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I needed to put her out of my mind, and the Internet was convenient in that way—people could be deleted, switched off.
“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”
La luz se fue.
If I let go of my pain, there would be a hole inside me that was so vast I would cease to exist. I would be the balloon floating into the sky, not the other way around. There would be nothing pulling me down, nothing keeping my feet on the ground. My pain was my gravity. “Without my pain, I wouldn’t be me anymore.”
“Because I’m fat, I know how horrible everyone is. If I looked like a normal woman, if I looked like you, then I’d never know how cruel and shallow people are. I see a different side of humanity. Those guys I went on the blind dates with treated me like I was subhuman. If I were thin and pretty, they would have shown me a different side, a fake one, but since I look like this, I know what they’re truly like.” “Explain why this is a good thing.” “It’s a special power. I see past the mask to the real person underneath. I’m not living a lie like so many other women. I’m not a fool.”
We’re different in a way that everyone can see. We can’t hide it or fake it. We’ll never fit society’s idea for how women should look and behave, but why is that a tragedy? We’re free to live how we want. It’s liberating, if you choose to see it that way.”
If there was a spectrum, the young woman was on it and I was on it and so was every other woman I knew. Eulayla Baptist was there, bursting through her jeans. In nine months, you’ll be looking foxy! That’s what Gladys had said at my first Baptist Weight Loss meeting. Foxy, hot, fuckable. Whatever it was called, that’s what I’d wanted—to be hot, to elicit desire in men and envy in women. But I realized I didn’t want that anymore. That required living in Dietland, which meant control, constriction—paralysis, even—but above all it meant obedience. I was tired of being obedient.
As I walked I steadied myself, raising my chin confidently, daring someone to say something. People had always insulted me by calling me fat, but they couldn’t hurt me that way, not anymore. I was fat, and if I no longer saw it as a bad thing, then the weapon they had used against me lost its power. I was wearing bright colors, refusing to apologize for my size. The dress made me feel defiant. For the first time, I didn’t mind taking up space.
I don’t think this is terrorism or lady terrorism. Do you know what I think it is?” “I’m dying to know,” said Nedra Feldstein-Delaney. “I think it’s a response to terrorism. From the time we’re little girls, we’re taught to fear the bad man who might get us. We’re terrified of being raped, abused, even killed by the bad man, but the problem is, you can’t tell the good ones from the bad ones, so you have to be wary of them all. We’re told not to go out by ourselves late at night, not to dress a certain way, not to talk to male strangers, not to lead men on. We take self-defense classes, keep
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“I was burned at thirteen, around the time that puberty set in,” Sana said. “I had always been a tomboy—is that what you call it? My friends and I were starting our periods and growing breasts—you know the awkwardness of that age—and here this horrible thing happened to me at the same time. I’ve always connected the two in my mind: being scarred and becoming a woman, both traumatic processes in their own way. An attack on my sense of self.”
Since I didn’t want to be fuckable anymore, I focused on how I felt inside, not how I might have looked to an imaginary someone. I was anchored in the sensations of my body rather than living outside of it, judging it.
He laughed again, glancing around the table for support, but the men and women at the table were silent and expressionless, unsure how to react. The big blob had spoken. It could speak. They had always relied on the blob to be quiet, to absorb their taunts and snide remarks and slip quietly through the cracks of life. Now the blob was angry. Uh-oh.
