The first time it happened, it was my mother. What perfect betrayal, like burning down the house where I was born. She grew tired in secret of the long, curved line of her belly, pendant in sweatpants and spreading over her lap when she sat. She hated huffing and puffing up the stairs, and she worried she’d become diabetic. So she underwent a radical form of weight loss surgery that eliminated over half of her gut — and taught me a powerful lesson in how intolerable it was to be like me.

Four kids and a minivan — nobody expected her to bother about her looks anymore. She didn’t tell anyone she was going to do it; she only told me I’d have to look after my younger siblings on the eve of the surgery. She made up her mind and didn’t want their judgments or their approval. The week before was an orgy of overeating that I recall as a conveyor belt of food. Carbonara thick as oil paint on piles of handmade noodles. Pot roast in flour-thickened gravy, potatoes enough to starve the Irish again, followed by bacon sandwiches that blurted mayonnaise from every side when she bit into them.

Even then, she barely cleared the insurance company’s weight requirement. Her doctor told her to make that last week count. Her best friend joked that she must be going in to get her tits done. She laughed and went under the knife at 4’11” and 285 pounds, nearly as wide as she was tall.

My mother was the first woman I knew who moved out of her own body.
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But what she really wanted was to not be like me anymore.

I went to support groups with her, in the year after the surgery. I didn’t go for the endless stories of these recovering fatties who had traded the feeling of being squeezed by the outside world for being strangled to thinness from within. I didn’t go for the stories of divorce so utterly rote and predictable that I struggled not to laugh. Men often marry fat women for very specific reasons. Conditions change and those men split like bananas. I went along because everyone there had once looked like me — and some of them had very nice clothes. They’d trade with one another, a 16 for a 14, a 12 for an 8. They shrunk before my eyes like icicles in spring. The tables marked 26/24/22 filled up and there was no one else to take those elastic dresses and 3X yoga pants. I showed up with a roll of garbage bags.

Why Don’t We Hear Fat Women’s #MeToo Stories?

More than once I inherited someone’s favorite outfit in its entirety, replete with the story of how it made her feel. I would wear that outfit later and remember that she wanted to stop being this so badly that she let someone cut out a large section of her intestines. She had an anchor-shaped scar across her entire abdomen. She vomited every day and shit herself at least once a week, but at least, thank god, it was all worth it because she wasn’t fat anymore.

There were other people I knew who moved out of their bodies, and I could understand why: They knew they had to go. They were being evicted anyway; blown knees and exhausted pancreas pushing them toward desperate measures. Weight loss surgery seemed a fair price if the alternative was death.

But in nearly every case, the alternative was my life.

I used to joke with people that I was my mother’s before picture, in the ubiquitous and devastating tradition of photos taken to reveal dramatic weight loss, the punchline for every ad that sells weight loss to women. Beforewe had shared a silhouette, titanic ass and olympian hips, a pear-shaped and pendulous swing we rode through the world. After I had trouble believing we were the same species, let alone iterations of the same bloodline. Long legs and short arms; freckles and the same crooked pinky finger. But disparity of scale suggested two different climates; two long-separated branches on the tree of life.

Before, my mother had dealt with the way people refuse to take fat women seriously. She had endured the infantilization and desexualization, and she was ready to trade it in. Two days after the surgery, she ignored her doctor’s orders and tried to chug a coke. I watched her stand over the kitchen sink with brown foam pouring from her nose and mouth, knowing herself chastened not by a paternalistic and fatphobic doctor for once, but by the physical reality that her new stomach was the size of a Dixie cup. A month later, I watched her black out after eating a Starburst; the sugar dumped into her bloodstream so fast that it acted like heroin when it hit her vitals. She traded the agony of perception for daily physical torment. After years of trying and failing at diets that never worked for anyone, she chose the nuclear option. She weighed her options and chose this over living a life like mine.

For me, it’s only the surgery that achieves the sharp sensation of abandonment, rejection, and betrayal. I’ve seen friends through every diet, every justification of denial, misery, and elimination. A friend or a cousin will one day lose the ability to converse about anything but carbs or sugar or whole foods or animal products. I’ll stop listening and start nodding. I know they’re trying to move out, move away. They cannot bear to be what we are anymore.

The fat people who become obsessed with counting calories and steps, the ones who try to vacate their bodies a little at a time . . . I don’t worry about them. They’ll never make it. Sooner or later they all come back.

The ones who follow in my mother’s footsteps are the ones that really leave. They get something cut up and cut out, they install new hardware to stop them from eating the world. They pack it in and they don’t return. I stay me.

I’ll be polite to my fellow fatties when they fall prey to the pressure; I understand what they’re going through. Thin people talking diets fill me up with liquid murder. I cannot abide their careful warding, hanging up knots of garlic and crossing themselves three times when they see me coming. I will not listen to their terrified superstition or their smug pseudoscience when they tell me again and again what they are willing to go through rather than become like me. When their talk rolls around to calories and their moral obligation to hate themselves, I typically spread out as wide as I can. I can expand like a jellyfish; it is a particular advantage of the very fat. I conform to the shape of my container like a water balloon. Displaying maximum width, I’ll eat anything I can get my hands on while they talk. On one notable occasion I shut down a discussion on the evils of white rice by calmly eating a trick-or-treating sized bag of mini Snickers while nodding my fat head to show I understood.

In outraged weariness of being seen as a cautionary whale, I seek out ways to weaponize my own image. I haunt thin people at the gym as the Ghost of Fatness Yet to Come. It started off as a demoralizing phenomenon; I began by refusing to shrink away from the pained glances and open hostility I receive for having the audacity to live in a fat body without making a constant apology for myself. My gym in San Francisco is a caricature of bodily obsession. Its ad campaigns are notorious, and lithe trainers cruise the floor like sharks sniffing for blood. There are no other fat people there. An orca among eels, I cast my shadow over their swimming and striving, and they look upon me in naked terror. I am the reason they get up at 5 a.m. and wear a monitor that counts their steps. I am the worst thing that can happen.

‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me

One after another, the fat people in my life have left me. Not through diet or exercise, not through the much-vaunted “lifestyle change.” They get the surgery and they cross over to the other side. Many of them have been self-accepting, even fat-positive. They came through hell to love themselves and live in their bodies without apologizing. But they’ve gotten tired of haunting the gym. They get tired of people lecturing and begging. They get tired of men at the bar shouting “man the harpoons.” They get tired of their seatmates on airplanes asking to be moved. They get tired of hearing they were too fat to fuck, or that this dress does not come in that size. They’ve done the impossible math: one set of humiliations they’re willing to trade for another. They come to agree with our thin friends; this life is the absolute worst fucking thing that can happen to a person.

I made new friends with a fat girl. She is beautiful and smart and holds an enviable position in my community. I tried several times to engage her in the casual sorority of fat girls, to talk brands and clothes and share a little eye roll at the way things are. She rebuffed me in a kind but cold way, and I didn’t know why. I thought spitefully that she might be one of them, in long recovery from the knife and not yet passing for thin. Months later, she published her own story of dysphoria in a lyrical cry that broke my heart. I adjusted. I took another step in the direction the conclusion toward which most of my life has been leading me: No matter how much they hurt, the actions of others are entirely for and about themselves. They aim those harpoons at their own hearts.

My mother did not opt for invasive surgery to leave me behind. She did it because was tired of the inescapable fight that is life in a fat body. I am not the victim here. I am only a casualty.

Yet another friend went in for the surgery, early this year. I tried to look at her life without judgment, without centering my own emotions, and figure out why she would choose this. We’re old enough now that vanity itself does not seem like enough. Maybe she’s lonely and thinks this is the answer. Maybe she wants to travel without being a spectacle and an inconvenience. Maybe she just wants to live in another body before she dies. In the end it doesn’t matter. She’s doing the thing that everyone but me will understand. It’s what they would do in her place.

The first day I knew she was home and recovering, I briefly considered having a dozen donuts delivered to her door.

But I didn’t. Because there are worse things a person can be than fat.

It’s been nearly two months now since the “adult content” ban went into effect on Tumblr, but a handful of key things have not changed.

On December 17, 2018, Tumblr officially outlawed all content considered to be pornography in order to comply with the SESTA/FOSTA laws—laws that are allegedly supposed to combat human trafficking, but instead just make life exponentially more difficult and dangerous for sex workers.

According to a former employee, Tumblr’s new policy was influenced by the fact it had such a massive child pornography problem that Apple removed the Tumblr app from its stores, but the machinations were were already in motion months earlier due to the fact that Verizon—the parent company that owns Tumblr—couldn’t sell ads next to all that porn.

The first thing that any Tumblr user will tell you about the result of this ban is either that there are just as many porn bots on the social media platform as ever or that there are just as many Nazis. All the porn bot creators had to do was change the language their bots used and/or tag posts with “sfw” (safe for work) to avoid the wrath of the wildly ineffective, thrown-together auto-flagging program. Meanwhile, the average Tumblr user has had to put up with posts getting flagged when they have absolutely zero sexual content, but apparently have something in them that looks like a “female-presenting nipple” to a poorly-constructed algorithm.

Many users vowed to leave Tumblr when the ban was announced, and many did. Sex workers and body positivity blogs in particular have been affected. I myself have been on Tumblr since 2012 and credit the communities there for my education in everything from white privilege to non-binary genders to fat positivity. That last issue is of special interest to me as a woman who has gone from being thin or at least “not fat” in 2012 to being solidly fat today in 2019.

Like many people, I gained weight in my 20s due to a natural change in metabolism that happens to the vast majority of humans. Today, at 210 pounds and (almost) 5’5”, I’m a size 16, which is actually the average U.S. pant size for cis women. However, I am “obese” according to my BMI and my hanging belly and double chin would have me labeled as such by any of the mainstream news networks who love to panic about the so-called “obesity epidemic” in America.

