were not born wanting to do these things. they were born innocent and pure, just like all of us were, and then things went to hell and the world failed them. WE failed them. we fail each other every single day. all of us.
these tragedies that plague us *are* preventable. they are a failure on ALL of our parts, every single one of us. whether we're talking a mass shooting or a guy who stabs his girlfriend to death and mutilates her body or a parent beating a child or someone torturing animals in a fighting ring. every act of violence is an act of failure. it's an act of education and religion and cruelty and abuse and hate hate hate. children are not born into this world hating. we teach them to.

we create monsters and then rid ourselves of responsibility and make them "other" so we don't have to acknowledge our failures.

i understand that many people out there can't do more than offer thoughts and prayers. that you may not be able to donate blood or money or volunteer. you probably feel helpless, just like i do. you don't know what else to say or do. so im here to help you. what can you do? you can teach people around you not to hate. you can speak up when someone you know is being abused or committing abuse. you can be there for someone with mental illness no matter how exhausting they are. you can think twice before making disparaging remarks in front of your children and you can correct other people who make disparaging remarks in front of theirs.

will they appreciate it? probably not. but when they tell you, "this is my child, and i will raise them how i see fit." you can tell them, "your child didn't know how to hate until you taught them to." maybe it will make them think, maybe it won't. but you can try. because THOSE are the thoughts and prayers we need. we need action, we need change, we need people to be aware that they are teaching their children to hate, that they are creating a monster where there wasn't one. that we are failing our children and WE have to change.

every single act of violence is a reflection on ALL of us. every single one. they weren't born wanting to do this.

"Apathy kills anger - and this is what ya choose.
There's always gonna be somebody who will lose.
Did ya ever stop and think about the world as is.
Life's about living, can't believe it's come to this.
It's not about me. it's not about you.
It's not about them or what they do.
It's not about pride, it's about
We must all understand:
Violence lies."

 - Bif Naked, Violence

If You're Unhappy & You Know It, Shut Your Mouth

there's been a lot of discussion lately about assisted suicide, a lot of it stemming from a movie that's coming out called "me before you" which i know nothing about and so will not comment on directly. instead, i want to talk about how disabled people talk about and treat other disabled people. id like to talk about the voices that go unheard in our struggle to be treated with respect and dignity, and mainly id like to talk about the multitude of people, both SJW's and disabled people themselves, who post about how outraged and indignant they are that someone could even hint at the idea that disabled life isn't worth living.

i think people should be a little more cautious in their outrage and indignation with this. i think that in a lot of ways, other disabled people are sometimes even worse than healthy people at criticizing and silencing other disabled people. i think there's a really, really bad habit in our community of being offended when someone else from within feels they would rather be dead than live with their disability the rest of their lives. just like most other marginalized groups, we are very good at eating our own. sometimes we go so hard with the "im proud to be a tubie/wheelchair-er/survivor/warrior/whatever" stuff that we can make other people who are those things feel completely invisible because they don't feel that way and are being told they should. we silence them by saying, "youre not doing anything for the cause with all your talk about disability sucking. sit down."

i didn't see it before, but it rapidly became very clear to me when i tried out various support groups/forums for the surprise colostomy i had found myself left with. i didn't stay in any of them for long, because i very quickly realized that if anyone else legitimately felt the way i did about it--that i would rather be dead than live with it--they weren't speaking up. in fact, it was taken as a personal offense that i would even dare think of such a thing, and i was instructed unanimously to seek psychological help, though the tone of this 'advice' ranged from sympathetic to downright nasty, including one person who encouraged me to go ahead and die because people like me are the reason there's a stigma around ostomies and everyone else would be better off without my voice being heard.

and while i understand academically at least, why people might get their feathers ruffled, i dont understand it on a personal level. it is not one and the same thing to say "i personally do not feel that MY life is worth the price tag i have to pay for it" and "everyone else in my situation isn't worth the price tag either". people react as though it is a given that if you dont feel your own life is worth living because of Reason X, theirs isnt either. it doesn't seem to come up very often that while you may share a reason, you don't share a life. and thanks to the popularity of the pain olympics, we can't point out that our lives are different, because its throwing down the gauntlet for everyone to tell the best sob story that ends in triumph over adversity.

i have never felt so alone in my life as i have since december. there is *nowhere* for me to turn where i can feel accepted and validated. my feelings about the bag have not changed, i merely stopped talking about them because all it has brought me has been grief and guilt and arguments. it turns out a couple of choruses of "im unhappy and i dont want to be here" is even more taxing to the soul than "99 bottles of beer on the wall". of course there are people who have been very supportive of my feelings, but they aren't dealing with my situation, and there are people in my situation who are not supportive of my feelings, and there has been no overlap between the groups. even the people ive spoken to or post-lurked on who also hate their ostomy still have other factors and seem to feel the reward is worth the cost. i dont. i never have, and i never will. the one person i love more than anything is why i stay--because i love her, and almost losing me nearly killed her as well, and i care about her well-being too much to voluntarily do that to her again. but i am not grateful to be here.

and that doesn't mean i dont want to live, it means i dont want to live like this. i don't want to care for this thing, i don't want to live with the godawful side effects and constant misery and pain. i don't want to have it on my body. and frankly, it upsets me that anyone could tell me that it makes me ungrateful, it makes me selfish, it makes me a blight on the disabled community because my god what kind of message am i sending. i didn't think of myself as a messenger, but i am constantly told otherwise. id better change my tune or stop singing, because the disabled community at large is more important than me. i am not the greater good, and if i won't sing in harmony with the rest of the chorus, i need to sit down.

a huge factor in play here is also that i wasnt given a choice in the matter. i hear a lot that im not alone in that, that nobody would choose to have an ostomy, but im not saying i didnt have a choice because the alternative was death--that's just having a choice you don't like. i didn't get to decide to live or die, that choice was made for me. i never consented to having it done. i had no idea that it had been done. it had never even been something that was ever brought up by any of my doctors in any of my appointments my entire life. it was never considered or discussed, and while i have a lot of fears regarding things that could go medically wrong with me, i never feared this.

