EP#15- Chronic Illness & Body Confidence with Gigi Robinson, Content Creator

(gentle music) - Something that's super important also in the healing process and learning about how to advocate for yourself is acknowledging and, again, honoring other people's experiences while also understanding that no two experience is going to be the same and knowing that it's okay. - That was Gigi Robinson. Fun fact about Gigi, we went to middle school together. So I've known her for a pretty long time and I think it's really awesome that we were able to do this recording. I am really inspired by all the amazing achievements that she's accomplished throughout these past 10 years and I'm just so excited to have her on as a guest because it's really cool to see someone's progression throughout their childhood and young adulthood and see them accomplish all that they do. So that's a cool fact about Gigi, but an even cooler fact is that she was recently featured on a billboard in Times Square. If I were her, I would be feeling kind of famous right now but what I love the most about her is that she's incredibly humble and hardworking. Gigi Robinson is a digital content producer, photographer and TikTok creator who shares content about body image, chronic illness, advocacy, and visual content tips across her platforms. She's a recent graduate and current master's student at the University of Southern California studying design, business and technology. She invites her online community to reach out to her to have meaningful conversations and continuously be a resource for all of her followers. In this episode, we chatted about Gigi's experience with chronic illness and mental health struggles and how she uses her social media platforms, her passions for technology, business, photography, and design to advocate for these issues and create a really strong and intimate community in her online following. Before we get into the interview, I have a quick message from anchor. - Hi Gigi, thank you so much for coming onto everyday endorphins. I am so happy that we're gonna chat about chronic illness and all the really incredible work you do. Now that you've graduated from USC, you're just so cool and you're going to grad school. There's so many exciting things for you in the future. But yeah, thank you so much for coming on this afternoon. - Of course, thank you so much for having me. I feel like it's also so cool because we've known each other for years like to see each other's evolutions creatively is just really cool, even just like being there and like hearing about different experiences that we've both dealt with, mental health wise, physical health wise. I think that's just super cool. And thanks for having me. - I totally grew with you. Like we went to middle school together and then like I became good friends with your brother Charlie. So we like kept in touch throughout high school and beyond. And I always had this impression of you as this really talented like artist. You went to LaGuardia in New York and you know, after those who don't know it's a performing arts high school, really amazing school. Timothy Shalame went to LaGuardia. We loved Tiffany. But you know, in my mind, I always thought of you as this really incredible photographer, artist, visually intelligent person. And I didn't know that you had had these struggles with physical and mental health. And I think it's so incredible that you've channeled that energy through your work and you're using your platform to spread awareness about chronic illness. So I would love for you to talk a little bit about the chronic illness that you are encountering in your life and how you use your social media platform to spread really positive messages and uplifting messages. - Yeah, first of all, thank you for those kind words. Second of all, yeah, I would say a lot of my, I guess intuition of creating art that has a purpose is one, because I'm given a platform, regardless of actually whatever numbers you think. If you think numbers are the thing that if given me success, you're absolutely wrong. The thing that's given me success is my passion towards the cause that I'm interested in, which is educating people about chronic illness. And that even if you look 100% fine, even if you have pretty privilege, even if you look like an able body person that you might not be, and this goes for mental health as well, you can ever tell really if somebody's struggling with their mental health just upon first glance. And coming up with ways to visually represent that and talk about it and speak about it is so important for me in figuring out that community online is what really started driving me to be more open about it and share about it. And obviously, the numbers have come as a result of that. And I think that that's great. But regardless of who you are as a content creator, if you have a platform, it's imperative to your growth and the growth of your community to be transparent and talk about issues that actually bother you and that you've experienced so that you can really educate from a place of kindness and just trying to make a difference in a positive way. So that's why I decided to do it. And then dealing with a lot of issues during college with professors not believing me and friends not understanding. And I just, my way of saying fuck you is through art because it's a visual way for me to tell a story, pictures worth 1,000 words, whatever that saying is. The picture hopefully will transport you to the pain and the trauma of being