I don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to be a fat woman in this country, and increasingly in many other countries around the world. Over the years I’ve experienced a stark difference in the way I’m treated by loved ones and strangers alike, not to mention by myself. Confronting the hateful voice in my head—placed there by a profoundly fat-phobic society—has been one of the greatest challenges of my 20s.

My biggest support in this battle against self-hatred has been other fat women. If it wasn’t for Tumblr, I don’t know where I would have found such a strong community around loving and accepting the body you have, at any size. Part of learning that acceptance has been viewing fat, naked bodies.

Even before the “adult content” ban, I didn’t see much nudity on my Tumblr dashboard, pornographic or not. But most of what I saw was people sharing their naked bodies in a celebratory manner. Whether they were dim, blurry selfies or professional photo shoots, Tumblr users exposed me to naked trans bodies, naked bodies of color, naked non-binary bodies, and naked fat bodies. Sometimes all at once. All were wonderful, and all worked to support those marginalized people who were left out of magazines, ads, and even mainstream pornography.

“Look, these bodies exist too, and they’re beautiful,” said every naked nipple, no matter the gender of the person they were attached to. For me, the fat bodies were a wonderful comfort, and I hoped to some day gain the courage to display my own fat naked body, unashamed, to help other women like myself learn to love and accept themselves.

Now I can’t. And since December 17, 2018, I don’t see naked fat bodies anymore. Ever. Tumblr was the only place I saw them before that date. Where else can I find them? I certainly tried Googling “fat naked bodies” for this article, and you can imagine what I found. Pornography featuring fat women is nearly always fetishized, which is not what I’m looking for. And I don’t want to have to wade through any kind of porn site in order to see a body like mine. I miss being able to see those bodies casually, unexpectedly, on Tumblr, as though it were as normal as a video of a cat batting things off of a counter.

And it’s not just full nudity. Due to the terrible quality of Tumblr’s nipple-detecting program, any photo containing something that looks round and fleshy tends to get flagged. I don’t even see fat bodies in bras and panties anymore. It doesn’t help that many of the body-positive blogs that posted these photos left Tumblr out of protest or because they knew their blogs wouldn’t be able to function anymore.

I reached out to three fellow fat women who had fat-positive Tumblr pages or used a Tumblr blog to promote their sex work to find out how they’re doing and/or where they are now.

Satine La Belle

Satine La Belle, a sex worker who uses multiple social media platforms to sell nude photos of herself for income, has been the most affected. She abandoned her Tumblr account once the “adult content” ban went into effect because she felt like it would be a waste of time to continue, especially with how overzealous the nudity-detecting program is.

“I felt like there was no point in having another platform where I would have to risk my hard work if there was anything sexual, whether that was a nipple or just sex positive sentiments,” she said.

Nearly all of Satine La Belle’s content on Tumblr was flagged before the ban even officially went into effect, including some of the content she used for her livelihood.

“I released a nude that is normally only for purchase on Tumblr before the change for my fans. It was flagged right away and I notified Tumblr about being able to have titties out until the 17th. It was then no longer flagged for a little bit.”

Predictably, the ban has had an impact on La Belle’s ability to make money as a sex worker, and she’s had difficulty making that up on other platforms.

“It has gone alright for me, but I have found it much more difficult to find clients on Twitter then I had on Tumblr. I think it is because Tumblr was a great safe space for nudity, nude art, porn, etc. Since it was more normalized there it was easy to find clients who knew what they wanted and were ready to pay.”

Satine La Belle is on Twitter, Instagram, and DeviantArt. You can also send her some money on her Ko-fi account.

Bec Mae Scully

Bec Mae Scully is the owner of the body-positive Tumblr blog Chubby Bunnies, which was hit so hard by the ban that the entire blog is now hidden behind a content warning. Attempting to go directly to the blog lands you on a page that says “This Tumblr may contain sensitive media,” then directs you to your dashboard where you can view it on the right-hand sidebar. If you don’t have a Tumblr account, you can’t view it at all.

Chubby Bunnies boasts a couple hundred thousand followers and has been a very active account for 10 years. Since the ban went into effect, Tumblring just hasn’t been the same for Scully.

“The ban has affected my interaction with followers a great deal,” she told me. “With close to a couple of hundred thousand followers who would usually be interactive daily with submissions, likes and reblogs have now disappeared.”

The lack of interaction has saddened Scully, but it also interferes with her ability to help the people that Chubby Bunnies is reaching out to.

“As silly as it might sound to some, Tumblr in a lot of ways saved my life,” said Scully. “At least 6 beautiful souls have said that because of the blog it helped them not end their life.”

Interaction with followers isn’t the only part of Scully’s blog that was disrupted by the ban.

“I didn’t make any money off the blog, but had recently been trying to put things in place so I could make a business out of it. When the ban came through it’s put it all on hold.”

Not only that, but the ban almost utterly wiped her blog out.

“At first 99.99% [of Chubby Bunnies’ content] had been removed. Then some of the content came back, and most of it is flagged, including my profile picture which was a caricature of me with mermaid hair covering my ‘female-presenting nipples’ that they seem to have such a problem with.”

The “adult content” ban is supposed to have exceptions for artistic expression and content used to make a political statement. Unfortunately, their flagging software has been wildly unsuccessful in make these distinctions. Users have to appeal every individual post flagged in order to get actual human eyes on the post. When your flagged posts number in the thousands, it creates a problem.

Chubby Bunnies is a Tumblr-exclusive blog, but Bec Mae Scully has many beautiful photos on her Instagram account if you’re lucky enough to be friends with her.

Amisha Treat

Even a Tumblr blog that focuses on fat positivity without showing a lot of skin, like Fat Girls Doing Things, has been affected by the “adult content” ban.

“The ban has mostly been just annoying for me, there isn’t a lot of ‘adult content’ on the blog so in that regard I haven’t had a ton to deal with,” says Amisha Treat, owner of FGDT. (Fat Girls Doing Things.)  “It has however reduced the amount of interaction and submissions happening, which is very disappointing, but I get why that is happening.”

Treat also talked about her constant efforts to block porn bots and blogs, which often target body positive blogs to steal images.

“It has done nothing to reduce the number of porn blogs that follow,” Treat told me. “In fact, it has made it harder to identify which ones are [porn bots] because their icon and posts are blocked so I can’t always confirm if I should block or not.”

Although the FGDT community is still largely intact, Treat is concerned that things will get worse. Unfortunately, there are no social media platforms out there that are quite like Tumblr.

“I have had to spend time trying to find another platform in case the ban continues as is, which is proving to be very difficult in terms of finding a site that allows easy interaction and submission availability.”

Fat Girls doing things also has a Facebook page, an Instagram, and a Twitter account.

In spite of widespread dissatisfaction with the “adult content” ban, Tumblr has given no indication that they plan to change the policy, and the flagging program has not improved. I myself have had two posts recently flagged — one classical nude painting and one that contained no nudity at all. I appealed both successfully.

Unfortunately, nothing is likely to change until the reason for the ban, the SESTA/FOSTA laws, are changed or repealed. Sex workers are leading the efforts to make this happen, but due to massive and widespread whorephobia in the U.S. and abroad, few are listening despite the fact that the laws have already been credited for the assault and murder of multiple full-service sex workers.

I’m lucky the ban’s effect on me has been comparatively mild. But I think about all the young women out there who are or are becoming fat who won’t have the same community support and access to unfiltered, unfetishized images of naked fat bodies. Eating disorders and the self-hatred and depression caused by our society’s intense fat-phobia have killed many and will kill many more. The hindering of a formerly indispensable tool in the fight against the stigma and hatred of fatness is nothing short of a tragedy.

Over the course of a few hours, Schnuck trains methodically, moving from her warm up to the series of three lifts that make-up powerlifting: deadlift, bench press, and squat. Some days, she meets her lifting goals and tracks her weight numbers in a spiral-bound notebook. Other days, she feels the heaviness of the round, candy-colored weights defeat her and the figures stare back at her—the representation of her athletic ability. They can be a source of painful disappointment.  

“I don’t think I have good genes for any kind of sport,” she says. “Nobody is ever taught how to be athletic.”

Since 2015, women’s participation in powerlifting has more than doubled. Often documented through instagram athletes and encouraged by the mantra “strong is the new skinny,” the face of heavy lifting has been changing.

Schunck, while part of that movement, is also very different than the lean, white, pony-tailed visage typically smiling and sweating on your screen. She is not the best, not the strongest, and not the loudest—in fact, she shirks most public affirmations of her athletic prowess or progress.

“Powerlifting has given me a greater focus, a goal,” she says. “I have to say, I really do enjoy the challenge.” Week after week, as the numbers rise and fall, as her determination grows and wanes, Schunck persists.

She makes that Saturday morning drive, rallies herself, and lifts.

It started a few weeks before my 21st birthday. I got an email from my pen pal, Kim, in Minnesota, asking if I could receive an international package in my country Kenya. I lived in a village where doors were unmarked and dirt roads led to bushes. I had no address. But the vanity that defined me at that age needed that package so bad. It was the first time someone showed interest in celebrating my birthday.

I was working in a cyber café where the only payment was being allowed to use computers and send emails. When Kim wanted to send the package, I asked the owner of the cyber café if I could use his post office box address. After much prodding, he gave a begrudging yes, with a threat that if I used his address to receive illegal things, he would throw me to his snakes. (Yes, he kept huge snakes as pets, but that is a story for another day.)

It took exactly 22 days for my package to arrive from America. From the day she posted it, I scribbled my anticipation in a rugged old diary that acted as my dream board.

