It can be so hard to know how to deal with death and kids in a society that is pathologically afraid of genuine feelings, especially the sad and hard feelings. But the basics are--let's teach kids how to feel bravely so they can grow up and not have to reparent themselves like the rest of us have had to.
American democracy is getting it wrong. It represents corporations and highest bidders, ignores the will of the people.
I've been brewing my own ideas about a new form of government and I am going to dream out loud with y'all.
Six years ago if you'd asked me about attending weekly Sunday services I would have said, "Unlikely!" Now I got to two different church services on Sundays! Rest assured I only attend services where all seekers are welcomed and valued.
I am really obsessed with making milkshake drinks out of frozen bananas and so proud of myself about figuring out a good pumpkin pie flavor profile.
Our consumer power is the most important. We all have time, attention and money to spend--curating how you do that with folks who align with your values is how we will create the world of our dreams instead of investing in this murderous paradigm.
I didn't come to this concert movie to play it cool and I'm totally over caring if people think I'm crazy. We had such a great time! Singing when and how we want to! Getting up and dancing!
It's cuffing season! That sacred time of year that people seek to keep warm with someone they want to stay safer at home with! I recognize that probably less than 10% of the people reading this even want to go on a date with me and others might just read it cuz they are curious! I hope you are inspired to ask for what you want and to name your desires openly.
I made this chicken soup to offer my neighbors for our outdoor showing of the Barbie movie. I am still getting compliments on it from people and one of my neighbors wanted the recipe.
When I endeavored to write this post I was trying to come up with some sort of tidy protocol for developing a more compassionate lifestyle but it doesn't feel like a protocol, it is more of a way of life and a lens with which to view the world.
Content Warning: Mention of caregiver abuse.
When I moved to the woods five years ago, I was surfing a lot of uncertainty. Feeling lost and in need of a healing journey I turned to a daily walk practice that really helped me move through a dark night of the soul.
I kept remembering this time when I was five years old and I got to go back to live with my mom after circumstances landed me with my dad and his parents. Mom had my bedroom all set up for me. Care Bear sheets, a Care Bear comforter she sewed for me. A little clock radio next to my bed.
I treasured that clock radio–it was the first time I had ever had control over music in my life and I could listen to the soft rock hits of the 80s through that radio while I went to sleep.
While I was living with my dad and his parents, my Grammy physically, emotionally and verbally abused me. A tiny four year old.
Caregiver abuse is all too common and I can’t give you a formula for recovery from it. But I can share with you how I walked my way back into parts of myself I abandoned after that abuse.
It was either a psychic reading or a card reading that showed me I needed to connect with my inner five year old. I had the inkling (and following our intuition is a path to healing) that connecting to her would help me release the pain from that time and unpack some of my swirling feelings during my gay divorce.
Remembering that clock radio, I started walking in the woods and listening to the “Top Hits of 1984” which was the year I was five years old.
Teaching Fat Kid Dance Party Aerobics, I use nostalgia and music as a portal to transport and connect to our inner child. I thought this would help me.
A healing journey isn’t flipping a switch and everything is better. It’s a circuitous path of making more nourishing choices, witnessing parts of ourselves without judgment, backsliding and returning to the path, weathering emotions that are uncomfortable and eventually feeling better.
That playlist connected me to a time when things were very hard, uncertain and painful for me as a child without anyone to guide me through it. And now that I’m a grown-up, with tools and patience and unconditional love and acceptance for my inner child, I can be the safe space she needed to process those Big Feels.
I had another reading in early 2023 that told me my inner 11 year old needed attention, so I did the same thing with walks in the woods to “Top hits of 1989.” I actually had a few big break throughs watching my favorite movie from that year, The Little Mermaid.
I had a party last year and when putting together the playlist for my friends I considered when each person was five years old and put songs on the playlist from those eras. It was a big hit!
There’s so much more to say about the process of inner child healing, and I’ll be writing more about it in the coming weeks. We teach what we most need to learn and I’ve been doing this work for many years!