in hospitals all the time because of the chronic illness. That's where I really wanted to come from, I guess, with my work. - I want to talk a little bit more about that because I can imagine it's really challenging to visually depict an illness that's invisible. So how do you do that? Like how are you able to convey those messages through visual expression and through the work that you do? - Well, I think the word challenging is just an obstacle that you have to work through and find a way around. So that's like part of the thing that makes me want to keep doing work in industries that are challenging or looked at as like bad and how do you navigate a field like that? Because all it is is coming up with a suite of assets, whether that's design, photos, videos, podcasts, conversations, essays, coming up with this collection of media that can kind of take somebody on that journey. And through photography for me, if you guys check out my book, my senior thesis is actually called the discourse between myself and the waiting room, which I conveniently have with me right now. You guys can all go check it out, and I encourage you to do it because part of the thing that I did in a lot of my imagery was taking photos of things that wallows in the hospital at appointments and getting all these tests run on me. I would bring my camera and take things that I intuitively like no, like okay, every single time I'm in the hospital, I'm lying on that stupid bed, and you hear that paper crunching, right, underneath you. Again, also this is coming from somebody who, you know, I'm lucky and a lot of the world is coming from a hearing perspective. So perhaps somebody who doesn't have that hearing perspective doesn't understand that sound, but they may understand the touch. They might understand how that feels from just looking at it. And maybe somebody who is visually impaired knows the sound, but doesn't know how it looks. So eventually I definitely am gonna add like an audio component to that this book series because I think it's really important to push yourself to think outside in more inclusive ways. And it's definitely something I'm working on for members and other communities of, or in other realms of the disability community. So yeah, back to what I was saying, it's about intuitively thinking like what's something that almost every person has an experience with, and creating something visually that's compelling and that will bring that memory up. So that's the best way that I could describe and think about it. And then also it was about like healing. So I didn't really care about, oh, like, how do I best represent my life with chronic illness? It was like, what am I gonna do right now to make my process of understanding this illness like lighter? Or like more positive and more understanding for other people and other perspectives. And yeah, part of that was also like color and the visual world that I live in because as an art student, I'm just gonna get a little artsy here. But if you walk into like a hospital, they're pretty much all lit with that horrendous, freaking fluorescent light. It's so sterile. Yeah. We're inviting, it's not welcoming, it's just very like empty and blank. Yeah, it's, it's bland, it's empty. You know, sometimes you'll have the orange tinted light. Sometimes you'll have those fluorescent lights. You'll have that buzzing of the fluorescent light. Even one of my favorite images, I ultimately don't think I actually included it in the book because there were stronger ones. But one of my favorite images that I've taken is like when you're lying on the bed in a hospital and you look up and you see those like panels in the ceiling. Like, Almost everybody has that experience intuitively. You can envision it and you can like see it. Even if you're not frequenting it a lot, but as somebody with a chronic illness, you're going to so many appointments, that becomes second nature. And again, it's not really something you think about until you think about it. Right. It's a frequent. Yeah, so you're really like really focusing in on the specificity of detail in those experiences and then translating that into your work. Which is exactly what you call cool. I mean, I'm not an art student, but I do have a minor in creative writing. And I think a lot can be said about the writing process. Like it can be very cathartic to work through a challenging moment in your life or a mental health struggle that you're going through just through the process of writing about it. And I'm sure, as you've mentioned, it's very similar through visual art and expression. And we've talked a bit about that. And I want to go back to talking about your actual personal experience with chronic illness. Can you tell us a little bit about what the specific chronic illness is that you have? So I have Ella's Danlos Syndrome, hypermobility type, which essentially just means like I'm over flexible, but on that note, it means that the collagen in my muscles is loose, which makes it easier for my joints to dislocate. So sometimes people are like, oh, you just have really flexible joints and you're super bendy and you're super this. And I'm like, no, it's actually because I have a lack of this one thing that's vital to keeping your body together. And that's why it's so easy to be injury prone and to get bruised easily. So that was the first thing I was diagnosed with. And then last year, I got diagnosed with mast cell, which basically is where my body thinks I'm allergic to a lot of