but i didn't find any allies even among others who woke up one day to find themselves suddenly with this bag they weren't prepared for. they were all happy to be alive, too. they all said i needed to "get some help" and assured me that how i felt would change, and i'd learn to appreciate the bag and discover that i could still have a super awesome life. i would adapt and find a new path and be grateful to still be alive. i know it was well-intentioned, but it didn't bring me up. it felt like i was just sinking deeper into the quicksand and everyone else was standing around the pit talking about how they swam out of it and i would be able to do it as well, instead of reaching out to help me. maybe they all really were just coping that well with their stuff and something is wrong with me. or maybe they're not coping that well at all and they're afraid if they tried to help, theyd realize they were still in the pit all along.

cause the thing is, when the bulk of the disabled community screams as one voice about how proud they are to be disabled and what a warrior they are and how strong their will to live is.. the ones who arent screaming find themselves on the outside of the community. like theres something wrong with them because theyre not proud of their struggle or because they can't overcome their disability and it looks like everyone else has, and everyone else is handling it better than they are. so as a group we agree to present a united front by pretending we're standing on the edge of the pit even if in reality we're up to our eyeballs.

when healthy people shut you out, it sucks, but hey, we already knew we weren't part of that world anyway and we can just go meme about it and laugh with our fellow spoonies. there's a solidarity in being a marginalized group. but when its other disabled people shutting you out, you find yourself *very* alone in the world. at least the ring around the pit is talking to you while you sink so you're not drowning by yourself.

 i wish more people would consider the implications of how what they're saying makes some of their fellow spoonies feel. because to me, as i scroll through dozens of posts about not just this movie, but just in general about ableism, about pride, about struggle and the inevitable triumph, overcoming, fighting, and warriors, what i hear is a cacaphony of voices all telling me that my feelings are offensive and stupid and they dont matter because there's a larger picture. there's something*wrong* with me because i can't put on a smile and a tshirt that says "proud to be an ostomate" and stop making people uncomfortable by being honest.

it reminds me  of how i felt when i figured out that i was gay, and i was constantly on guard against letting anyone know that. the real me was locked away inside, because i had to protect her even though i was ashamed of her and wished she'd just stop being awful and go away. and all these years later, ive found myself back in the closet again, lying to everyone and swallowing my truths so that i wont be rejected for feelings i can not change or control. its fucking lonely. and while obviously im *glad* that most people find a way to overcome their illnesses, adaptive devices, and cyborg parts, or at least make peace with them, that simply isnt true of everyone. it feels awful enough to spend every minute of every day wishing for an end to this perpetual physical misery without also feeling like you're a terrible, selfish, broken person for not being able to cope with it better.

we need to make it okay to not cope. we need to make a safe space for people to say, "im not coping" without being told theres something psychologically wrong with them and they need to be medicated. we need to listen to each other and really, truly care what the other person is saying. we need to recognize that its OKAY to not feel like a warrior, that its OKAY to not be comfortable in your own skin, and that its OKAY if its not for reasons listed in the DSM. we need to make it OKAY for people to talk about death, and to want it to happen on their own terms. we need to make it okay to not be okay, and we need to stop making the situation worse by telling people who aren't okay that they need to shut up and stop making disabled people look bad. if we want healthy people to stop looking at us as poster children, i think a good start would be not looking at each other that way.

i don't want to be expected to live up to anyone's standard of disability or illness--healthy or otherwise.

im not a tubie. im not an ostomate. im not a spoonie or a GPer or a mito warrior. im not sick. im not disabled. i am not a spokesperson or representative of any of these communities. im just me. im just a girl with a lot of medical problems and no fight left in me. im just a girl who isn't coping but does a really good job pretending that she is. im just a girl being held prisoner in a body that won't work. i will never, ever be able to have the life that i want, and i do not want the life i have. i dont want to pay the price tag thats attached to this beating heart--but im doing it anyway. im just a broken girl who's still *here* and wants that to just be enough.

im just me, and i am not okay.

okay?

Krazy for Kratom Diary, part 1

Mitragyna speciosa (ketum, kratom or kratum] Thai: กระท่อม) is a tropical deciduous and evergreen tree in the coffee family (Rubiaceae) native to Southeast Asia in the Indochina and Malesia floristic regions. Its leaves are used for medicinal properties. It is psychoactive, and leaves are chewed to uplift mood and to treat health problems. M. speciosa is indigenous to Thailand and, despite growing naturally in the country, has been outlawed for 70 years and was originally banned because it was reducing the Thai government's tax revenue from opium distribution.

Kratom behaves as a mu-opioid receptor agonist like morphine and is used in the management of chronic pain, as well as recreationally. Kratom use is not detected by typical drug screening tests, but its metabolites can be detected by more specialized testing. The pharmacological effects of kratom on humans, including its efficacy and safety, are not well-studied. - Wikipedia

Kratom Resources:

Kratom on Erowid

The Kratom User's Guide

/r/Kratom on Reddit

I am taking red vein/white vein mix from www.microfinekratom.com

o6oo PM - just took my very first kratom capsule. i’m nervous but excited. as i obviously have nothing of substance to report yet, i figured for my opener i would talk about my goals and why i am willing to experiment with something like this.

• PROs:

- kratom is chemical-free. i am far from a homeopath or organic nut, and i love gluten more than i love my family, but i am also a scientist. and as a scientist, i am permanently horrified by the fillers, dyes, and general “icky stuff” that gets put into my body every day. i am happy to have the medications that i do, to have access to them and that they exist because they do all kinds of wonderful stuff for me like controlling my blood pressure and helping stop the ongoing cycle of vomiting that is my life. but they are still chemicals, and i still put a LOT of them into my body on a regular basis, and there are still a lot of ingredients in them that aren’t helping me, but are part of the compound of the medication itself.
- kratom does not need a prescription. this will let me take control over my own healthcare to some degree. i can decide when i need to take it and how much i need to take based on how i am feeling rather than a doctor’s personal interpretation of my conditions and their own multiple and varied concerns when it comes to scheduled drugs.