In the meantime, I have developed several aerobics classes that focus on 80s Inner Child healing & 90s inner child healing that have come out of my healing process, if you care to dance with me! Here’s a class you can rent or if you want the whole collection, check out my theme classes in the On Demand membership. Pretty much any class I teach involves inner child healing, because Fat “Kid” Dance Party is about healing that kid that felt left out, whether or not you’ve had a fat experience.
Dancing and play help us learn and heal 7-20 times faster than just reading and listening to things. I hope you dance!
If you find value in this blog, please consider supporting!
Patreon.com/fkdp (you can follow for free and get updates and freebies from me!)
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Venmo: @bevinb
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Buy my aerobics video! fatkiddanceparty.com/video4pack
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I have been with Verizon on and off for most of my cellular years. (24 total.)
At some point a few years ago I remember wondering how my bill got to over a hundred dollars and then it got to over $130. I would routinely call to see what I could do but that was pretty consistent.
Three years ago I heard about Visible mobile, which is owned by Verizon. I’m pretty sure the concept of it is for gay people who don’t have access to the savings of a family plan.
Many of us are not in touch with family of origin and our kinship networks are not always financial. I think that’s going to change in the coming years as we realize the power of pooling our money and creating consumer groups.
I was nervous about switching carriers especially because I live in the forest, where the only cell towers that seem to work are on the Verizon or AT&T networks.
I brought my own phone, which was paid off and not part of the $130+ a month. On that I was paying about $15 insurance for my phone, which I couldn’t start again at Visible. (But you can get if you finance a phone through them.)
The change process was straightforward and I handled it myself. I remember hitting one stumbling block and their online chat helped me figure it out.
It’s been over a year and my service has been exactly the same as it was at regular Verizon and my bill is exactly $25 a month (no taxes to me!), deducted on the same day of the month. I have traveled and I have been home in the woods and both are the same as it was before.
Occasionally they offer a pay ahead for a year deal and save some money but I haven’t been flush with cash enough to do it.
I pay as little as possible to big corporations so I can pay more to small businesses. I spent more than my monthly cell phone bill buying a new journal from an artist friend, even though I could have gotten one from a big box store–where you spend money votes for the world you want to see.
Here’s a link to join Visible where you get $20 off your service and I get a $20 service credit. (Or use referral code: 3PNG9H8 ) I was originally going to just post a blog post telling you to go save money on something you’re paying for anyway, but they have a refer a friend program! Let’s win win!
If you find value in this blog, please consider supporting!
Patreon.com/fkdp (you can follow for free and get updates and freebies from me!)
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bevin (safe and secure way to buy me a snack!)
Venmo: @bevinb
Cash App: $BevinBoss
Buy my aerobics video! fatkiddanceparty.com/video4pack
Amazon Wishlist: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1SJCL864DDKEH?ref_=wl_share
Tee shirts: https://genuinevalentine.com/collections/fat-kid-dance-party
Instagram: @fatkiddanceparty @bevinsparty
Work one on one with me: https://queerfatfemme.com/one-on-one-with-bevin/
Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bevin (Search “Bevin” on Spotify or Apple/Google Podcasts)
You Tube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/SelfCareParty
Email list: http://eepurl.com/dyX3db
Buy anything on Amazon using this link to go to their website and I make a 3% commission on anything you buy! Costs nothing extra to you and cuts into that “astronaut’s” profits just a lil bit. https://amzn.to/2PQ52A9
Threads, Tik Tok, Twitter: @bevinsparty
Facebook.com/bevinsparty
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I learn a lot from my intergenerational friendships and my 30 year old pal Laura Brooks said “My job is not my identity” during our first conversation and it blew my mind and changed my life.
When I left my career as an attorney I didn’t have anything I was leaping into other than the temporary monetary cushion of a fiance who wanted me to move to Los Angeles with her and was willing to support my career transition. A lot of times life is like that, we have to leave the familiar for the unknown and then it sorts itself out.
About nine months after the move I had already started working on a tea business, overlapping with that is when I got the idea to start teaching aerobics. I took a class at the World Tea Expo about liability and small product based consumable businesses and knew I couldn’t do it with no capital. Forever learning the Capricorn lesson about not monetizing all of my passions (I remain very passionate about herbs and tea).