things. And it triggers a histamine reaction. So it's not the worst thing. It's just like an annoying one. And then pots is basically like that feeling where you get up. At least this is how it manifests in me. For some other people, it can be so much worse. But again, this is just my experience. And I was talking with another friend of mine who has a podcast who's chronically ill and no persons experience with chronic illness is going to be the same. No person with mental health is going to be the same. But I think it's important to acknowledge that and honor that and just be OK knowing that my experience with pots is going to be different than maybe somebody who has it on a more severe level. I've dealt with seasonal depression. I've dealt with eating disorder. And I just talk about it because a lot of people are scared to. And it's really important. Again, I do it because I want to educate not because I want people to pity me, not because I want to get people to be like, oh, wow, I love the work she does. No, I do it because I genuinely hope that I can help people heal and work through some of the most difficult things that somebody who's ill can go through. Yeah. And I mean, with the chronic illness piece that you were just talking about, a lot of that is invisible. People can't see the pain that you're feeling because of the uber flexibility in your joints. So I think it's really amazing that you're doing this work where you're also creating a space for this community to also share in these experiences and be like, hey, I'm suffering from this. And I know there are other people out there that are suffering with the same thing. Exactly. Yep. I had a bunch of injuries in middle school. And it was like, this thing where I kept getting injured and my parents were like, some things was going on. And then the doctor one day, she was like, oh, I think she just suggested it. It was like, I think she might have this. You guys should go see a rheumatologist. And you should see a chanadasis. You should investigate this further. And then after we did that, luckily, I was diagnosed off the bat. And with EDS, it's one of these chronic illnesses that gets often misdiagnosed with something else before they get to the proper diagnosis. And before you can start actually getting treatment for it. So I feel pretty lucky that I was diagnosed at an early age. So I was able to kind of navigate it and know how to manage it for years. And that's the thing with chronic illness. You're never going to be cured from it. Or there's no magic potion you can take to make it go away. There's things you can do to alleviate your symptoms and to manage it. Because it's something that you're going to have throughout the rest of your life. And that's been-- it's sometimes daunting. But at the same time, I know I'm very fortunate to have it to the extent that I have it as frustrating and annoying as it is to have that and to live with. So yeah, that was when I was 11 in middle school that I was diagnosed with that. And I didn't talk about it because I was ashamed. What are we? I don't know if you remember the art teacher at the time. I forgot-- - You were in school? - Yeah, no, she would call me "gimpy." - Oh my god. - Yeah, so that was why I never talked about it. And that was because I had a broken foot sheet and know that I had this other thing. It was just like, I had a cast on my ankle. But then I had an air boot because I re-injured my ankle. And then the next year, I injured my wrist. And like-- - You know, as a kid, also just constantly go through. - Right. And like, I mean, as a kid, and also, I think, we're very fortunate to have grown up in New York City. And we're very privileged to have grown up in the education system that we have and going to specialize high schools. But at the same time, we need to address the fact that we're very privileged to be in that position. And that we also live in a city where a lot of the time inclusivity is like, you know, fundamental in the education system. And I think we could do an even better job. I can't speak to experiences of other ethnicities. I can't speak to, you know, other races. But what I can speak to is like, people in the disability community. And I feel like I honestly never-- I really never found that. And that's because I didn't talk about it. I didn't want to make a point. But even at La Guardia, I was one of the people that would catch other people with chronic illnesses or with other problems in the elevator. And it was like, oh, yeah, we're like the elevator crew, like, aha. But then there's people who don't understand what you're going through because they can't see it. They don't see anything wrong with you. And they're like, oh, well, she just gets to ride the elevator because of her chronic illness. Like, yeah, she doesn't have it. Like, she doesn't need a rolling backpack. If she was really sick, she'd be in a wheelchair. And that's just like so disrespectful to say. And you can't change someone's perspective. Also, at the time, you're, what, 14 to 18 years old? You're a kid. Like, you-- Yeah, higher school. Sometimes you don't have the ability to see past the fact that somebody else is taking the elevator and you're taking the stairs. I think that's a great point. When we think of disability or disabled people, you think of someone in a wheelchair or some physical ailment that you can see. And so it's so important to like broaden your perspective and realize that like able-bodied individuals, like that encompasses, you