• CONs:

• - my insurance will not pay for it, and kratom costs about as much as many prescription medications. as someone on a fixed income who can barely make ends meet already, this is a big con.
• - kratom is relatively unresearched. there are any number of potentially serious side effects to using it, and i have no way of knowing whether those might happen tonight, or tomorrow or next week or after ten years of use.
• - kratom does not need a prescription. i am putting all of my faith in the supplier, that not only were they sanitary and careful about filling these capsules and farming and preparing the kratom, but also that it is indeed kratom that they are giving me. the company i used has a lot of positive reviews, but anything is possible.
• - kratom is not likely to be widely available for much longer. when we look around and see what happens to non-prescription drugs that gain a bad rap from people who used them irresponsibly and people who are afraid of the word drugs (marijuana is the best example of this, but i urge you to look at the state of ‘illegal’ drugs in portugal since the revolution and see what a positive effect decriminalizing has had!), we can assume that kratom will soon be on a blacklist somewhere.
• - it may not work.

and yes, you may have noticed the CONs list is longer than the PROs list, but these are definitely weighted lists. and the potential for pain relief and taking control of my life and my health far outweigh any of the cons. unless of course, i have some kind of crazy reaction to it and become a zombie and/or drop dead. those things would suck. although if i had to choose, i’d rather be a zombie. as long as i’m a quick, scary, awesome zombie like in 28 days and not some rotted corpse dragging my butt around like in the “thriller” video.

i hope you guys enjoyed my first kratom post, and i thank you all for taking this journey with me. this was pretty long, so it will be a separate entry, while the rest of my “kratom” diary (for my maiden voyage, anyway) will be compiled into one entry, to be followed up by long-term-use updates, hopefully.

PLUR it up & stay frosty guys.

#icantbreathe aka the time police almost killed me but didn't.

i want to talk about white privilege. before you click that little X in the corner, i want to tell you that i understand what you’re feeling right now, reading that. you’re thinking, “i’m poor” or “i’m disabled” or “my grandparents imigrated here”, or any one of a thousand other reasons you feel that you aren’t privileged. i understand that because i used to feel the same way. i grew up in a welfare family. at the end of the month there was never food in the fridge. i wore tattered hand-me-downs and our christmas presents came from the telephone company or the salvation army or whatever charity took pity on my single working college student mother and her two young daughters. i am also seriously chronically ill and physically disabled. i use a hearing aid, a wheelchair, a walker, and i eat through a tube stuck in a hole that was surgically punched through my stomach wall. i am gay, autistic, and 5th generation american.

i am also white.

i used to think, probably like you are right now, about the terribly difficult life i had and still have. how could i be privileged? look at all the evidence that i’m not privileged, right? but privilege has different levels. if you are in a heterosexual relationship right now, you have heterosexual privilege. this is true no matter what your skin color is—you are privileged in a way that i, as a lesbian, am not. you do not have to live in fear that someone will hurt you or the person you love for being together. you can get married and never worry about what state you’re in. you can adopt a child, you can visit your partner in the hospital, and should your spouse die without a will, you will get whatever rights are due you, including survivor benefits and unquestionable custody of your children. none of this is true of me. so in regards to sexuality, you are more privileged than i am.

so when i say the words “white privilege”, i want you to understand that i am talking about your skin color and nothing else. the rest of your life is objectively excluded from this argument. it doesn’t matter how poor you are, or what gender or sexuality you are. it doesn’t matter if you have a wheelchair or a seeing eye dog or an ostomy. if your skin is light, you have a privilege that people who are dark-skinned simply do not have.

when a police officer sees you standing on a corner they assume that you are waiting for a friend, waiting for a bus, waiting to cross the street, or just hanging out. if you’re in a mostly black neighborhood, he will assume you are lost.

but if you have dark skin, and are standing on a corner, they assume you are buying or selling drugs, looking for someone to carjack, waiting for your fellow gang members, casing a place you intend to rob, or, if you’re a female, prostituting yourself. if you’re in a primarily white neighborhood, he will assume you are there to commit a crime.

white privilege is being able to walk down the street and having nobody notice you. when your skin is dark, you cannot blend into the background that way. you stick out even among other dark-skinned people as a target of interest to suspicious whites.

i want to tell you a story from my life now.

this all happened only a few weeks after my 18th birthday. a legal adult and in a bad mental place, i made the poor decision to steal a book from a toy store. it was stupid, it was illegal, it was wrong, and it ended with me in handcuffs getting stuffed into a police cruiser and taken to one of philadelphia’s hovels that passes as a police station. i deserved to be arrested and punished—i broke the law. i took something that i did not pay for and i didn’t even have the moral high ground of it being food or medicine.

i was brought into the station around 2pm and put in a cell. as the hours passed, my cell and the ones around me filled up because the police had been doing a bust on several crack dealers in the area. sitting on a cold, dirty metal shelf and staring at a corroded privacy-free toilet-slash-water fountain, chewing slowly on a stale cheese sandwich and purposely not sipping the carton of iced tea i’d been given because i didn’t want to piss in front of 40 strangers, i was surrounded by drug addicts and scared out of my mind. one black woman sat next to me, using a fake nail she’d snapped off her finger to slash into her fingertips, attempting to obscure her fingerprints. the cells overflowed with other black women and a handful of white women.

im gonna interrupt myself to point out that drug users in general are predominantly white, while crack users are predominantly black. if you think it’s a coincidence that they were cracking down on crack, i refer you to leroy jethro gibbs, who doesn’t believe in coincidence.

after a few hours of sitting with my knees pulled to my chest, the elmo fabric of my pants getting increasingly dirty from the squalor of the cell, crying on and off quietly and wanting nothing more than to just be home with my mom, the woman who’d been trying to scratch off her fingerprints looked over at me and frowned. “how old are you?” she said. “shouldn’t you be at juvie?” i wiped my cheeks and shook my head. “i turned 18 last week.” the woman sat up straight and i shrank into myself, afraid of this stranger who’d been arrested—never mind that i’d been arrested, because i wasn’t a real criminal, i wasn’t buying crack.

and this woman, who had made a career out of sitting in jail cells at that point, reached out and gently touched my shoulder. she said, “honey, tell me you didn’t tell them you were 18. tell me you lied about your age.” i told her no, i hadn’t. that i’d figured they would know if i was lying and i’d be in more trouble. she, and a few other women from our cell and the others, then gave me an hours-long lesson on police procedure, on law, on attitude, and on the fact that because i was a young white girl, if i had told them i was only 17 or 16 or 15, i would be home with my mom right now, the way my younger sister who had also taken something and who also was arrested, but had been brought to juvie and released within a few hours, was.