Nothing under this earth will ever replace the feeling I got when I finally held the yellow package that was delivered to me at the cyber café. I raced to the toilet, the only place that had semblance of privacy, and delicately tried to open my gift. I could feel my hands shaking from excitement that rose from a place deep inside me.

I made a hole in the envelope and peered inside. There were several multicolored bracelets, a photograph, and tiny samples of perfume. I could also see a sleek silver tube. I tore the envelope further and recognized the tube almost immediately. It was lipstick. My very first! I nudged it open, and it revealed a crimson red color that looked even richer when I moved from the toilet’s fluorescent light and held it against the scorching sun.

I made a swatch on my wrist. It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance. I hastily rubbed it off; but I knew I was in love.

In my village, and according to my family, owning lipstick was unacceptable. The thought of wearing it was unimaginable. Women with scarlet pouts were something I had only seen in magazines. I marveled at the courage of those women, inwardly wondering if they had parents.

It glided smoothly to form a screaming red line. The color of my blood. It stood out like an act of defiance.
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My childhood is made up of memories of my mother whispering to me about “red lipped prostitutes.” Of village girls who left for the city and got introduced to sex, drugs, and lipstick.

“She started coloring her lips and everyone knew she will get AIDS,” I remember my mother saying under muted light from the paraffin lamp that lit up our kitchen. She was retelling a story she had heard at the market, of a girl who was found dead a few months after she left the village to look for a job in Nairobi. They blamed her death on prostitution and lipstick.

As my mother spoke, tears gathered around her eyelashes. I wondered if she was crying from the pain of the story, or if her eyes were getting irritated by the smoke from the wet firewood she was using to cook. Lipstick was a sin. No decent woman wore it, at least in the eyes of my mother and people around her.

The night after receiving my package, I hid the lipstick beneath a heap of clothes in my metallic suitcase. I could not sleep. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to apply it. When everyone was asleep, I groped through the darkness, opened my suitcase and rummaged through it with my fingers. There it was! My lipstick.

I opened it again and lifted it to my nose — it smelled like delicious bubble gum. I applied it in the dark, smacked my lips together and extended my lips to see if it could shine through the pitch darkness around me. It did not. I rubbed it off till my lips were sore. Then I went to bed.

Applying lipstick in the dark became my ritual. Whenever fear that my mother would notice remnants of the representation of immorality lingering in the cracks of my lips crept inside me, I would wash my mouth with soap.

Oh, I longed for the day I would wear my lipstick in the light of day.

I decided to dare, almost six months after she sent it to me. I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe. I was young, I wanted to be different, and lipstick provided that. So I created an awkward pout with my mouth and clumsily drew an unsteady red line on the outlines of my lips. While staring into the cracked mirror that I held close to my face, I filled my lips.

I tried it because I was tired of hiding. I was just fed up with not being able to express myself because of what my culture made me believe.
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My heart was beating fast as I slowly pressed my lips together before applying another layer. The redness of my lips was a representation of rebellion and transformation for me. I stared at myself in the mirror, and fell in love with the contrast the red lips formed against my dark skin. The dark spots on my face and my bushy eyebrows seemed less pronounced from the dominance of the lipstick.

Then, I grabbed the hem of the leso (wrapper worn by women over their clothes to show decency) and slowly wiped it off. I had tasted liberation. I had worn lipstick during the day. It was brief, but it showed a defiance of rules that defined women. I was a part of a mini revolution.

My urge to do more was emboldened. Wearing lipstick became my distant and secret obsession.

The tiny silver bottle contained my freedom. Not being able to wear lipstick reminded me of my oppression. I wanted to do things that were forbidden, things women had been enculturated to believe they cannot and should not do. We were taught that women cannot serve and eat before men had their full share. I remember waiting for my father to finish eating, and it felt like forever. I would get so hungry waiting for men to eat. We were told we cannot laugh out loud, so all my life, I grew up stifling laughter because women were supposed to lower their voices. Looking at a man in the eye was considered rude; so I spent time staring on the ground while talking.

Any time I caressed the tube between my fingers, I was confronted with the reality of how much our culture had made women feel like they have no say in what they do with their bodies.

We were enchained. The only way I could break from those shackles was to wear my lipstick out.

One Saturday morning, almost six months after I received the lipstick, I did it. I wore faded blue jeans that I had gotten for 100 shillings (1 dollar) at a flea market, a white halter blouse, and lipstick. I was ready for the world.

My mama was working in the farm when I stepped out into the brightness of day, wearing red lipstick.

The world momentarily held its breath. As she saw me, she put down the seeds she was sowing, and walked towards me. I stood, waiting.

“What are you doing to me? What is that on your lips?” she asked. Tears choked her, and the more she talked, the more it became apparent that she was crying. Yes, the first time my mother saw me wearing lipstick, she cried.

“What will I tell people? Have you decided to be a prostitute?” she asked; her voice low and dejected. I stood motionless. She begged me to wipe it off.

I weakly told her that I will remove it when I come back. She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.

I felt so free. Lipstick to me was not a mere influence of the “Western world” or corrupt media. It was just me, being a young woman who wanted to try out something new without feeling like I owed the whole community an explanation.

She watched me walk away with my lipstick still intact. I did not have courage to look back.
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I was tired of being told what to wear, what parts of chicken women should eat, how loud they should laugh and what should go on their lips.

I wanted to paint my lips, because they were mine.

I wore lipstick that day, and the days after. Even when my mother said she will miss me when I die, because to her, lipstick and death were related, I still wore it.

Amidst stares and whispers when I walked past people in the village, I maintained my red lips. In no time, the stares reduced. People started accepting my red lips. My streak of red on my lips became normal.

I had gotten my freedom, and they had accepted it. My mother no longer clicked when I tried getting lipstick stains off my teeth.

I started asking Kim to send me more lipstick. When she sent me coral lipstick, my mother lingered behind me as I tried it on.

“I used to think all lipsticks are red. What is that color?” she asked.

I said: “They are in all colors you can imagine.”

She shook her head and smiled. I had won the battle.

I can’t remember what my friend Sophie and I were talking about that night in the spring of 2011. I know our families were having dinner together; I know I had just lost 30 pounds in three months, and would lose at least 10 more. What matters, though, is that for whatever reason, I said, “I’m not fat anymore,” laughing, expecting Sophie to grin and agree.

She didn’t. Instead, she gave me a response that I have not forgotten in seven years. Her face contorted into confusion, pure in its immediacy, framed by the platinum hair I so envied. Sophie looked me in the eye, without a trace of hesitation, and said the most shocking thing I’d ever heard: “You may be skinny now, but you were always slim.”

I don’t know how I responded. It’s possible I didn’t say anything. I may have laughed and brought up something, anything, else. But Sophie’s words have replayed in my mind too many times to count in the seven years since she said them—when I’ve tried to fall asleep, when I’ve hung out with friends, when I watched the trailer for the upcoming Netflix series Insatiable.

You were always slim, she said, the first person who ever told me that, when I was 14 years old.

When I Get Back To My Body
theestablishment.co

When I think about the shows and movies I watched as a kid, only one features characters comfortable in their fatness, lovable at any weight: Dumbo, whose lovable, fat characters are elephants. The first human—or, at least, humanoid—fat characters I remember were villains, whose fatness seemed to correspond with greater deficits in character. The Powerpuff Girls’ Big Billy is as rotund as he is stupid: even when he wants to help Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, his weight and idiocy prevent him from doing so—until he can save the day by eating. Fuzzy Lumpkins, another recurring antagonist in The Powerpuff Girls, first enters the series by attacking Townsville with a weapon that turns everything into meat, and plans to eat the city. The Powerpuff Girls can only defeat him when he turns sweet Bubbles’ hair into a chicken drumstick, an affront on her appearance which enrages her so much, she gets a full action sequence beating him to a pulp.

And then, of course, there’s Ursula. Her hugeness in The Little Mermaid makes her a looming, frightening figure, so sharply contrasted with beautiful Ariel, whose waist is smaller than Ursula’s arm. In “Poor Unfortunate Souls,” Ursula convinces Ariel she uses her magic for good by talking about the time she made a fat mermaid skinny, which helped her get a boyfriend. It’s a small moment, but one which sets the tone for women’s weights in the movie. When Ursula turns herself into a human to win Prince Eric, armed with the voice he fell in love with in the first place, she can give herself any body imaginable. She makes herself tall, white and skinny.

These characters didn’t tell me all fat people were evil: I knew from my own experience that wasn’t true. I spent most of my childhood snugly chubby, and I adored my parents, who were both fat. However, these characters did tell me fatness was gross, fatness was wrong, and fat people should be considered unlovable. My parents unintentionally spread that idea, too. They hated their own, fat bodies, and fed me a steady stream of well-meaning encouragement to lose weight as a child. Part of that encouragement came from my doctor’s advice, but part of it came from their feelings, externalized: they didn’t want me to look like them.

When I think about the shows and movies I watched as a kid, only one features characters comfortable in their fatness, lovable at any weight: Dumbo.
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Although I loved my parents, their self-loathing told me I should not love their appearances. I took that self-loathing as my own. When I was 14—and 13, and 12, and 11—I felt like a beached whale. In reality, Sophie was right: I’d never been fat. Before I began losing weight that year, I weighed 132 pounds and stood at 5’1. I had a BMI of 24.9—just below the overweight range, but still, below it. I’d developed the kind of healthy lifestyle my doctor had always encouraged. I’d found exercise habits I enjoyed, such as swimming and biking; I began commuting by foot more; I ate enough food to make me happy.

It’s ironic, in retrospect, that those months of early pubescence were the physically healthiest time of my life. Back then, whenever I looked at myself in the mirror, all I could see was ballooned fat, suffocating me. That body dysmorphia was severe enough in suburban Ohio, where I grew up. It became worse in the summer of 2010, when I was still 13, and my family moved to Paris, France.