know, people who also don't have invisible chronic illness issues. So there's like this whole other side of the coin that's just not talked about at all. Growing up with this and coming to terms with this that it's not necessarily curable, where there are certain practices or lessons you've learned that have kind of helped to keep your mental health in check or at least prioritize it. Because as we've grown older, I think we can both say that there's a huge connection between our physical and our mental health. And maybe that was a lesson or a piece of insight that you learned way younger because you had to deal with this, like as a kid. Yeah, I would say like coming to terms with it really took me until my like sophomore year of college, junior year of college, senior year of college. Like really acknowledging and honoring my experience and knowing like, OK, I have to stop. I have to take a beat. I can't push myself. I can't go out tonight because it's going to ruin my entire week, which is in turn going to ruin my midterm season, which is in turn going to affect my final season, like making sure that I take care of myself first and then dealing with like the fun and the social life second. It's definitely been difficult because that's something that again, I'm going to say another thing about college students. A lot of college students just want to have that experience. Go out, go party, not have to deal with real life things, not have to deal with work for me. Like my schedule is health, school, work, social. Yeah, you have a priority street. Yeah, that's on the record. Yeah, and Stella knows me. So she's probably going to say this about me. She knows that that's been my priority for a long time. And that's not the priority of every college student. And that's totally fine. But for me, like as somebody who has to put my health first, and let me say I didn't put it first for a long time. I would even put school and work above my health, therefore leading me to burnout, therefore leading me to failures in my social life. But if I honor my health first and take care of myself and take care of what I need to do academically and then take care of everything I need to do so I can get paid so that I'm not stressed out so that I can manage my health better so that I can go get like, you know, for me, chronically, ill people like sometimes we go to special masseuses because they know how to like work with our bodies or like we get acupuncture. But those are things that sometimes aren't covered by insurance. So you have to pay out. pocket. So again, doing all of those steps so that I can get like funded for that in the end is like super important for me. And then after all of that, then I'm down to sit down and have fun and go out if I'm able. But honestly, like going out was so exhausting for me in college literally, I would hit a point like, honestly, like around 1235, I would literally be like, I'm done. Well, I mean, you also do USC, which is a very different, more intense social scene than I would say wash you. But I think it speaks to like most college experiences, like, yeah, it's lasting to go out. But and it's so important to put your health and wellness first and your mental health first, you know, you heard it here first. That's probably like the most wise thing I've heard you say ever about like how you've listed out your priorities. It's like, it's like a reinvented Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Like the basic, most fundamental layer needs to be putting your, your physical and your mental health first because if that's not aligned, like the rest just cannot follow. Like it's a don't know fact. Yeah. And I think back to what you were saying about mind-body connection, something I've been doing, I've really done my hardest. I would say I'm like, almost to being a fully plant based diet. There are still times where I cheat on meals and I, you know, I have dairy, but that's really the extent and sometimes fish actually I will say that. But eliminating red meat and eliminating poultry from my diet and like poor has been just so helpful for me truthfully. Like I've noticed the inflammation and pain both in my, my gut and in my joints has like gone down and my body connection is so important. So not only taking care of yourself, regarding self-care with, you know, journaling in beds and taking walks, but also making sure that you're nourishing your body with like the right food for you and learning how to eat intuitively and listen to my body and finding something that works for me and my conditions may not work for somebody else with a chronic illness and their conditions, it may not work for somebody with an eating disorder. Like, you know, there's times where I literally splurge and I go these periods without eating any dairy and then all of a sudden there's hogging does in the freezer and I just want to eat like, you know, so much of it and I do it and then I get sick and I say I'm never eating it again and like that's part of my problem with binge eating and-- >>And you feel cycle. >>Yeah, I feel glad, yeah, you brought up like the intuitive eating part too. >>Yeah, and it's definitely hard. Like I'm not saying it's easy, my freshman year of college, I'm pretty sure you-- yeah, we hung out a lot that year and I'm sure you notice like I was definitely a little bit heavier than I perhaps like have been in recent years and that's because I was having like a lot of issues with binge eating and like, you know, I didn't have like