later that night, around 8 or 9 pm, i had an asthma attack. i felt it coming on, felt my lungs tightening, and i kept telling the police officers that i couldn’t breathe, that my inhaler was in my pink backpack i could see hanging on the wall behind a desk. they never looked up, never acknowledged me. i fell to the floor and while i was half-conscious, my cheek resting on the ground in a puddle of my own vomit, my vision going dark and my lips turning blue, choking and gasping for breath, i heard a woman in the cell opposite mine—one of the only other white women in there, and whose husband was a lawyer who probably would not be happy to hear she’d been picked up at the crack bust—shouting that they were going to have one hell of a lawsuit if i died there, and that every last woman on the cell block was a witness. the women shouted and stomped and banged on the bars, all of them yelling and rubbing my back and trying to get me to breathe, screaming at the cops to get the inhaler out of my backpack, telling them i was dying.

at some point someone pressed the inhaler into my hand and, too weak to lift it to my mouth myself, a dark, feminine hand lifted the inhaler to my lips and depressed it, thumping my back, rolling me to my side, trying to force me to take one last breath, to pull the medication into my dying lungs. the next thing i knew my own hand was on the inhaler and i pumped it a dozen times, gulping in the albuterol and forcing my lungs to keep working until the EMT’s arrived. with a blood pressure of 250/180 and oxygen being forced into my lungs from a tank, they took me to the hospital via ambulance and kept me there until my blood pressure dropped. the triage nurse made them take the cuffs off of me when she found out i was in for shoplifting a $5.00 book, and threw the cop out of the room. she told me i had to calm down because i was about to have a heart attack. after she’d stabilized me and i’d been forcibly drug tested at the officer’s request (i was sXe & they had no reason to believe otherwise), i was taken back to the cell. every woman in the hall reached out as they marched me back to the cell, touching my shoulders and thanking god that i’d come back, because they didn’t think i would. those women, those "hardened criminals" that i'd been so afraid of, saved my life. they protected me while i was there, they comforted me and enabled me to survive one of the worst experiences of my life.

after that, i was kept at the precinct all night before being transferred to the “round house” the next day. we were herded around like animals and finally, at the round house, given toilet paper for when we had to use the bathroom. later that second day i went before a judge in a little room with a bunch of individual video-phones. i never spoke. the judge looked at me and released me “ROR” which means “Released on Recognizance”—basically that i realized i’d committed a crime and i was sorry about it. i did not need bail money or a lawyer. i was told i would receive a date and time and location to attend a criminal justice class, which did cost several hundred dollars to attend, but that after spending two hours learning about the justice system, my record would be expunged and no one would ever know what i did. and that’s precisely what happened. the only reason anybody would know what i did and what happened to me, is the fact that i am blogging about it right now.

now that i’ve told you my story, i’m sure you’re saying, “but look there, you are white and you almost died, you were on the ground crying out ‘I can’t breathe’. so how is that privilege?”

the privilege is that i am here. telling you this story. i did not die on that jail cell floor. my heart did not stop beating. they brought me my inhaler when they realized i wasn’t pretending, when they realized what an outcry my death would cause. when they realized that if a young white girl was left to die on the ground, people would be angry. people would care.

eric garner did not have that privilege. the policemen and EMTs that left eric garner to die did not think to themselves, “people will be angry. people will care that this man is dead.”

the only reason that i am alive right now is because i am white. because my picture on the evening news would outrage the nation. a young white girl with a life full of potential was left to die over a $5 book, the politicans and news anchors would say. how could such a tragedy be allowed to happen? how could these officers, these people charged with upholding and enforcing the law, let this child die?

Michael Brown, 18.
Eric Garner, 43.
Kimani Gray, 16.
Kendrec McDade, 19.
Timothy Russell, 43.
Ervin Jefferson, 18.
Amadou Diallo, 23.
Patrick Dorismond, 26.
Ousmane Zongo, 43.
Timothy Stansbury, Jr., 19.
Sean Bell, 23.
Orlando Barlow, 28.
Aaron Campbell, 25.
Victor Steen, 17.
Steven Eugene Washington, 27. (Autistic)
Alonzo Ashley, 29.
Wendell Allen, 20.
James Brissette, 17.
Ronald Madison, 40. (Mentally disabled)
Travares McGill, 16.
Ramarley Graham, 18.
Oscar Grant, 22.
Trayvon Martin, 17.

all black males. all unarmed. all murdered by police officers.

all somebody’s child, too.

white privilege is not having to think of these names every time you leave the house. white privilege is not having to be afraid of being killed for existing. white privilege is having the police assume you are unarmed, assume you are where you are for legitimate reasons. white privilege is being given a pass, being given the benefit of the doubt, being assumed innocent until proven guilty rather than guilty until proven innocent. white privilege is never being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

white privilege is surviving to tell the story of the time you almost died in police custody, rather than having the story told by your surviving loved ones while you are six feet under.

the chubby tubie and other medical marvels

this entry, like so many others, started out as a comment to a dear friend. she, like me, is a bit on the fluffy side and as such, she has faced much of the same nonsense i have in regards to being ill and needing a feeding tube. there's an unfortunate and inaccurate belief among many people, including medical professionals, that if someone is overweight it is the source of any malady they experience. there is also a belief that those of us who are fluffy, chubby, pudgy, or squishy cannot possibly be in much danger of dying from starvation because hey, we have a few extra layers, right?

well, not so much, actually. in fact, not at all.


that's why i'm here to tell you that if you hold those beliefs you are sorely mistaken. and i want to help you, dear reader, to understand why what you know about weight is wrong, as well as to understand a bit more about how this disease that i and so many of my friends suffer from, works.

NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: im gonna preface this entry by saying anyone who has anything to say about my weight or anyone else's weight, whether they are heavy, thin, or "just right", will get a smackdown. so if you don't think you can read about a chubby girl or a skinny girl or see pics of them without making a nasty comment, dont read any further. someone else's body is really none of your business in the first place anyway. i'm writing this blog to educate, not to encourage stereotyping, shaming, and cruelty. nasty or ignorant comments will be removed and their writers will be permanently banned and possibly have their computer exploded from the inside out by my brother, the hacker slash codemonkey extraordinaire.

i also want to apologize (but only a little, since i wouldn't have written this if i didn't think it was important!) for the length of this, but i feel this is a very important topic that doesn't get discussed nearly often enough, and i feel that people who are heavy are often dismissed by doctors as well as others in the community, their friends, their family, and even perfect strangers. so i have a lot to say, and i want you all to take every word of it to heart---i think that everyone should know this stuff when it comes to the very touchy and often upsetting subject of being chronically ill and overweight at the same time, because even doctors assume that if you're heavy, that's why you're sick.

my beautiful & bubbly bestie

okay. onwards, dear reader.

first things first: weight is irrelevant.

no, seriously. hear me out. im old and i know things and this is an important thing that i want all of you to know as well. weight. is. irrelevant.

weight means nothing. nothing at all. there are people who are underweight and have been for their entire lives but were always healthy. my bestie pixi is one such person--even though she's chronically ill now, with a condition called UPJ (Uretero Pelvic Junction Obstruction) she has always been very thin and was in pretty decent health for most of her life.

there are also lots of people who are overweight or, yes, even morbidly obese who are healthy! no diabetes type II, no heart problems. athletic, active, healthy-eating people who just happen to be heavier than a chart hanging in a doctor's office somewhere says they should be. you can be healthy or you can be ill at any weight.

in fact, many times weight has nothing whatsoever to do with your health! in many, many cases, whether someone is overweight or underweight, weight can actually be a symptom of a problem rather than the cause of the problem.

im gonna give you a partial hit of my story here, and stick with me cause i promise its very relevant.

shortly before i was diagnosed with gastroparesis, i was the thinnest i'd ever been in my life. at 5'1 i was 148lbs. which is still overweight, but for me, for my body type, for my build and the way i carried the weight, i was wearing a

Helicobacter pylori, previously named Campylobacter pylori,
is a Gram-negative, microaerophilic bacterium found in the stomach.
Read more about h. pylori at ilovebacteria.com.

size 14/16 in little girls clothing, comfortably. that was after a lifetime of being very overweight. i

me at 148lbs in a child's tshirt.

started getting sick, and was first diagnosed with a raging helicobacter pylori infection that they said had probably been attacking my gut for years at that point.


they treated it, but i didnt get better. then they took my gall bladder out. and it still didnt get better. finally they diagnosed me with gastroparesis after an endoscopy revealed food that had just been chilling out in my stomach for over 72 hours already. for nearly ten years it was bearable. i threw up a few times a week maybe, or if i ate something really bad (deep-fried food, marinara sauce, etc). but i was functional and i just had to take some pills now and then, with an ER trip thrown in every so often for a "hard reset" when i got stuck in a vomiting cycle.

but things changed drastically in december 2011. my girlfriend and i ordered chinese food. all i had was white rice (i was never much of an adventurous eater), but we both got really terrible food poisoning and spent the following week in that special hell known only to those who have gotten really terrible food poisoning. at the end of the week, my love got better. but i never did. that bout of food poisoning set loose something in my body that i am still battling to this day. melodramatic phrasing aside, it truly changed my life forever, in ways i could have never imagined beforehand.

me at 148lbs again.

at that point i weighed probably somewhere around 250 or so. a lot for somebody my height and build. the jump from 148 to 250 came mostly from risperdal, but also some other psych meds plus spending a LOT of time locked up in a psych ward for weeks at a time (with no physical activity at all beyond walking from my bed to the cafeteria to group and back again) contributed as well. so, whatever. that made me morbidly obese and i was unable to lose that weight again.

much to my chagrin, even though i was throwing up every single day sometimes more than 20 times in a 24 hours period, i was *gaining* weight.

me at max weight, with a swollen "GP"
belly after eating a few bites of egg.

because of this i had a lot of doctors tell me, "well, you must be keeping something down. you're gaining weight, and your cholesterol, which was previously fine, is now off the charts." honestly for a bit i thought i was going crazy. but i finally got sent to a GI who was more concerned with my health than my weight, and my first NJ tube was placed, and suddenly i was able to function again. i wasn't even on formula at the time--just getting my meds through the tube improved my quality of life vastly.

up until a little less than a year ago (about winter 2013 or so, through summer 2013) i more or less maintained my weight. and even my labs, though they were borderline, were still just barely within normal range. for all intents and purposes, my body was telling my doctors that i was fine. but of course, i wasn't really. in march 2013, after almost a year of having NJ tubes in (for a total of 5 different ones over the course of 11 months), my GI placed the GJ tube, and we finally got approval for the proper formula and i was actually running feeds daily and it was all good.

more calories = losing weight?!

i was getting more nutrition than id ever had in my life (since i was a baby ive been a very picky eater and only eaten mostly carbs, even well before i was sick) but i was losing weight. how could such a thing even be possible?! because for the first time i was getting regular nutrition-not just calories, but all the vitamins and nutrients and micro-nutrients--my metabolism was like "whoah. dude. so sorry, i didnt realize i was supposed to be doing stuff. ill get right back on that." and it kicked in and started burning away the weight. my cholesterol labs went back into normal/low range as well.

it's actually pretty simple. when the body goes into starvation mode, it holds on to absolutely everything you put in it. a healthy body gets food regularly, separates the crap from the good stuff, absorbs the good, and throws the crap out (literally turning crap into actual crap.) but when you're not giving your body nutrition on the regular, your body goes into survival mode and is basically yelling at all of your organs, "guys! guys dont get rid of that! i dont care where you store it--stick it in an elbow or something, but we need to hang onto that. i need that, so dont get rid of it." and so your body, knowing that it's not getting fed regularly, becomes an extreme hoarder and it doesnt get rid of anything.

and of course, you're also dehydrated. so the body starts holding onto that as well. and when it gets to the point where you're not taking in much of anything, your body once again panics, and it starts digging into all that crap it stored up, the emergency winter supply of fat (fun fact: a person cannot BE fat. fat is a layer of a greasy-ish substance that forms under the skin, also known as 'adipose tissue'. the idea of a person literally being fat is slang and also inaccurate and mean.)

medicine, yay!

so, when the body panics and starts eating all the fat it stored away, it produces cholesterol as a by-product of that self-cannibalization. many people who are starving will see a sometimes serious jump in their cholesterol, and if, like me, their primary dr at the time is a doofus, he will tell them to stop eating fried foods, which is probably the least helpful advice for that situation ever.

so because i ramble lets recap. in the third person because it's fun to talk like that.

