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.

You will climb to the top of the jungle gym where at the tender age of 9, your best friend Bobby is hanging upside down and screaming curse words to make the other kids laugh. He never sticks up for you when they call you names, but he never calls you names either. You will sit at the top of the dome. You are hungry for acceptance, starving. You will learn how to eat off this small kindness; you will learn to pretend that it fills you up. You will recall your mother describing the car accident she got into as a teenager.

You will shut your eyes as you hear her talk about getting her jaw wired shut, and how much weight she lost. You will try to use all the fifth grade math in your little fifth grade head to figure out how you can land in such a way that will require your own jaw to be wired shut, to calculate how much weight you could lose. Math was never your strong suit, though, and you’re too young to have learned geometry so you resign yourself to another day of existing Like This. Fat.

You will feel undesired by men. Your first experience with sex will be with a man who fed you crumbs in terms of affection, crumbs you happily accepted and crumbs you convinced yourself kept you full. Your first experience with sex will be red and painful and violent. You will be 14 when you break down outside of Spanish class, and when Dante asks you what’s wrong you will confess, begging silently for him to absolve you. He will not believe you—he will tell you, matter-of-factly, that you are simply not pretty enough to get raped. You will swallow it back down and it will be two years before you tell anyone. You will fail your Spanish exam that day. You will fail every Spanish exam after that. When you are in your art class next period, you will stare at the wire clay cutter in your hand, bile and rage and fear stinging, sour, in the back of your throat. You will fantasize about slicing your gut off like cool gray clay. About sloughing off your thighs and your hips and your chin and your arms like the soft wet brick that sits on the table in front of you. Until you are small enough to be believable. Until you are pretty enough to have been raped.

You resign yourself to another day of existing Like This. Fat.

You will spend years in a relationship with a man who will say he loves you. You’re beautiful, he will say. When he fucks you he will maul your soft breasts, he will bite at your sinewy neck. When you examine yourself in the mirror, you will always think that you’re lucky that you have the face, the chin, the neck of a much smaller woman.

When he fucks you, the lights will stay off. He will not touch your gut. He will go out of his way to avoid it. By now, you have noticed that you’re hungry, that you’ve been hungry, that he’s left you starving, and so you end things. He will move out and take the bed, the TV, the cat you thought you wanted.

I’m A Fat Girl In A Tutu Who Loves To Take Up Space

You’ll go on a date with a mortician you meet online. His curly hair will be piled on his head in a thick bun and you will think that it must weigh almost as much as the rest of his bony frame. He will try to finger you in the photo booth at a dirty dive bar. You will take him home, he’ll roll a joint, you’ll start to kiss. For a moment his desire will confuse you; you will have a fleeting feeling of fullness.

You will feel close to sated until he grabs at your fat rolls so hard, you will flinch and as he pinches and pulls, you will feel his cock strain and swell against his jeans. Later, when he is buttoning up his pants, he will ask you if you have ever let anyone feed you before. You will block his number and you will cry in the shower the next day when you find dark blue fingerprints, as though he had marked you when he squeezed you, freckled across your gut and thighs.

You will be promised that you do not deserve love. You will believe it. You will be loved in secret by men too ashamed to claim you. You will be loved in public, but you will not be able to shake the feeling that you’re loved in spite of your body. You will never ask if he loves you. You will be fetishized. You will be told one hundred times that a body like yours was Built For Sex, that that’s all you’re good for, and you will waste years believing them.

You will fall in love with yourself, in spite of it all. You don’t know how it happens—maybe it’s the beautiful femmes down the street who paint their hair and lips blue and encase their guts in spandex and invite you to their house parties. Maybe you start to see yourself through the eyes of the beautiful boy with perfect teeth, who swallows hard and looks in awe when he sees you naked for the first time.

Maybe it’s that you found magic, and through magic you have learned that your body is just a tool, a resource for navigating this life. That your tender heart is a gift. Maybe you’re just tired, maybe this lifetime of hating yourself has finally caught up with you, and maybe you need relief.

You will fall in love with yourself, in spite of it all.
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But whatever the reason, it will happen. Before you know it, you will fall in love with the way you can trace the outline of your gut pressing against your tight black bodycon dress. With the way your loud, Ursula the sea witch laugh commands just as much space as your body. With the cellulite that dots the tops of your thighs. You will not fall in love with the way it burns when they rub in the summer, but you’ll fall in love with the way you bounce when you walk.

You will fall in love with yourself, and you will feel full.