Michelle Williams
speaker
1,165 appearances
24 recordings
10 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 29 Jan
Michelle Williams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 12.
Appearances
CHIT is a medical order from a doctor that exempts you from physical duty to some degree. For example, if you're on CHIT, you might be on CHIT to not run for a while while your ACL is mending, something like that. Here's a neat little tip from a misinformed corporal during a nutrition briefing. So nearly entirely wrong. It felt like being sandpapered.
If you want to lose weight, pick your goal weight and add a zero to it. And that's how many calories you should eat in a day. Intriguing. That allotted me 970 calories a day. If you want to mess up your head even faster, run 16 miles and still only eat your goal weight plus zero calories. Then you too can wake up in the middle of the night with hunger kneading your stomach from the inside.
I nod my knuckles in my sleep. I woke up with blood on my pillow, noting with mild interest I was resorting to self-cannibalism. I turned the pillow over. I routinely slept with ice packs on bare shins. The frostbite blended in with other scars, mottled like blue bark. Damn, Williams, you must be the first Marine to get frostbite in Monterey, and NCO laughed. I laughed along. Hilarious.
If no pain, no gain, then I was rocking. Every time someone implied it was characteristic of females to be fat and broken, I furiously clocked another mile, right hip clicking along. When rumors circulated a female was malingering for going on shit, I flew out the door, shoelaces double knotted, shouting at my injury to go on, hit me. And when she was asking for it,
or she's lying, she wanted it, I protested by running long hauls along the gray coast. I rarely cried. Sometimes, though, in the gray cocoon of oceanic fog, miles alone up the coast, hunger cracked into something else. Then I slowed on the sand, dropped my hands to my thighs, and took shuddering breaths.
First, thank you so much for your kind words. The hope with how unflinching the writing is was to show what that space was like, simply because when I had an eating disorder, people who really loved me and were really trying to be kind would just say the worst things. It was like, maybe I can illustrate what this looks like from where I'm standing.
And hopefully it'll help other folks who have eating disorders or love people who do. I worked on this book for nine years. The bulk of it was written by the time I was about 26 or 27. And And the writing coincided with recovery. I have spent the last decade in the meditation and mindfulness space. I've been a yoga teacher. That's been my major way of supporting myself for years. And for me...
You know, the events in the book, it's just my increasingly deranged quest to make myself fit in by being smaller because that's what I feel is being asked of me. And I use the term deranged really intentionally. I believe it comes from the French to be removed from the land, de ranger, to have a lack of relationship with land. And so for me...
Writing was the accumulation of a lot of miles spent walking. I left the Marine Corps with an injury that really hurt, and what helped for me was movement. And I started walking and started backpacking and spent most of my 20s backpacking as much as I could, as frequently as I could, and building up this new story in my body.
Because the story in Hollow, I feel within my own body that I am inherently weak. And over the years of writing it, I was actively working on cultivating this new story in my body, which is actually I'm really strong. And I'm very much capable of holding this younger self that didn't have me. It didn't have that sense of value and self-worth and strength.
This is the heart of the paradox, right? Like an eating disorder weakens you. An eating disorder weakens you, but you don't see it that way when you're in it. I knew that what I was doing was harming me. I could feel it, especially in the end when I was very sick indeed.
Like, I could feel, like, these warning lights dimly going off in my body of, like, this is not – like, something is very wrong internally. And yet I always found this mental acrobatics to justify my eating disorder as the only thing that would fix it. The problem, for example – okay, so – binging and purging, that felt awful. It was just a horrible experience.
So obviously the answer was I needed to just not eat, right? Like that's going to fix it, which is not at all true. It was so inconceivable to me that to feed myself would actually strengthen me. I think this really speaks to how inherently unsustainable an eating disorder is because effectively you are
crippling your energetic force right like you're you're taking your life force and you're trying to constrict it and say i can live on less and then i can live on even less than that i can live on you in this like you're i felt like i was drawing my my life closer and closer within me and like wrapping it as close as i could around the bones because i felt like somewhere really really deep inside if i just kept this archaeological expedition somewhere some deep down layer of me was good and worthwhile i just had to find it and that mindset is inherently crippling
compared to you have worth and value exactly as you are, so feed yourself.
Oh, admiration and approval, definitely. Definitely. In fact, I once or twice heard men stand up for me because they saw me running so much. There was one time I dropped into a colleague's barracks room to borrow a book, The Psychology of Killing. I remember that distinctly. Went in, borrowed this book, and at that moment, the NCO on duty walked by.
And my being in a male room was grounds for punishment. And so he definitely, you know, chewed us out. And then he said, well, I'm going to let you off this time because I see you running all the time. I was like, well, okay. And so that kind of thing was in my mind when I was tired and wanted to take a day off.
It was like, well, my reputation, my entire sense of selfhood really revolves around being the endurance runner. So as long as I'm doing that, I don't know, like I'm doing something to claim my place within the Marine Corps, no matter how tiny it is. It makes me feel like I'm doing my best.
All of it. I enlisted one of the greatest appeals of the military was the promise of meritocracy, that I would be judged on my character and my effort, what I could control. And not my gender, which is something that no one gets to control. It's just how you are. And that was just simply not the experience I had. My gender was so aggressively I was sexualized from the first day.
And that never really ended until the last day I left the Marine Corps. Like if someone managed to say something. reminding me I was a girl and that that was inherently problematic effectively every day of my enlistment. There were times as I worked on this book for nine years where I really hoped that some of the messaging had become irrelevant.
Showing 1101–1120 of 1,165 · page 56 of 59
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