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buried the girl I had been because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. She is still small and scared and ashamed, and perhaps I am writing my way back to her, trying to tell her everything she needs to hear.
Today, I am a fat woman. I don’t think I am ugly. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I do live in the world. I live in this body in this world, and I hate how the world all too often responds to this body.
There is a picture of me. I am five. I have big eyes and a scrawny neck. I am staring at a plastic typewriter while I lie on a couch, on my stomach, ankles crossed, probably daydreaming. I always daydreamed. Even then, I was a writer. From an early age, I would draw little villages on napkins and write stories about the people who lived in those villages. I loved the escape of writing those stories, of imagining lives that were different from my own. I had a ferocious imagination. I was a daydreamer and I resented being pulled out of my daydreams to deal with the business of living. In my
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neck. I am staring at a plastic typewriter while I lie on
The constant pressure made me refuse to lose weight to punish these people who claimed to love me but wouldn’t accept me as I was. It
like. I deny myself gentler kinds of affection—to touch or be kindly touched—as if that is a pleasure a body like mine does not deserve.
Then I became self-conscious and tucked my thumb against the palm of my hand, as if I should hide my thumb,
as if I had no right to feel pretty, to feel good about myself, to acknowledge myself as a woman when I am clearly not following the rules for being a woman—to be small, to take up less space.
hate that I am letting down so many women when I cannot embrace my body at any size.
I got older and realized I was exhausted by all my self-loathing and that I was hating myself, in part, because I assumed that’s what other people expected from me, as if my self-hatred was the price I needed to pay for living in an overweight body.
don’t want to change who I am. I want to change how I look. On my better days, when I feel up to the fight, I want to change how this world responds to how I look because intellectually I know my body is not the real problem. On bad days, though, I forget how to separate my personality, the heart of who I am, from my body. I forget how to shield myself from the cruelties of the world.
I am hyperconscious of how I take up space. As a woman, as a fat woman, I am not supposed to take up space. And yet, as a feminist, I am encouraged to believe I can take up space. I live in a contradictory space where I should try to take up space but not too much of it, and not in the wrong way, where the wrong way is any way where my body is concerned.
And then I start to hate myself for my unruly body that I seem incapable of disciplining, for my cowardice in the face of what other people might think.
don’t like patterns. I don’t like appliqué. Fat-girl clothes designers never got this memo.
I was at this store, looking for some cute, colorful shirts, when a young woman came out of the dressing room crying. The details aren’t mine to share but she was so upset and her mother was treating her in quite a humiliating manner and I wanted to sob right there in the store because it was just too much to see such a familiar and painful scene. Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.
But I followed her to the dressing room and I told her she was beautiful. And she was indeed beautiful. She nodded, tears were streaming down her face. We both went on with our shopping. I wanted to tear her mother’s face off. I wanted to call my person and hear a kind voice. I wanted something to pull me out of the spiral of self-loathing I felt myself tumbling into. I wanted to burn the store down. I wanted to scream.
I’m overweight. I hope to not always be, but for now, this is my body. I am coming to terms with that. I am trying to feel less shame about that. When I mark myself with ink, or when I have that done to me, I am taking some part of my skin back. It is a long, slow process. This is my fortress.
That version of myself is terrifying and maybe even beautiful, so I panic, and within days or weeks, I undo all the progress I’ve made. I stop going to the gym. I stop eating right. I do this until I feel safe again.
Most of us have these versions of ourselves that terrify us. We have these imperfect bodies we don’t quite know how to cope with. We have these shames we keep to ourselves because to show ourselves as we are, no more and no less, would be too much.
“I am not attracted to you. I do not want to fuck you, and this confuses my understanding of my masculinity, entitlement, and place in this world.” It is not my job to please them with my body.
When people try to shame me for being fat, I feel rage. I get stubborn. I want to make myself fatter to spite the shamers, even though the only person I would really be spiting is myself.
And then I hate myself for wanting something so terrible and I rage at the world that hates me for my body and how it is so markedly visible and the same world that forces too many girls and women to try their best to disappear. My rage is often silent because no one wants to hear fat-girl stories of taking up too much space and still finding nowhere to fit. People prefer the stories of the too-skinny girls who starve themselves and exercise too much and are gray and gaunt and disappearing in plain sight.