I had been chubby in Ohio, but so had plenty of other kids: my fat didn’t stand out much. Paris was different. A 2009 study at France’s National Institute of Demographic Studies found French women were the thinnest in Europe, with the highest proportion of clinically underweight women on the continent. Even at a private, international school in Paris, my classmates reflected this study’s findings. I was objectively one of the heaviest girls in my grade.

To their credit, none of my classmates called me “fat” to my face, but I felt isolated by my weight all the same. I couldn’t wear the same trendy fashions that everyone else did. I felt self-conscious eating anything in public because of France’s intense, ingrained stigma against eating too much. The country’s Catholic roots have popularized the notion of gluttony as a sin: portions are small, snacking is rare, and fatness is seen as a character flaw that any Jacques or Julienne has the right to talk about.

The most striking moment, though, happened in March, just as the winds had begun to warm. One day in the courtyard during our lunch break, I saw a crowd of boys throwing paper balls at a girl in the grade below me. She was one of the other “fat” girls. She wore a pale, yellow shirt that clashed with her reddening eyes, and she was cowering against a wall, yelling at the boys. I couldn’t understand everything they shouted back, but I could make out the words grosse and laide—fat and ugly.

My legs froze, and I stood watching that scene until the bell rang and a friend dragged me to class. No one else had seemed shocked by the bullying; no one had tried to intervene on the girl’s behalf. Those ranks of cowards included me: I was too scared. I knew, if I tried to help her, the boys would attack me, too.

I decided to start losing weight two weeks later.

‘It’s Because You’re Fat’ — And Other Lies My Doctors Told Me
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Yet the bullying I witnessed wasn’t enough, on its own, to make me want to lose weight. The bigger problem was my loneliness. In Ohio, I had a close-knit friend group with whom I spent countless hours, friends I trusted with my life. In Paris, my 10-person class hung out together after school sometimes. But I couldn’t make forever friendships, one on one, the way my other classmates did. They would hang out with each other in pairs instead of groups, they would spend hours texting each other and exploring the city. I got along with all my classmates, I consider them friends to this day, but they made close, personal friendships without me. In the entire year I lived in Paris, only once did I hang out one-on-one with a friend.

I decided my fat was the problem. I thought of Big Billy and Fuzzy Lumpkins and Ursula, whose weights were indistinguishable from their villainy; I thought of Natalie in Love Actually, whose so-called “tree trunk” thighs made her unattractive to nearly every character in the movie; I thought of Fat Monica on Friends, who exemplified the potential of a fat person to find love only once they lost weight.

Everyone else at school had found their BFFs; everyone else was thin. To me, the pattern was clear. I decided to lose weight, my parents celebrated my decision, and eventually, my dieting spiraled out of control. I lost 40 pounds in four months. At my lowest point, I weighed 92 pounds.

After a year in Paris, my family moved back to suburban Ohio. I started to see a therapist, who helped, and slowly I gained back weight. But I was never quite able to regain the healthy lifestyle I’d had when I was a preteen. It took me until college to realize where I’d gone wrong. Not only had I never been fat, but—more importantly—people’s opinions of me, nine times out of ten, didn’t depend on my weight. When I started high school in Ohio, no one became my friend because I had a toned stomach or because they could see my ribs. My new classmates became my friends because I made them laugh, treated them kindly, and showed I cared about them. And they remained my friends when I gained weight, knowing my body had no bearing on my personhood.

Yet movies, TV shows and books keep perpetuating the idea that fat people can’t be loved. The latest example, coming to Netflix on August 10, is Insatiable. The show’s premise is simple: “Fatty” Patty (Debby Ryan, in an awful fat suit) is bullied for her weight in high school, until a punch to the face forces her to spend the summer with her jaw wired shut. When she comes back to school after those three months, she has miraculously lost 70 pounds, looks like a Disney starlet, and her classmates all but salivate over her. Newly confident, she sets out to take revenge on everyone who bullied her while she was fat.

Everyone else at school had found their BFFs; everyone else was thin. To me, the pattern was clear.
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In plenty of ways, Patty is a far cry from the Big Billys and Ursulas of the world. She’s the hero; she’s clever and determined; she’s meant to receive the viewer’s sympathies, not their disdain or disgust. But Insatiable would not exist without the assumption that fat people can’t be loved—fat women, in particular. To care about Patty’s revenge crusade, the viewer has to believe in the pain she is avenging: that almost everyone she knew really did hate and bully her because of her weight.

That’s not to say no fat person has ever experienced such cruelty. Insatiable’s creator, Lauren Gussis, has said her own experiences inspired the show. The bullying she suffered as a 13-year-old because of her weight made her develop an eating disorder and want to seek revenge. Indeed, Gussis called Insatiable “a cautionary tale about how damaging it can be to believe the outsides are more important,” and said she’s trying to share her “pain and vulnerability through humor.”

Maybe Insatiable does succeed in that. But when over 150,000 people call for a show’s cancellation before it airs, and when thousands post selfies with the #NotYourBefore hashtag, a commentary on how fatness is often depicted as a sad or undesirable “before” to skinniness, there’s usually a reason. Gussis’ statement, in which she admits developing an eating disorder in her drive to “look pretty on the outside,” is revealing. Skinniness does not make a person more beautiful. Fat does not make its bearers ugly. I understand Gussis’ anguish: I grew up convinced that fat was the antithesis of beauty, too. But I have spent years unlearning that conception of bodies, letting myself find beauty in our skins’ folds and creases instead. Gussis seems to have done the opposite: she has internalized the idea that fat people can’t be pretty, can’t be successful, can’t be loved. For all her good intentions, she remains trapped in a twisted, dangerous cycle of fatphobia.

That cycle has infected almost every part of our lives. Our culture is oversaturated with fat jokes and narratives about overweight people’s—particularly overweight women’s—inability to be loved. We perpetuate this standard through negative representations in media, showing viewers over and over again that skinny bodies are aspirational and overweight bodies are not. A 2012 study from Durham University in the U.K. found that such exposure, called a “visual diet,” directly influences our perceptions of acceptable weights: seeing a series of large or small bodies, presented as aspirational or not, changed participants’ preferences for different body types. These perceptions, in turn, affect how we treat people with “unacceptable” weights, and the consequences can be devastating. Overweight women are significantly less likely to be believed if they report rapes or sexual assaults, obese patients often receive worse medical care than their thinner counterparts, and overweight people even face hiring discrimination, which is not illegal in the U.S. And that’s not even mentioning the social ramifications in day-to-day life activities such as dating.

Insatiable is a cog in that cycle, contributing to the stigmas and mistreatment overweight people face everyday. Even worse, it masquerades as a progressive, uplifting show, targeting young women most susceptible to its misguided messaging. When I was 14, I would have loved Insatiable. The premise would have given me hope: just like Fatty Patty, I could lose weight and get everyone to love me, too.

Skinniness does not make a person more beautiful. Fat does not make its bearers ugly.
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I am healthier mentally in every way now than I was when I lived in Paris. Still, I have a lot of work to do. I hate taking or looking at photos of myself because of the fat on my arms, chin and thighs. I’m too self-conscious to join #NotYourBefore, because to do so I’d have to share photos emphasizing my fat, and that idea nauseates me. Almost every day, I think with regret of the time Sophie told me I was slim, had always been slim, and how I couldn’t believe her.

I am self-aware enough now to understand how much media like Insatiable, which seem so innocuous, damaged me. Media with messages like Insatiable’s—that overweight people are ugly by default, that overweight people can’t be loved—nearly destroyed my life. Insatiable is an irresponsible, ill-conceived television program that can’t possibly be funny enough to make up for the harm it will cause. If Netflix does air it, against tens of thousands’ of people’s objections, they hold the blame for the children they will hurt.

Content warning: descriptions of sexual assault

One hundred and twenty two men.

That’s how many prominent politicians, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and public figures have been publicly accused of sexual harassment and sexual assault since Harvey Weinstein left the Weinstein Company. In the last week alone, Junot Diaz joined that growing list, as did New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, and the Nobel Prize scandal highlighted the experiences of women working with one of the world’s most prestigious literary organizations. So I suppose that brings our list to 123.

Clearly, we are far from ending this epidemic. But finally, for once, institutions are beginning to name the behavior of the men who make unwanted remarks and unwelcome ultimatums, who expose themselves, who demand our bodies. For once, we’re learning to believe women.

The women coming forward are undeniably courageous: young and old, rich and poor, famous and unknown. And overwhelmingly, they’re thin.

But 67% of American women are plus size. So where are the fat women?

I was 15 years old, and a size 18, the first time a man told me he’d fantasized about raping me.

He told me that he longed to pin my hands behind my head, yearned to hear me tell him no. You’ll fight me off, but you’ll love every minute of it.

The women coming forward are undeniably courageous: young and old, rich and poor, famous and unknown. And overwhelmingly, they’re thin.
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I was shaken, confused, disoriented. As he spoke, every breath drained from my waiting lungs, siphoned by his certainty that I’d be grateful for his violence. You’ll love every minute of it. The life in my veins seeped from my body into the ground I wished would swallow me whole.

Over time, men’s fantasies became part of the fabric of my experience. In the years that followed, more and more men would disclose their desire to assault me. When I told one to stop, in my mid-twenties, he was taken aback. I thought you were liberated. You should be grateful.

The menacing ghost of gratitude followed me everywhere. I was queer, which meant I was expected to be sexually flexible, unfettered by boundaries and unlikely to say no, available to be posed in any scene or position needed for men’s gratification. And I was fat, which meant I should be grateful for what I got. Even if it was violent. Even if I didn’t consent.