• lissy is throwing up a lot and cannot hold food down.
• lissy's metabolism panics and orders lissy's body to start holding onto every single cracker, popsicle, and grain of salt lissy does manage to keep down.
• this goes on for awhile until lissy's metabolism realizes "well, we can't stay alive on crackers." and orders the other organs to start cannibalizing as much of themselves and each other as possible.
• lissy's cholesterol goes up and lissy is still overweight, so nobody takes lissy seriously.
• lissy gets sicker and sicker until she can no longer function, and ends up in the hospital.
• lissy finally finds a doctor that understands this process, and they put a feeding tube in.
• lissy starts getting nutrition, and GAINS MORE WEIGHT. this is because her metabolism is still on alert level red. it hasn't realized that the nutrition will keep coming, so it's still holding onto absolutely everything.
• after a bit, though, lissy's metabolism realizes, "oh. this isn't temporary, guys. it looks like things are okay." and drops the alert level down from red "severe" back into blue "guarded".
• with the alert level back down, lissy's organs stop cannibalizing themselves and every spare bit of fat they can find, and rapidly lissy starts losing weight, because her body has realized that it doesn't need to be a hoarder anymore and called the sanitation commission to clean things out with a bit of help from miralax and fleet.
• lissy's weight loss slows and her cholesterol is back to normal. she's still chubby because she's a chubby person and always has been, but her body is functioning the way it's supposed to (more or less), and it has begun to lose weight at a rate of a few lbs here and there--a nice, healthy, SLOW, weight loss.

[PSA: fast weight loss is a very, very bad thing. no matter how healthy you think you're being when you lose weight, if you're losing weight fast, it can be extremely dangerous. healthy weight loss is no more than 1-2 pounds per week. speaking strictly calorically, a reduction of 500-1000 calories per day causes weight loss of

1-2lbs a week. anything more than that can be very dangerous and in some cases, life threatening.]

now, last year, when my nutrition crashed again due to the eosinophilic disorder and the incredibly harsh formula i was on that i could not tolerate, i was taking in basically nothing--not even the eat-and-puke cycle we're all so familiar with, i just flat out was taking nothing in because my body just became too weak to be vomiting 20+ times a day again. during that time (a period of about 3 months or so), i lost 70 lbs. which is very, very unhealthy and dangerous.

i suspect that because i was getting less than 500 calories a day, my body pushed right past the "hold onto everything" panic and just kind of gave up. at that point i was told that if we didn't get a grip on it very quickly, i didnt have a choice and was going to have to go on TPN (that's IV nutrition, generally given through a central line, for those playing the at-home version of this game.) thankfully my GI discovered through scope biopsies that i had eosinophilic gastroenteritis. (for those who dont know, i sugest checking out APFED to learn more about eosinophilic disease. but to give an idea, ive always referred to it as "the allergic-to-everything disease" because thats basically what it is--EoS provokes an immune respose from the body to anything and/or everything and while it really does vary what "safe foods" there are for

tubes are beautiful because being alive is beautiful.

each person with a form of eos, in general people with an eosinophilic disease's list of unsafe foods is much, much longer than their list of safe foods. there are people with eos who literally cannot eat any food at all and many who can only eat one or two types of food.)

i was given steroids and placed on a hypoallergenic elemental formula, and again, the weight loss plateaud.

currently i am still on the stereoid. i still have a GJ tube and am still on the elemental formula, but i am once again not doing so well with it. so even though i am STILL overweight--despite going from a maximum weight of 275lbs down to my current weight which i will not share--i am still pretty sick, and our priority right now is to get me to a place where i can run feeds regularly again.

but throughout all of this, my labs have never shown that i was starving (because i wasnt--i had lots of fat for my body to cannibalize, which kept my labs in the normal range, something that would not likely happen for someone who was thin to start with). i have never been even a "normal" weight for my height, never mind underweight. i have had a lot of people not take me seriously because hell, how sick could i be if i was so big?

and for the grand finale, even all of that set aside--one of the biggest issues with gastroparesis is vomiting. some people dont vomit, but most GPers do. and every single time a person vomits, they are doing damage to their stomach, esophagus, throat, teeth, and even their muscles, spinal cord, and believe it or not, eyes. vomiting is a very violent thing, and the body is only meant to do it in order to get rid of something that is toxic, such as spoiled food or poison. prolonged vomiting can and does cause all kinds of really serious and life-threatening issues.

- a mallory-weiss tear can cause internal bleeding so severe that a person could bleed to death interally before they even realized anything was wrong.

thumbs up for tube feeding!

- forceful vomiting can cause blood vessels in the eyes to burst and damage your eyesight (my eye dr regularly checks my eyes with every tool at his disposal because he is concerned about exactly that--something i didn't evne know was possible until he told me it was.)

- the acid your body produces that comes up every time you vomit does more damage than lindsey lohan on a bender. it strips the teeth of enamel and can cause tears and ulcers throughout the entire digestive tract.

- chronic dehydration can lead to all kinds of problems runing the gamut from UTIs to heart attacks to total renal failure. it also means there's not a lot of moisture in your intestinal tract and can cause obstructions, anal fissures, bowel tearing, external and internal hemheroids, bowel impaction, polyps, and the combination of all these side effects can lead to SIBO and other problems that can eventually lead to inability to voluntarily move one's bowels, necessitating ongoing laxative use and in some cases surgical repairs or the addition of an ostomy to allow the expulsion of waste.

- constant vomiting can also cause cancer in all the places it goes through: stomach, esophagus, throat, mouth--even the sinuses and ears by way of the throat. other complications can cause cancer and other serious issues in the other direction as well.

- sleep vomiting (something that i and many others have experienced) can lead to death by aspiration. (choking to death in one's sleep.)