I have chronic heartburn because I used to make myself throw up after I ate. There’s a word for this, “bulimia,” but it always feels strange to use that word with regard to myself.
Sometimes, I just want to rid myself of all the food in my body. I want to feel empty.
When we’d go out to dinner, friends remarked that I always went to the bathroom after I ate. “I have a bad stomach,” I demurred, politely. It was a half-truth.
The one time he caught me throwing up he said, “I’m glad you’re working on the problem.” For him, the real problem was my body, and he never let me forget it. He punished me and I liked it. Finally, I thought. Finally.
The word “heartburn” is rather misleading. It has nothing to do with the heart. Or it has everything to do with the heart, only not the way you might think.
They will say things like, “Don’t say that about yourself,” because they understand “fat” as something shameful, something insulting, while I understand “fat” as a reality of my body. When I use the word, I am not insulting myself. I am describing myself.
as if I cannot be fat and also possess what they see as valuable qualities.
it’s insulting to assume that I am ashamed of myself for being fat, no matter how close to the truth that might be.
As an undergraduate, I dreaded classrooms where I would have to wedge myself into one of those seats with the desk attached. I dreaded the humiliation of sitting, or half sitting, in such a chair, my fat spilling everywhere, one or both of my legs going numb, hardly able to breathe as the desk dug into my stomach.
I love plays and musicals, but I rarely attend the theater because I simply cannot fit. When I do attend such events, I suffer and can barely concentrate because I am in so much pain.
people tend to assume that everyone moves through the world the way they do. They never think of how I take up space differently than they do.
all I can think about is the pain in my thighs and the arms of the chair pinching my sides and how much longer I will have to pretend everything is fine.
Even the happiest moments of my life are overshadowed by my body and how it doesn’t fit anywhere.
I avoid walking with other people as often as possible because walking and talking at the same time is a challenge.
No matter how small a bathroom stall is, I avoid the handicapped stall because people like to give me dirty looks when I use that stall merely because I am fat and need more space.
If I am fat, I must also have the body of someone who is not fat. I must defy space and time and gravity.
more I tell people that they don’t get to have it both ways—complaining if any part of my body dared to touch theirs if I bought one seat, but placing their belongings in the empty space of the empty seat I bought for my comfort and sanity.
as if punishing you, reminding everyone else on the plane that you are too fat to use the standard seat belt. Or that is what it feels like because I am so self-conscious about everything related to my body.
This too is the truth of living in a fat body. It’s a lot of weight to bear.
She gives me permission to love food. She gives me permission to acknowledge my hungers and to try and satisfy them in healthy ways. She gives me permission to buy the “good” ingredients she is so fond of recommending so that I might make good food for myself and the people for whom I enjoy cooking.
melancholy of cooking for yourself when you are single and living alone. One of the many reasons it took me so long to learn how to cook and learn to enjoy cooking is that it often feels like such a waste to go to all that trouble for myself.
deprive myself, to give the appearance of conforming, of making some small effort to become thinner, better, less of a family problem. Because that’s what they tell me—my weight is a family problem. So, in addition to my body, I carry that burden too, knowing that my loved ones consider me their problem until I finally lose “the weight.”
am so much more than hungry when I am home. I am starving. I am an animal. I am desperate to be fed.
be seen while I am eating feels like being on trial.
wanted to do everything in my power to remove the possibility of being with men from my life.
For far too long, I did not know desire. I simply gave myself, gave my body, to whoever offered me even the faintest of interest. This was all I deserved, I told myself. My body was nothing. My body was a thing to be used. My body was repulsive and therefore deserved to be treated as such. I did not deserve to be desired. I did not deserve to be loved.
In relationships, I never allowed myself to make the first move because I knew I was repulsive.
My body was nothing, so I let anything happen to my body. I had no idea what I enjoyed sexually because I was never asked and I knew my wants did not matter. I was supposed to be grateful; I had no right to seek satisfaction.