When I finally disclosed this pattern to thinner friends, I anticipated some knowing commiseration, some tools for survival. After all, we’d spent plenty of time developing shared strategies for creepy coworkers and lecherous neighbors. But to many of them, this ravenous violence was a foreign interaction, a reason to call police, run away, tell every woman I knew, do something drastic. Desperate measures.

For my thin friends, rape fantasies were an exception, the provenance of a particularly depraved kind of man. For me, they were the rule: so commonplace as to be routine. Around fat women, seemingly any man could be that particularly depraved kind.

More troubling were the reactions from thin acquaintances. A family friend and self-proclaimed feminist, upon hearing about this onslaught of fantasies, congratulated me. Isn’t it great to be wanted? And, more troublingly, there’s a lid for every pot. As if I had been disheartened about the selection of men who would take me. As if their violence were a sign of hope. As if it were just a misguided expression of attraction.

One friend asked why I hadn’t told anyone sooner. I was surprised by her question when the answer felt so plain. Like many women before me, when I share stories of harassment, catcalling, unwelcome advances, and violence, I am met with pushback. Unlike other women, that resistance comes as a question:

Who would want to rape you?

While thin women were free to talk about sexual assault as being somehow divorced from desire — rape is about power, not sex — I didn’t have that luxury. As a fat woman, my body was seen as inherently undesirable. Any sexual attention fat women receive is treated as a windfall worthy of congratulations, an erroneous impossibility, or an out-and-out lie. Fat women are expected to be grateful for any expressions that could be mistaken for want, including assault and harassment. We are exposed to an unvarnished kind of desire, its most violent self, because we are expected to hold and nurture whatever scraps of it we’re offered.

Sometimes, our harassment takes a more menacing turn, relying on reinforcing our rejection, rather than our assumed gratitude. A fat acquaintance recently told me that, at her workplace, men openly discussed who they would and wouldn’t sleep with. She often heard her own body used as a punchline — colossally undesirable, comically unwanted. “I just wanted to work,” she said. Even when we’re unwanted, harassment still finds us.

When fat women do muster the courage to come forward about our experiences with sexual assault, we’re significantly less likely to be believed about our experiences than our thinner counterparts. While thin women face dismal rates of prosecution and conviction for their sexual assaults, fat women are often dismissed out of hand — making it open season on our bodies. The cultural belief that fat women are unlovable, that fat bodies are undesirable, offers a warm Petri dish, a hospitable home for men’s bacterial desires to grow.

It took me years to disclose my own experiences. Because, like any woman, I knew that stepping forward would mean standard denials, scrutiny, dismissals. But for all our talk about sexual assault being an act of power, not desire, as a fat woman, I knew that those statements always came with caveats, asterisks, footnotes. I knew that my body was reliably withheld, an obvious exception to the rule.

After all, who would want to rape us? We should be grateful.

Our national conversation about sexual assault and harassment has become an important flashpoint. Notably, it has been largely led by Hollywood actresses — the Jessica Albas, Salma Hayeks, and Rose McGowans known for their legendary beauty.

But in order to flourish, that conversation will have to hold space for women whose leadership we struggle to respect, whose bodies we struggle to embrace. Even those who, in our heart of hearts, we still expect to be grateful. Because if our feminism fails to acknowledge the humanity of 67% of us, who will that victory serve?

The doctor had my empty skin in fistfuls, pulling my flesh together at the center of my body. The corset of his hands exaggerated my natural curves unnaturally, making me look wasp-waisted and wrong.

“Just look how pleasing she would be,” he remarked, surprising me with the third person. He was not addressing me, but looking past me in the mirror to meet the eyes of my then-boyfriend.

Pleasing. I remember that word specifically, can still hear it: a word shared between men. Although it was my body he was manhandling, his work was clearly not about me, personally. It was about what I broadcast — the experience of my body from an external perspective. It was about the object I could become.

After a lifetime of obesity — I was fat since I was 4 years old — I lost a significant amount of weight in my early twenties, which took two years and a total reinvention of my relationships with food and exercise. I worked hard to lose the weight, of course, and my body was inarguably different. But I still wasn’t satisfied, still didn’t look as I’d imagined.

At 14, I’d printed photos of bikini-clad women and taped them into a notebook. It was the highly problematic “thinspiration,” a small act of masochism to bolster my daily journaling of bites eaten and steps stepped. The models strode down empty beaches with carefree smiles and almost every inch of skin exposed, their taut tummies and distinct thighs heuristics for perfection — never mind how carefully crafted those images might be, how fake their photographed laughter. Living life as a fat girl in classrooms, doctors’ offices, and school dances had only reinforced my suspicion: If I looked like that, everything would be different. Easier. Better.

At 24, my “new” body could fit into clothes whose tags bore single-digit sizes, but I looked nothing like those women when I wasn’t wearing them. What fat I had left pooled into sags of skin across my belly and inner thighs, which still rubbed together — sometimes painfully. Outwardly, I had achieved thin-girl status, as evidenced by all the strange and problematic things I suddenly began experiencing: Men who’d wanted nothing to do with me before began asking for my phone number; athleisure-clad women beside me in cafe lines commiserated idly about tempting bakery cases, their wares assumed verboten. But in my brain, I was still a fat girl, and my unclothed body corroborated.

Naked at the mirror, I’d pick up the deflated bag of my belly and let it fall, or hoist the flab of my thighs like loose leggings to see the strong muscle I’d developed underneath. I had come so far and put in so much work to meet our society’s ideal, and I couldn’t shake the feeling I was being denied something — something I’d earned.

So I called the surgeon’s office and made the appointment.

My phone rang a week before my surgery date, which was set for early December. It was my anesthesiologist. He wanted to triple-check my health history for the many risk factors of general paralysis; I’d be under for at least four, and up to seven, hours.

I’d planned to take the four-week winter break of my senior year in college to get through the worst of the recuperation. Along with all the risks of the surgery itself, a full tummy tuck involves weeks of brutal recovery; patients can’t even sit upright, let alone walk properly, for several days post-op. Bulbous drains are inserted bilaterally into the wound to catch the lymph and blood the body weeps for even longer, requiring regular, stomach-turning maintenance. The incision site can remain swollen and tender for months after the procedure, all to say nothing of the basic, gut-level grisliness of the thing: a hip-to-hip gouge, a triangle of flesh lifted from the abdomen like making the mouth of a Pac-Man.

On Weight Loss Surgery And The Unbearable Thinness Of Being
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I gazed at the box of post-surgical vitamins in the early kitchen sunlight, peeked inside at the three large bottles filled with horse-sized pills I dreaded trying to swallow. The blend had cost me $90 and was heavy on the arnica. I was about to give my body a serious beating.

I can’t tell which of the many pieces in this braid of hesitation finally made me call it off, but I do know the decision cost me my non-refundable $1,000 deposit. (The total estimate escapes me, but it was in the five figures.)

I wish I could say my entire weight loss effort was healthy and body-positive, but it wasn’t. Indeed, much of it was rooted in a kind of obsessive-compulsive self-hatred that made existing through constant, low-grade hunger and climbing untold StairMaster storeys not just possible, but inevitable.

But whereas parts of my weight loss effort were distinctly unhealthy and dangerous—psychologically and physically—other parts, like establishing a balanced fitness routine, were good for both my brain and body. By contrast, this surgery could only diminish my bodily health — if not by some complication related to the procedure itself, at the very least by forcing me to give up exercise, which I’d ultimately grown to love and rely on for self-care, for the duration of the recovery.

This surgery could only diminish my bodily health.
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Paradoxically, this surgery meant to make a body look “fitter” requires that body to give up fitness pursuits to properly mend. Many patients find that by the time they’re healed, they’ve gained much of their lost weight back. It’s not an uncommon irony in plastic surgery; breast augmentations, for instance, carry the risk of loss of nipple sensitivity. The sexually-objectified body part becomes a more perfect sexual object, but loses its sexual potency for the woman herself.

In any case, the surgery was an undeniably wild expense and put my body at significant risk that was in no way medically necessary. I could tell myself I was doing it “for me” all I wanted, but was I really willing to risk my life for something purely cosmetic?

Half a decade later, I’m still living in my imperfect, stretched-out body. Loose skin and stretch-mark trenches confess a complicated history, a life lived across the spectrum of size.

I won’t lie and say I don’t still think about it on occasion, that I never poke and prod my misplaced parts in frustration. Although my gym time is now (mostly) for my sanity as opposed to my vanity, sometimes, I still can’t get past it. I did so much work. I do so much work.

But most days, living in my imperfect body helps me realize how misguided that ideal was in the first place, how arbitrary those visually-based goals can be. I’m in the best shape of my life, eating food that makes me feel good, and always finding new ways to move; I’m strong enough to enjoy experiences — running 30-minute 5Ks, squatting under heavy barbells, hiking steep river valleys — that were out of reach when I was less fitness-focused.

I can’t deny that excess skin has made dating somewhat challenging — sometimes more so than it was to date fat, when my partners knew what they were signing up for from the start. But in some ways, it’s actually a helpful elimination tool (or, as I like to think of it, an asshole barometer). Given that I look significantly different naked than one might expect when meeting me clothed, I’ve taken to having a frank and open conversation ahead of business time — and if that honesty and imperfection gives a would-be partner pause, I’ve gained an invaluable data point as to whether I really want to sleep with them in the first place.

My Friends Would Rather Have Their Guts Cut Open Than Be Like Me
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The sex itself is also better, by the way. I find I’m less and less focused on what’s jiggling where, or on how I can better perform for my partner, the movie-reel play-by-play of what does this look like; how I might be, in my would-be surgeon’s words, more “pleasing.” Instead, I focus and insist on my own pleasure as well as theirs; I’ve stopped faking orgasms. Part of it is plain old growing up, but I also thank my decision to allow my body to be what I’ve made it — as opposed to slicing it into something the better to be served up to others.