bulimia to a point I think where it was noticeable but in correlation with my binge eating I would eat until the point where I was sick and like I didn't really-- I haven't talked about it much. This is like the first time I've really like acknowledged that but going through that has made my healing process with eating also a lot more challenging but again it's just an obstacle for me. Like I had to go through that for me to understand like, okay, eating that much and putting my body through that really feels like crap and the reason I was doing that is because my mental health wasn't in check because I was putting work and school before my health instead of putting my health first and after dealing with so many issues last year with my health physically. I-- that's when I took the beat and I sat down with my team over at USC, my disability office team, my professors, my parents, my doctors and we said, you know what, maybe taking a reduced course load is actually going to be the most kind of amicable way to move forward in a way that's productive for my education, for my health, for my work life and for my social life and I'm so glad I did it. I'm so glad I did it. And I encourage anybody who's like struggling to just like reach out for help, I know it's hard. Even if you want to DM me on any platform, like I'm all ears, that's something I'm super open about with. My-- my community online is that like if you are having a problem, like just like I'll listen, like I'll just-- I'll chill. I was like-- You definitely really promote a lot of positive values, body positivity, spreading awareness about chronic illness and I also want to thank you for being so honest and open on the podcast because unfortunately, I'm sure many, many, many individuals are or have in the past suffered very similar issues related to eating and eating disorders. So thank you again for sharing your experience. It's really inspiring and I hope that. But, for listening, feels inspired as well. Going back to what you're saying about just listening to practically how much work you're putting on your plate and making sure that you're doing something that's manageable and sustainable so that you don't burn out, clearly worked because now you're off to grad school. What are some exciting things coming in the future for you? Thank you so much for also, you know, acknowledging that I think something that's super important also in the healing process and learning about how to advocate for yourself and make art about it if that's your jam or to talk about it or to, you know, be an advocate is acknowledging and, again, honoring other people's experiences while also understanding that no two experience is going to be the same and knowing that like it's okay and that it's just, you got to keep going. My dad always says like two things. One, everything you need is within you now. So like, you know, if I got through my worst day, I can't get through today. And that's kind of how I've gotten through a lot of obstacles in my life. But what's next? Well, a couple of things. So I applied to grad school also at USC. I was very surprised to get it in being honest. I, you know, they they had this this program. You didn't need the GRE. I said, fuck it. Like, I either get it in or I don't. I, you know, my portfolio was raw and honest. I don't know if you remember that project. I did my freshman year of college that I'm a supermodel. Yeah. And to think back, that was four years ago, that was the foundation for the work I'm doing now in body positivity. It really was the foundation. I just didn't know it yet. I was setting it up back then. And I, you know, look where it's gone. Me now. I think, you know, I'll continue to be an advocate as much as I can to educate people. And I obviously also need to be educated in so many other realms of activism and continue to learn and to be present and to be an ally for all kinds of marginalized communities, whether that's ethnically, racially, you know, other kinds of disabilities. I can't, you know, LGBTQ, whatever that is. I'm here to be an ally and to learn and educate. So that's super important. But regardless, yeah, that's I'm just kind of, you know, ebbing and flowing with whatever comes my way. Yeah. Rolling with the punches. I mean, it's all very exciting. And I'm so proud of you. You should be very proud of yourself. Lots of exciting things to come. Before I let you go, there's one question that I ask all the guests that come onto my podcast. And that question is, what is something that brings you a bit of endorphins every day? It's definitely a couple of things. Obviously, anyone that knows me knows I'm obsessed with my dog. So Zoe's a big one. I mean, as you can see on this podcast, plants have given me some endorphins lately during the pandemic. But ultimately, in terms of why I do the work that I do and continue to do it, it's really those messages that I get from people in the community or like a random DM from, you know, some person across the world saying like how much my content genuinely helps them move through their life or like helps them with their eating disorder or be more confident and stand up for themselves when somebody says something rude about their body image or doesn't understand their chronic illness. So really just I think it comes from community building more than anything and communicating that with people. That's so wonderful here. Thank you so much again for coming on this afternoon. Of course, this was so fun. Thanks for having me.