- repeated vomiting strains the body and can cause spinal injury (i can't count the amount of times that i've thrown my back out just from vomiting), muscle strains and tears, bursted blood vessels, electrolyte imbalance, severe migraines, nerve damage, elevated blood pressure, tachycardia, heart attack, fainting, anyeurism, stroke, seizures, and death.

the bottom line is that a person with gastroparesis (or similar conditions) has all of the same risks and complications as someone with anorexia nervosa and bulimia combined, with a bunch of extra risks and complications thrown in just for fun.

people do not die from gastroparesis. gastroparesis is not a terminal illness.

but they do die from complications due to gastroparesis. and most of those complications are related to long-term damage from prolonged and violent vomiting, ongoing starvation, and simply having old food lingering in the digestive system for several days or longer.

gastroparesis is not about weight. 

its about the hell your body goes through as it tries to keep you alive.

i fight like a girl and i always will.

Down the Autism Rabbit-Hole and Back Out

It will probably not come as any kind of surprise to my readers that many of my friends, like myself, are Autistic. It may come as a surprise to some people that the majority of Autistics (or ‘Auties’ as I affectionately like to call us sometimes) bear no resemblance to Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rain Man’ whatsoever.

Recently a conversation took place on my personal Facebook wall. It involved discussion about various feelings and behaviors, and whether or not they were autistic in nature. At one point in this conversation a dear friend of mine who is an adult that does not yet have an official diagnosis of an Autism Spectrum Disorder began questioning himself. His last comment on the thread before I read it pulled at my heart metaphorically and inspired this entry.

“i'm falling down the 'am-i-really-autistic'
rabbit hole again, somebody pull me out.”
- Name Withheld, Facebook

The hurdles of getting a diagnosis as an adult are seldom worth jumping unless you need an on-paper diagnosis for school or work related accommodations, to qualify for disability-related benefits, or simply for your own peace of mind. Adult testing is mostly based on self-reporting and can be incredibly expensive. To date, most insurance companies will not cover it. As such, it’s very common for spectrum adults to either be self-diagnosed or diagnosed without specific testing by a physician, psychiatrist, or therapist.

Most of the information on autism is geared towards the parents of (most often male) autistic children; there is very little out there for adults, particularly female adults. The result of this lack of information and resources has been that many autistic adults stumble around in the dark blindly, trying to find their place in the world. I reject everything about Autism $peaks including the blue puzzle piece, but I find the more general rainbow jigsaw to be an accurate representation of autistic life—and not in the way most people probably think. I am not a puzzle to be solved, and I am not a puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. Rather, my spectrum diagnosis was a piece of me that linked a whole bunch of things about my personality together. Suddenly I ceased being a weirdo, a freak, quirky, moody, and anti-social. Suddenly, I was normal—just my own brand of it.

"I am not 'retarded.'
I'm just as special as anyone else,
maybe even a little bit more.
People who call me that are ignorant
fools or retarded themselves."
- Luke, The Story Of Luke (2012)

For many adults, the initial recognition of their autism can be a relief; however it can also be a source of pain, confusion, and constant questioning of one’s identity. Many spectrum adults, including me, find themselves at the start of their journey over-analyzing every feeling and reaction they’ve ever had. They desperately dig through their childhood memories, looking for autism or looking for experiences that ‘prove’ they are not autistic, depending how they feel about being autistic. 

This panicked rifling through your mind can cause incredible amounts of stress, depression, panic, guilt, fear, and can even induce PTSD if the individual was raised in an environment where they were punished verbally or physically for autistic behaviors. They might struggle with not feeling “autistic enough”, especially if their conversations about autism mostly take place with NTs (NeuroTypicals: non-autistics) or if they have few to no conversations about autism at all. Their behaviors may not match up with the behaviors of other autistic people they read about or know, and they may question the entire state of their being based on that point.

And into the rabbit-hole we go, and we can only hope that someone who cares will reach a hand down and help us climb out before we fall in too deeply.

And so this is my hand, reaching out to anyone who is gazing into that abyss and afraid they will slip. This is my hand, with all the love in the world and every inch of my soul, reaching out to hold onto you—whoever you may be—and help you glimpse the light even if just for a moment. Because sometimes that’s all you need; one moment of someone caring enough to reach out. I’m reaching for you, my autistic brethren. You are not alone.

This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole.

The walls are so steep, he can't get out.
A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up,
"Hey you, can you help me out?"
The doctor writes a prescription,
throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up
"Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?"
The priest writes out a prayer,
throws it down in the hole and moves on.
Then a friend walks by.
"Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?"
And the friend jumps in the hole.
Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here."
The friend says "Yeah, but I've been
down here before, and I know the way out."

- Leo McGarry, The West Wing (2000)

Please take this to heart.

NOBODY gets to define autism beyond the diagnostic criteria except the autistic person themselves. (And while I will mention again how much I despise and am against everything autism $peaks stands for, their coverage of the DSM-5 criteria is a helpful little page and you can view it here, although be sure to note that the Autism Spectrum criteria is a bit further down the page.)

Talk to other adult autistics. If you don't find other autistic adults in varying numbers that share any given behavior with you, I will film myself eating my fancy black and pink fedora and post it on YouTube. I promise you that.

The major mistake that people in general make is thinking that autism is a box, and you can just put all the autistic people inside the box and they'll all fit nice and neat, filed away quietly. But in real life we are every bit as varied as anyone else. A popular comparison I see (and a major point of the conversation that sparked this entry) is the various forms of stimming, because we have been told over and over again that stimming is simply rocking or flapping your hands.

The truth is that "stimming" is any repetitive motion brought on by extreme emotion: both negative and positive.

I have good stims and bad stims. Some of them are even the same stims. I might rock to comfort myself in a period of anxiety; I might rock because I’m so excited about a new dinosaur documentary that I can't even contain myself. When I am stressed I gnaw the heck out of a pacifier. When I am happy I clench my teeth and stretch my head to one side slightly. When I am happy, sad, bored, lonely, excited, in physical pain, sleepy, grumpy, Dopey, or Doc--or pretty much any other emotion at all (meaning I do it constantly), I clench my toes and sometimes hands.