But most importantly, foregoing plastic surgery has unlocked a new understanding of my relationship to my physicality. Accepting that my body will always be this way — “imperfect” — shifts the impetus of maintaining it from self-punishment to self-care. The effort of eating well and moving lots, I’ve learned, doesn’t have to be about excoriating excess flesh or trying to be smaller.

Instead, it can be a labor of love, a way to respect and retain this resilient machine that moves me through the world — that is my world, sagging and stretched and strong and only mine.

Content warning: disordered eating

The first time I left my body, I was 15. It was revelatory. For no particular reason, I looked in the mirror and suddenly was meeting someone for the first time. It inspired me, with my adolescent faux-profundity, to write a poem about the illusory nature of the self.

Then things got…creepy.

It went from spiritual revelation to identity fragmentation. I became more and more conscious of the split between the image and the self it represented. I’d decide to move my hand and marvel that it moved in response to a mere thought. I wondered why my thoughts could control Suzy’s body and nobody else’s. I wondered how I even had access to Suzy’s thoughts. As I floated further and further away from Suzy, I felt invasive for even knowing she existed. I felt like a fraud for masquerading as her.

Then I felt misunderstood for being seen as her. I hated her.

I feel the same sickening severance when I look at a picture and think, “Who’s that ugly girl in the front?” only to realize it’s me. The same sensation occurs when I hear my own recorded voice, when I wonder why I see the world through my own eyes and nobody else’s. You may say—and I understand it feels obvious—because they’re your eyes. But they’re mine only because I see through them, because an optic nerve connects them to my brain — and what makes that brain mine? This feels like a similarly disturbing problem.

My brain is usually too tired to think about itself, but when it does, I feel like a snake eating its tail, so wound up it can’t escape its own belly, so thick from self-consumption that it chokes.

My childhood fantasies of the future always contained the hidden assumption that one day? I would leave my body. Sometimes my future self was a Maybelline model with luscious lips flanked by equally model-esque man-candy. Later, I envisioned myself as one of the giants of poststructuralist philosophy, sitting around a table with Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Rolande Barthes—anachronistically—all at once.

I did not become a supermodel, and I did not become a French man.

I developed a devalued and objectified body unfit for a philosopher. Seeking an exit route, I grew so airy and detached, I felt my mind might expand like a balloon and float into space. Maybe it already had. I could be going about my daily routine without consciousness—like a very advanced robot. For all I knew, I was already floating in space, connected via some wireless network to my body, perceiving its immediate surroundings only by collecting data from its sensory organs.

For a while I forgot I needed to eat, or perhaps convinced myself I didn’t need to. My mind had no idea what my body wanted and that was fine with me. I didn’t want to associate myself with something as base and material as food. My body felt too heavy to express my inner ethereality. This asceticism bears similarities to anorexia mirabilis, a condition different from, but debatably a precursor to, anorexia nervosa, which afflicted several medieval holy women.

Saint Margaret of Cortona, who died of starvation in 1297, wrote:

“I have no intention of making peace between my body and my soul … allow me to tame my body by not altering my diet; I will not stop for the rest of my life, until there is no more life left.”

Saint Catherine of Siena claimed that she did not need food because she ate at the Banquet of God; she was above embodied existence. She renounced all carnal pleasures and had visions of marrying Jesus with a ring made of his foreskin, which some might say resulted from sexual repression, just as some might say her mystical visions were starvation-induced hallucinations.

But what I find more interesting is the possibility that it worked the other way around: She didn’t want food or sex because whatever satisfaction she could get from them paled in comparison to the fulfillment she got from her inner spiritual life.

My body felt too heavy to express my inner ethereality.
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The main difference I see is that the out-of-body experiences of St. Catherine consisted of self-discovery whereas I discovered a non-self. Rather than saying “this is what I am — an ethereal soul!” I felt as though my mind had no identity inherently coupled with my body.

It could attach itself to anyone or anything, a parasite surviving off its host. I couldn’t help but think of Voldemort on the back of Professor Quirrell’s head, feeding off his body until he gained the power to grow a body of his own. Perhaps my image of myself as a male poststructuralist philosopher came from this belief that my mind would eventually sprout a body to better fit its self-conception. But could a mind sans a physical body ever express itself? Maybe not.

Still, I can’t help but wonder whether, if I lived in a body less fraught, less subjugated by my mind — in other words, less female — the task would feel less impossible.

One account of disembodiment that sounds more akin to my experience came from Marya Hornbacher’s Wasted: A Memory of Anorexia and Bulimia:

“I suddenly felt a split in my brain: I didn’t recognize her. I divided into two: the self in my head and the girl in the mirror. It was a strange, not unpleasant feeling of disorientation, disassociation. I began to return to the mirror often, to see if I could get that feeling back. If I sat very still and thought: Not me-not me-not me over and over, I could retrieve the feeling of being two girls, staring at each other through the glass of the mirror. I didn’t know then that I would eventually have that feeling all the time. Ego and image. Body and brain.”

Like Hornbacher’s, my mind-body splitting was the precursor to an eating disorder, an auxiliary self that took up residence in my mind when I was 15, the age I first left my body.

Carolyn Costin, a psychotherapist specializing in eating disorders, articulates this phenomenon in The Eating Disorder Sourcebook: “Eating disorder symptoms are the behavioral component of a separate, split-off self, or what I have come to call the ‘eating disorder self.’ This self has a special set of needs, behaviors, feelings, and perceptions, all of which are dissociated from the individual’s core or what I call ‘healthy self.’”

I (the observer, the mind, the eating disorder self) stifled and silenced the other voice, “my” own, until I (the observed, the body, the healthy self) became a mere body used to fulfill my sadistic desires, or perhaps masochistic ones; it is hard for someone split in two to tell the difference. But I don’t think this sadomasochist was the only voice in me, or else its pleasures would have been fulfilled and it/I would have been happy. I imagine another voice calling out to me as I walked through the halls of my high school, a voice within my gut that grew softer as I floated away and away from “my” body.

Unlike my initial airy-fairy mirror split, this episode didn’t feel like a mystical revelation. It felt like the debilitating self-consciousness and self-objectification characteristic of this condition. I am not just talking about the condition of disordered eating; I am talking about the condition of being a woman. I am talking about internalizing an outsider’s image of my body until my face feels like a mask — all decoration, no sensation. I am talking about sensing that I can’t occupy the word “I” and thus becoming “you” to myself.

When I say “I,” I’m not sure whose words I’m using or who I’m referring to, but I’m sure that the speaker and the object of speech are not the same, and the words that define me are not my own. I cannot speak without splitting. Each “I” is a line drawn between me and the self I speak of. Each eye stares back at the other. Each act of speech masks me with another face, and through this mask I look down on my body in scorn, or at best, alienation.

“Given the coupling of mind with maleness and the body with femaleness and given philosophy’s own self-understanding as a conceptual enterprise, it follows that women and femininity are problematized as knowing philosophical subjects and as knowable epistemic subjects,” Elizabeth Grosz writes in Volatile Bodies.

Women are defined by materiality, men by mindedness. This is to say not that women are earthly, but that Earth has been made womanly; it is not to say that men are Godly, but that God has been made male. So many things have been imbued with references to men and women that we can’t speak of everyday concepts — presence and lack, hardness and softness, ether and earth — without speaking of gender. Man created God in his own image, and God created the world. It follows from this syllogism that man created the world in his own image.

I am not just talking about the condition of disordered eating; I am talking about the condition of being a woman.
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Just as St. Catherine of Siena configured her soul as a transcendent substance trapped in the confines of Mother Earth and her body, I am a masculine-coded mind trapped in feminine matter/mother, both from the Latin root mater.

I’ve chided myself for behaving as if the Cartesian illusion of mind-body separation is more than an illusion. I should know better, I think; I’ve studied the neural mechanisms of thought and emotion, the embodiment of cognition, the situatedness of knowledge, and how Descartes screwed us all over with the mind-body duality. Yet while I know this separation is merely symbolic, I can’t think away my own experience, an experience driven by symbolic distinctions: mind vs. matter, male vs. female. Our culture’s conflict between mind and body is raging inside me.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, entry into language requires an extra step for women: the adoption of a male perspective, a perspective outside her own body, looking at her own head through eyes foreign yet all too familiar to her. To accomplish this, language relegates her to the object of an action, or at best she is written as a subject in the passive voice. It is said that women are more empathetic, that women spend more time considering what men think than vice versa, that women have more understanding of the male mind than men do of the female mind.

That’s because our culture has no concept of a female mind. If there is one, I leave it on the ground every time I float outside my body to think about it. Lacan famously stated that le femme n’existe pas; there is no such thing as a woman. I believe I am a woman until I catch myself uttering such a statement, and once again, the “I” who steps outside my head, sizes me up, and classifies me as a woman with impossible certainty is not the “I” who is a woman.

After years of therapy and months in treatment centers, the only way I’ve managed to maintain my recovery has been to forget that the woman I observe and classify is, by most definitions, me. Disembodiment can be your worst enemy and your best friend if you take it far enough. When I ate foods I’d deemed too meaty and fatty and fleshy, I convinced myself it wasn’t really me eating; it was just a body that happened to be attached to me.

When I couldn’t bear the weight I acquired in recovery, I told myself my body was just a temporary vessel for an everlasting soul anyway. When I finally got my period back, I reminded myself it was only by chance that my soul was born into a menstruating vehicle.