Once I started teaching my aerobics class, Fat Kid Dance Party shot off like a rocket. Replacing “I’m an attorney” with “I’m an aerobics instructor” was an ease of mind I didn’t realize I needed.
I also didn’t realize what I was doing was, once again, externalizing my sense of identity and safety outside of myself.
“My job is not my identity” is such an accurate thing to say because, in capitalism, making our identity about how we create capital for the state makes that the most important thing we do. I believe we incarnate on Earth to perfect how we love one another and ourselves. That has more to do with being the best person we can be, not the best at making money or being “successful” in the eyes of capitalism.
Here are all of the ways I experienced income during Summer 2024 (that I can remember):
Patreon memberships
Pet sitting
Cleaning hotel rooms
Personal shopping for health / wellness / home products
Gifts to support my podcast, this blog and other free content I provide on social media
Arts grant panelist (this was 30 hours and intense!)
Sales of my online aerobics video series
In person aerobics classes (but to be accurate I actually went out of pocket for travel to teach in Seattle for 4 out of 5 of the recent classes)
None of these things is my identity!
I’ve been going through a lot emotionally over the past couple years as the revenue from my aerobics class has waned. I don’t know any entrepreneurs who did well financially in 2023 and I ended up getting a couple of gigs to supplement my income, while still doing the same amount of work in my entrepreneurial ventures.
If you’re part of the entrepreneurial “2023 was trash” experience, I highly recommend season 5 of Luvvie Ajayi Jones’ Professional Troublemaker podcast!
I didn’t realize a big part of why it was so hard emotionally was because I put so much of my identity in being “an aerobics instructor” versus just being the best Bevin I can be.
True, figuring out what I was meant to do in the world gave me so much peace. I spent a long time teaching about body liberation and self love without having a thing I could point to that made money from it. And then! Getting to say I made all of my money to live off from my art and activism was such a sweet experience. A dream come true!
True, it took shrinking my needs waaay down by moving to the forest and hardly heating my house in the Winter. But I got to work full time in my passions in a way I always wanted and to be a full time mom to my Feline Overlord, Biscuit Reynolds.
I started this post yesterday and a couple hours later found out one of my steadiest jobs is coming to an end. It’s wildly unsettling to be thrust into the chaos of “Oh I was counting on this thing and now it’s gone” but that’s grief in a nutshell. When I got laid off in 2008 from a lawyer job I had been at for five years I realized that job security is a myth and at any moment everything can change.
I think we all learned during the onset of the quarantine that something we have never heard of before can come through and change everything about our lives.
The only thing consistent in life is uncertainty and I’m proud of myself that my reaction to losing this steady income was to check in with my intuition and reach out to a couple of my besties for moral support. And trust that another stream of income will flourish!
I’m Bevin and that’s enough!
For further listening on this topic, my podcast episode with Jonathan Koe on redefining success is a good one!
If you find value in my blog or my work in the world, please consider supporting!
Patreon.com/fkdp (you can follow for free and get updates and freebies from me!)
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bevin (safe and secure way to buy me a snack!)
Venmo: @bevinb
Cash App: $BevinBoss
Buy my aerobics video! fatkiddanceparty.com/video4pack
Amazon Wishlist: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1SJCL864DDKEH?ref_=wl_share
Tee shirts: https://genuinevalentine.com/collections/fat-kid-dance-party
Instagram: @fatkiddanceparty @bevinsparty
Work one on one with me: https://queerfatfemme.com/one-on-one-with-bevin/
Podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/bevin (Search “Bevin” on Spotify or Apple/Google Podcasts)
You Tube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/SelfCareParty
Blog: queerfatfemme.com
Email list: http://eepurl.com/dyX3db
Buy anything on Amazon using this link to go to their website and I make a 3% commission on anything you buy! Costs nothing extra to you and cuts into that “astronaut’s” profits just a lil bit. https://amzn.to/2PQ52A9
Threads, Tik Tok, Twitter: @bevinsparty
Facebook.com/bevinsparty
Like/subscribe/review/send a link to a friend! It all helps!