When I am happy, I tap or drum my hands on my thighs or knees in a somewhat random pattern; when I am agitated I tap my hands on my thighs or knees rhythmically. In my autism, happiness is chaotic in a wonderful sort of way that I can never put into words, and rhythm, routine, and patterns bring me immense comfort when I am upset. That doesn’t mean all autistics function the same way. It also doesn’t make me any less autistic that my good feelings are chaotic and messy and some other autistics may experience good feelings in the same rhythmic and predictable way that I experience bad feelings.

Don’t ever make the mistake—any of you—of questioning your self-identity simply because you experience something differently from someone else, or because a behavior, urge, or feeling of yours isn't written down in a textbook somewhere.

Ole Golly from 'Harriet the Spy' (1996) once said, “There are as many ways to live as there are people in this world.” Autism isn't any different. There’s as many different ways to "be autistic" as there are autistics. You are you and you are wonderful and unique and there's nobody else exactly like you and there never will be. But I can guarantee you there are thousands of people, if not more, that share any given behavior, feeling, or urge that you have; whether they are autistic or not.

And if that still isn't enough to convince my fellow auties of how awesome you are, then it's time for you to read this beautiful article and remember that you are super great, and autism can be and often is every bit as joyful and wonderful as it is frustrating and upsetting.

There is no right way to be autistic.

There is no "good" or "bad" autism.

There are no "good" or "bad" autistics.

There are just good and bad days. Good and bad feelings. Good and bad events.

Life, and how you survive it.

 note: you may not reprint this blog entry anywhere
without my express permission. you may of course
share this link anywhere you wish--in fact, please do!

via icanhas.cheezburger.com

parents and teachers and snow days oh my!

i've seen soooooooo many parents complaining about having their kids home cause of the snow days. think about all the stress and frustration you're feeling, and how much you'd simply like to throttle them every now and then.. and then picture there are 20 of your child (or children) in your house all day every day for 180 days a year, in five-day increments.

now, if you can afford it, go to hallmark and get a nice thank you card and a visa gift card (even if its only five bucks) and send it to your kids teacher, and write in your own words how much you appreciate the time, effort, money, and dedication they put in to raise your child for 7 hours a day 180 days a year.

if you can't afford it, make a card by hand. have your kid make a card and then you sign it. just say "thank you." i can assure you, that acknowledgement of the difficulty of nurturing and educating other peoples children, at a 25:1 ratio--the fact that you took two minutes of your day to appreciate them--will mean the WORLD to your kids teacher. a simple little thank you note.

trust me on this one. it means a lot. im engaged to a teacher--and when she gets a nice note from a student or parent, the first thing she does is text me a picture or read it to me or bring it over. because it means that much to her, that somebody thanked her for the very difficult job she does. please please show your kids teachers that you know what they sacrifice and how hard they work, and that you appreciate it. not just at christmas or the end of the year. a quick note now and then. a simple "thank you for making the year go so smoothly for [childs name]" or "thank you for having patience with [childs name]".. if you can't think of something specific, just a general "thank you for taking care of my child during the hours i can't be with him/her" will remind that teacher why they do what they do. and t when they finally are able to stop grading papers and writing lesson plans and planning class parties and documenting their teaching for the government and the million other things they do every day all day long, that little reminder will also make them much more pleasant towards their fiances.

trust me. do this simple thing, a tiny little note! the significant others of teachers around the world will thank you for it, and i know the teacher will appreciate it too.

it's okay pluto, i'm not a planet either.

 “Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, 

but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, 

because they lead little by little to the truth.”
― Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

for some reason, every time a conversation about space comes up, there's always a comment war about pluto. today i saw the above image, a gorgeous piece of art that unites all the planets and pluto together as one. as i was taking in this brilliant image, my eyes drifted to the comments section to the right, and felt the wonder quickly leaving my body with a heavy sigh as i saw that, once again, people were all but marching around with picket signs saying "boycott nasa", and their rabid fanatacism about something they know nothing about beyond that it's name is pluto and it used to be a planet led me to this blog entry. i see this all the time, any time the subject comes up. even on "the big bang theory" the brilliant physicist sheldon cooper takes neil degrasse tyson (guest starring as himself) to task for "demoting pluto".

 and so i have to say to those insisting that pluto was a planet when you were young and therefore should still be a planet now.. things change. that's what makes science and the universe so beautiful. every day we learn new things, and we should be appreciative of that. pluto was labeled a planet when you were young because at the time, the best minds on our planet believed it was. but the best minds of today have a lot more knowledge and resources for gaining that knowledge, and as we discover new things about the universe, we must adapt to new truths.

we used to think the earth was flat, too, until the brightest minds figured out the truth: that not only is our planet round, but there are other planets out there that are too! defying new truths and information demonstrates a serious lack of ability towards adaptation. and science has also taught us that those beings which can not or do not adapt to their current environment are doomed.

instead of reacting like toddlers--kicking and screaming that pluto is a planet as though you and a test you took in third grade know better than brilliant, educated people who have devoted their lives to studying space--perhaps you should sit back for a moment and think about the beauty of discover, about how much information is right there at your fingertips, about the amazing technologies we've developed.

our grandparents went through life learning only what was taught in a classroom and knowing of the world only what they saw on the evening news or read in a news paper, if they even had access to those things. and here we are, with all of history, all of science, every single piece of human knowledge in the world, only a few pushed buttons away. you can learn anything you want to within seconds.

so why, in the face of all that, is it so very important to you to deny those beautiful truths? if you truly feel that pluto should still be classified as a planet, go to school. study the sciences. learn everything you possibly can about the universe and then go work for NASA and prove them wrong. otherwise, you're just wasting a perfectly good brain by clinging to falsehoods simply because they're familiar to you and more comfortable than forcing your brain to process and understand new ideas.

"Discovered in 1930, Pluto was originally classified as the ninth planet from the Sun. However, its status as a major planet fell into question following further study of it and the outer Solar System over the ensuing 75 years. Starting in 1977 with discovery of minor planet 2060 Chiron, numerous icy objects similar to Pluto with eccentric orbits were found. The most notable of these was the scattered disc object Eris—discovered in 2005, which is 27% more massive than Pluto. The understanding that Pluto is only one of several large icy bodies in the outer Solar System prompted the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to formally define what it means to be a "planet" in 2006. This definition excluded Pluto and reclassified it as a member of the new "dwarf planet" category."
- Wikipedia