When I felt defeated by the regrowth of curves I’d resolved to remove since they transformed me from a human into a piece of meat, I made extra effort to use the vocabulary of the male intellectuals I admired so I could catch people off guard with discussions of postmodern theory before they had the chance to peg me as a potential conquest.

Le femme n’existe pas; there is no such thing as a woman.
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My mind is a magician, making the body invisible while chattering at the audience so they don’t notice it’s still there. This defense may have even spawned the essay you’re reading — though my body’s having the last laugh now, because this piece is from and about it.

The split is inevitable, necessary, even: without detaching from and observing our bodies, we would not be self-aware. There are just more and less unhealthy ways to deal with the detachment. Freud contended that the world’s greatest artists channeled physical desires into intellectual pursuits. Like solid matter evaporating into weightless gas, this is called sublimation. He deemed it the only successful defense mechanism. My immediate reaction is to agree; I’m happy this way, I think. But which “I” is saying this? What would the other “I” say if she could speak? Where is she? Asleep until thinking-I wakes her with a kiss? Trapped in a cave with Antigone and all the other traitors of the male I?

Luce Irigaray claims that since language is fit only for a masculine subject, women must speak a different language to connect to their own bodies. But that can’t happen if there’s no woman in the first place, and as empowering as it is to hear about vaginas engulfing penises, it isn’t making me feel more embodied. So I’ve tried yoga, but every time I get down on the mat, I know it’s just a matter of time before I start sublimating. What comes down must go up. Everyone’s in downward dog and I’m in la-la land trying to solve the problem of induction. Any bit of mind left on the ground gets so engrossed in the movements that it merges with the body and loses consciousness.

Irigaray says women defy language because they’re so close to themselves, and one needs distance from something to speak of it. As I write, I approach the object of inquiry, myself, but I will never reach it. If I arrive at my destination, I will have to abandon it. By the time I reach myself, there will be no self to reach. There will be no “I;” I will be too close to speak.

The sentence implodes, subject and object meld together, and the split disappears. I cannot speak without splitting into the self that speaks and the self that’s spoken of. So I float off the page, and in the distance I see a girl with a face.

It is a pretty face, but I take no pride in it; it is not mine. The most it is good for is to represent me so that I can float further and not be bothered. If I don’t become a Frenchman, I’ll get back to you when I get back to my body.

The ACA Has Been A Lifesaver For Those With Eating Disorders — What Happens If It Goes Away?

Millions could be hurt by the GOP’s health-care plans. But one group in particular is often overlooked.

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This week, the United States Senate again failed to collect enough votes to complete one of President Donald Trump’s cornerstone campaign promises: repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has since proposed a vote to simply repeal the ACA without a plan for replacement (he promised a two-year “pause” without more specifics), though that plan doesn’t appear to have the votes required to pass, either. Meanwhile, the President stated that he’d be more inclined to just “let Obamacare fail,” an ominous threat without much substance or policy behind it.

This constant changing of the currents — an uncertain future that has left insurers skittish, local governments scrambling, and patients in fear — is largely due to political disagreements and power struggles between wealthy white men, but its impact is much greater and more deadly than they seem to realize.

The constant changing of the currents on health care is largely due to power struggles between wealthy white men.

Justly, more visible diseases, like diabetes and cancer, receive the lion’s share of the attention in discussions about the devastating impacts of the ACA. But there’s another, less talked-about group who may also die as a result of this politicking — those who are struggling with, and unable to get help for, their eating disorders.

The National Eating Disorder Association (NEDA) estimates that about 30 million people in the United States live with an eating disorder at some point in their life. Eating disorders are not fatal for the majority of those who get help — about 97% of patients who are treated survive — but when treatment is not available, the mortality rate jumps as high as 20%.

The fact is, despite targeted rhetoric about its costliness and general failure, the ACA has substantially increased access to treatment for many patients — and without it, many people with eating disorders would die.

Eating Disorders Before The Affordable Care Act

Though Netflix’s To The Bone made it look easy to get into a cushy in-patient program and stay for months at a time, the reality of eating-disorder treatment is much more bleak for many patients — and was even moreso prior to the adoption of the ACA.

In 2011, a court case in California pushed back on the idea that insurers don’t need to cover in-patient treatment, one of the most aggressive methods of treating eating disorders. The case stemmed from a perception that mental-health issues and physical ailments weren’t being treated equally, a violation of the state’s mental-health parity law and its federal counterpart, The Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008.

For years, insurers would cover only a limited number of days — a week, a month — in residential treatment, typically citing the cost; a week at Renfrew, the gold standard of eating disorder treatment, costs over $8,000 per week out-of-pocket. Other insurers flat-out wouldn’t cover any kind of residential treatment, despite recommendations from health-care providers.

Whether residential treatment is the most effective method is up for dispute — and there’s plenty of debate on that exact subject — the fact remains that in-patient treatment is still highly recommended by many doctors and therapists, and can be a lifeline for families who need help.

When You Include Your Eating Disorder On A Medical Intake Form

The ruling, which stated that insurers must strive toward parity of care between mental and physical ailments and thus, provide coverage for residential treatment programs, came down in 2012. NEDA CEO Lynn Grefe called it “a significant victory in the battle against eating disorders that we hope will have repercussions throughout the health insurance industries.”

It did not, however, help establish how patients would be able to access these resources if they couldn’t afford or obtain insurance in the first place. Crucially, despite the significance of the ruling, insurers could still find ways to avoid picking up the tab. Prior to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, they had one very handy tool: pre-existing conditions.

Though “being a woman” is not, in fact, a pre-existing condition, being a woman (or a person of any gender) with an eating disorder is — which means even if a person got coverage once, they could be denied it in the future. That’s challenging when dealing with a disease which tends to take multiple attempts at treatment (and many years) to fully recover from.

Thanks to Obamacare, insurers could no longer turn people away for trying again, and accessing health care was easier than ever.

Eating Disorders Are Expensive For Everyone

Even after the passage of the ACA, though, treatment for eating disorders was difficult to access — making the President’s threat of just “letting it fail” even more frightening.

At the time of the law’s passage, treatment of eating disorders had not qualified as an “essential health benefit” under the new law, despite lobbying from industry professionals. In a letter to then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, an organization of “more than 35 organizations in the eating disorders education, prevention, and treatment communities” stated their case:

“People with eating disorders experience discrimination in accessing proper treatment and this is a serious obstacle to recovery…According to a 2003 epidemiological study of more than 2000 women, only 1 in 4 white women and 1 in 20 black women who had a diagnosable eating disorder ever received any treatment for their eating disorder.”

Protecting benefits and Medicaid coverage is a matter of social justice. A lack of treatment options and funding methods means that the lethality of eating disorders can be extremely discriminating; if only one in 20 Black women receives treatment, the other 19 are at a much higher risk of death.

Protecting benefits and Medicaid coverage is a matter of social justice.

Reducing access to treatment may also skew research and perpetuate the myriad stereotypes about eating disorders — what they look like, who gets them, and how old they are. One of the most comprehensive ways to collect data about who suffers from eating disorders is to survey those who are getting help. However, when people from marginalized groups — LGBTQ individuals (particularly trans youths), people of color, immigrants, and the very poor, to name a few — don’t have access to treatment, they can’t be counted. The prevalence of eating disorders in poor, rural, and immigrant communities is fairly unknown because they just aren’t getting treatment. Additionally, because these stereotypes persist, primary-care physicians working with these populations may not know the signs or know when to refer someone to care.

The common perception is that eating disorders are private battles fought by thin white women (again, thanks a bundle, To the Bone), but the truth is that they frequently intersect with a whole lot of other issues.

Many eating disorders have nothing to do with restricting and may be masked by other behaviors, substance abuse issues, or trauma. It’s impossible to have conversations about obesity, diabetes, the opiate crisis, or the cost of health care in the United States without mentioning the fact that many of these issues impact and are impacted by the millions of Americans who are living with some kind of eating disorder.

Why We Need More ‘Hunger’ And Less ‘To The Bone’

Offering treatment, then, has far-reaching effects. But the case for offering it goes beyond being the right thing to do. Footing the bill for treatment also does what conservatives have claimed as their goal: saving money.

The sticker shock of a $30,000 per month tab for residential treatment may seem like a lot to a lawmaker looking to make cuts, but consider the cost of not treating those struggling. Again, from the provider letter sent to Secretary Sebelius:

“Consequences of not receiving necessary health insurance coverage include financial ruin for families paying out of pocket, a lack of life saving care, which leads to the worsening of symptoms and in some cases death. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses, upwards of 20%. Individuals with anorexia nervosa are 11 times more likely to die than their peers and they are 57 times more likely to die of suicide. Mortality rates are also higher for people with bulimia nervosa (3.9%), and eating disorder not otherwise specified (5.2%).”

Unlike many other ailments, which land sufferers in the emergency room for a round of antibiotics if they’re uninsured, eating disorders are an ongoing, deeply damaging experience that impacts both a person’s physical and mental health. It hinders lifetime productivity, can reduce earning power, and generally perpetuates the gender wage gap. Mental-health issues, particularly those with physical impacts, cost billions in unearned income, creating a cycle of economic despair and expense. They literally make people more poor, thus making them more reliant on social services.

The absence of a functional health-care system — whether that’s single-payer, an improved Obamacare, or something else — is also necessary for the ever-increasing number of children who develop eating disorders.

Yes, many eating-disorder patients are children — between 1999 and 2006, the number of children under 12 who were hospitalized for eating disorders increased 119%. These kids are unable to “go get jobs,” and may be reliant on their parents’ Medicaid, which is also in peril under the GOP’s health-care plan.

The Medicaid expansion portion of the ACA has been monumental for families; in some states, children are the single largest dependents on Medicaid. Meanwhile, children as young as 4 years old report disordered eating patterns that often go undiagnosed because they don’t have access to competent care. The younger these patterns are caught, the better a child’s chance of recovering early.

Repeal, Replace, Fail

There are necessary improvements to the ACA that must be made, but none of them are contained in the proposals coming from Republicans in the House, Senate, or Executive branches.

Each plan put forth by the GOP — from the AHCA to the BRCA to the plan to just plain old repeal — would put people with eating disorders at risk. Cuts to Medicaid spending, reduced coverage for pre-existing conditions, and trimmed mental-health-care coverage would all directly impact the millions of Americans seeking help.

They won’t help bring down the cost of treatment, either; with less insurance or Medicaid funding for eating disorder centers and recovery options, the patients will be expected to pony up. And in the absence of funding, many, many patients will opt not to get help, deferring the cost of treatment to a later date, and potentially dying while they do.

Each health-care plan put forth by the GOP would put people with eating disorders at risk.

McConnell’s two-year pause could also be lethal for patients; recovery is a long road, and many patients who are fortunate enough to be able to afford residential treatment, either through insurance or their own financial stockpile, will need ongoing aftercare. Putting a pause on coverage or temporarily cutting Medicaid will ensure that the long-term care is not an option — significantly increasing a patient’s risk of death.

And as for the President’s promise to “let it fail,” he may be waiting for a while. The ACA is far from perfect and there are still many reasons why treatment is just beyond reach for a lot of individuals, but it is not, as claimed, collapsing — despite concerted efforts from the President to make it so.

Regardless, this is a fight that’s being waged in Washington but fought with the weaponized bodies of people who are disproportionately young, disproportionately marginalized, and disproportionately struggling with other issues. Though the men in ties in the Beltway may view this as a high-level game of chess, the fact of the matter is that the future of the ACA is intimately tied to the future of many Americans who’ve only just got some semblance of hope.

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]]> https://theestablishment.co/what-it-means-to-become-the-fat-friend-8c1373ceac18/ Mon, 22 May 2017 15:41:17 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=1668 Read more]]> How your fat friend learns to disappear.

I didn’t expect to snap at such a good friend. There was so much I should’ve told him, and I didn’t. It brewed for years, bitter as oversteeped tea.

We’d been talking so often — three, four, five times a week, for three or four hours at a time. His heart had been shattered, and he was wracked with hurt even years later, fresh as the day it happened.

We’d been talking over the same few questions for weeks that turned to months, months to years. Meanwhile, my life was changing shape, its new contours emerging from a murky before. So many things were happening, and there was never room for them — only for him.

I had only just realized how frustrated I’d become when the phone rang.

“She just texted me,” he said, launching in as soon as he heard the click of my pickup. “I don’t know what to do.” My brain, buzzing and popping with the overcharged electricity of irritation, suddenly burnt out.

“How are you,” I said sharply, voice shaking with irritation.

“I’m a little messed up,” he answered.

“No, you ask me.”

“What?”

The floodgates opened. I loosed a torrent, my frustration finally boiling over. Nearly everything in my life had changed, I told him, and he hadn’t even asked.

So many things were happening, and there was never room for them — only for him.
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I had never gotten so angry with a friend, never snapped like that. My reaction had been mystifyingly disproportionate, uncharacteristically harsh. I sat with it for days, replaying the call over and over, its invasive species overgrowing my molding mind. It took me weeks to diagnose my downfall.

He hadn’t asked. But even in years’ worth of lulls in our conversation, in all our interstices, I hadn’t spoken up, either.

Despite my best intentions, I so easily slid into a role that was laid out for me. I became a vacant vessel set aside for others’ use, ready to be filled and emptied at will. In this friendship, I existed nearly exclusively in service to my friend. If he needed to empty himself, I was there to catch the fullest parts. If he needed filling up, I was brimming with his heart, his needs, his wants, and none of my own. I had made myself into a vast emptiness, only and always to be filled by him.

I had slipped into the role of the Fat Friend. I was a plot device to further someone else’s story; the road for others to walk upon. Even in my own life, I made myself a footnote.

I learned to be the Fat Friend over so many years. I learned it from the only fat women I’d ever seen on screen — the ones who acted as midwives to thin women’s pain. Whose only motivation was straight desperation, longing for thin or muscular men as a punchline. Whose only path had been worn down by the heavy footfall of so many fat women before them.

The fat women in comedies who only offered punchy one-liners and snappy comebacks, but rarely had lives of their own. The imagined fat women in Norbit and Road Trip, whose voracious desire made them a punchline, who taught me that no personal life at all was preferable to one that was ridiculed so openly. The empowered fat women in movies like Pitch Perfect, who made sharp jokes and showed so little vulnerability, so little reflection of anything human. The fat women on screen who only and always acted as ushers to thin people’s lives, feelings, needs — the realer stuff that was only afforded by smaller bodies. Movie after movie showed fat women written to be the background, our presence only justified by the glorious foregrounding of thin leads.

To The ‘Cosmopolitan’ Editors Who Offered Cancer As Diet Advice
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The fat women I knew and loved, who learned to live as ghosts. Whose lives could not be imagined, only papered over. Whose brightest moments were in desperation. Whose hearts were laid bare under glass, there to be examined and analyzed, but never to be touched, never held. The fat women who disappeared into wallpaper, plain as gesso — a colorless texture to serve the pigment that would follow. Never the star, never a subplot. Empty as a galaxy and desolate as a desert. All object, never subject.

This was what I had replicated in myself, and in one of my dearest friendships. I had become all emptiness so that my friend could become fragile in his fullness. And because of that, neither of us knew how to support one another anymore.

But I didn’t just learn all of that in the past, or from ill-intentioned bad actors. Even today, the role of the Fat Friend is reinforced at every turn, even by those we love. Fat people are so often expected to perform for the thin people around us.

Whether they intend to or not, many thin people’s beliefs about fat people set an impossible trap for us. Fat people are supposed to be ashamed of our bodies. That shame is meant to be a gift, something to be cherished, believed to provide the motivation we need to lose weight. When our bodies don’t change, we’re supposed to be more ashamed and more motivated than ever.

Fat people are supposed to be ashamed of our bodies. That shame is meant to be a gift.
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We’re supposed to be stylish, upbeat, have witty comebacks for the endless wave of hate that comes our way, regular as the tides. We’re also supposed to be empowered, confident, let criticism roll off our backs. We’re not supposed to give in to detractors, even if our harshest critics are family, friends, partners, doctors. Even when they are omnipresent. Even when we are entirely alone.

As strangers so regularly remind me, we are supposed to know we’re going to die. We’re supposed to know it will be our fault when we do. Passersby become prophets, grim reapers mandated to tell our future in gruesome detail.

What Happens When One Fat Patient Sees A Doctor
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We’re expected to accept street harassment, diet talk, all manner of public discussions about our repulsive bodies. We are not to interrupt. Neither are we to talk about our experiences, lest we be told we’re “playing the victim.” If we give voice to our inevitable sadness or anger, we’ll become the self-fulfilling prophesy of the sad, isolated fatty. And we’re expected to reject our bodies at every turn. If we dare to broker a ceasefire with our own skin, we’re “giving up.” If we learn to love our bodies, we’re “glorifying obesity.”

So: be ashamed but confident, doomed but upbeat, abused but unaffected, unbothered by reminders of our own impending deaths.

But after all that, there’s no space left for fat people to be vulnerable, honest, to hurt, to fail, to succeed, to be whole. It leaves no room for our humanity. We must not only subject our bodies to public scrutiny, but deliver our confidence, our shame, our minds, our senses of self. We’re made to be used. So I made myself useful.

It’s no wonder we disappear.

I am so deeply sorry for so much of what has happened.

I am sorry for the orbit I knocked us out of, my friend and I. I made such a vast emptiness, created cracks he learned to fill. I am sorry for the crackling silence since then, the hot microphone in an empty room. I am sorry for not responding to the calls that only reminded me of the ways I didn’t know how to be whole, how to be both his and my own.

I am sorry that I recreated a thick outer skin for my thin friends that kept them comfortable in a rosier understanding of the world — one in which fat people were harbingers of a frightening future, cautionary tales for thin people’s benefit, or passive sounding boards for their lushly orchestrated lives. I am sorry that I kept so many thin friends comfortable in their own hatred of the little fat on their bodies, free to hate themselves, and free to make my body their collateral damage.

I am sorry that this friend is not the first to witness my disappearing act. I am sorry for the ripple of nothingness I’ve left in my wake, making myself the quiet buttress of thinness. I am sorry that I have told him and so many others “I’m fine — what’s happening with you?” so long that they learned it was my primary function. I am sorry that I believed first that my life wasn’t worth hearing about, then that it wasn’t worth living at all.

I am sorry that I made my friend my greatest escape.

I didn’t know how to be whole, how to be both his and my own.
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I am sorry that I let my body be their fear, as it so often is with thin people. For so many thin people, fat must be a fear, never a reality. As a fat person, I have learned to absorb thin people’s insecurities and anxieties, staying silent about my own. I have learned that I have spent whatever capital I have, just taking up the space that my body occupies. I am not entitled to more — I have learned that no fat people are. Our bodies mean we are born to a debt that we must spend our lives repaying.

I want to learn to treat myself as someone who is as real as a thin person. And I want to create a bolder, brighter world for the fat people who follow: one in which we can fully emerge, embraced by ourselves and our loved ones alike. I want fat people to see ourselves reflected in the world around us in every walk of life, in every emotional reality, in the lives we long to lead and the lives we already do. I want to learn to build a world that strengthens and respects thin people by teaching them to see fat people fully as we are, not as we are imagined to be.

I want to learn a new language of friendship, and a new kind of fullness. I hope we can learn together.