Today was a difficult day.
In my Women, Food and Culture course we watched a documentary on the dance troupe Big Dance and basically the movie threw me into an anxiety attack. I knew at the start of the course that we would eventually be discussing weight- and fat-related issues and that it would probably be difficult for me but I didn’t think that my reaction would be so strong. I cried on the phone to Krystle after the class and struggled to hold back tears the rest of the afternoon.
I’ve always been bigger. I’m always going to be bigger, but I’m in that really awkward size where I don’t really feel like I fit anywhere. Fat girls say I’m too small, skinny girls think I’m too big, and clothing retail stores seem to agree. I have a hell of a time finding clothes.
I have big thighs, a big ass, big tits, a big stomach. I love my body. I’m proud of my curves and proud of the fact that I don’t weigh myself and proud that I try to take care of my body without stressing about losing weight. I’ve never been on a diet and I don’t even intend to, I think it’s insulting to your body to deny it in that way and also, most diets don’t work. They’re not actually designed to work; the diet industry is just that: an INDUSTRY. If people were actually losing weight because of it, they’d be out of business. They want you to lose weight so that you feel like it works but they know you’re going to gain it back and start all over again. It’s a waste of time and money. Eating healthy and having an active life-style are the only way to go. Some bodies are not meant to be thin and THAT’S OKAY. It’s okay to be big, to be curvy, to enjoy your body.
I’m digressing. The film, Big Dance, was about a group of older, larger women who had started taking a dance class geared directly at larger women. Hearing their testimonies set off a lot of sensitive bells for me. They talked about how many of them danced as children and were essentially forced out of it by all of the criticism they received for their size. This is especially sensitive for me. I took dance classes growing up and I LOVE to dance. I still love to dance, so much. I took formal classes in jazz between age seven and age ten or so. I started to develop breasts at age eight and with breasts came more weight around my hips and legs. I quit dance at ten because it was so stressful to endure comments from my teachers and from the other students about my weight, about how I was too big and not really suited for dance. Constant comments out the sides of people’s mouths about how I didn’t fit in because of my size and what was I even doing there, being so big? I quit dance classes. I had never really been aware of my size or the stigma attached to it until then and it continued to get worse for me after that. In elementary school, junior high, high school, other kids would torment me about my weight. I heard slurs on a daily basis: “fatty” “chunky” “fatso” “jumbo dog”, the list goes on. People would whisper it under their breath in class or shout it at me in the hallways. In gym class, in the locker room, girls would stare at me as I changed, critically dissecting my fat body. I felt repulsive, I hated the way I looked, I wore the baggiest clothing I could find in order to hide it. Before that I had been an extremely social child; after I was extremely reclusive. I was so afraid of people’s comments about my weight or my eating habits that I avoided them altogether.
I gained weight steadily throughout my adolescence because of struggles with over-eating (something I had never had difficulty with BEFORE I became stigmatized as fat). I ate to feel like I had a reason for my size, to feel like I had some control over it and simply because there was comfort in food. I got bigger. My depression got worse. I struggled to understand a world in which it was okay to shout derogatory things out the window of your car at someone just because you didn’t like the way they looked, a world in which if you’re a particular body shape or size that diverges from the “ideal” body type (thin), it can be really difficult for you to clothe yourself in a way that makes you feel good about the way you look, a world in which you are EXPECTED to feel shame about your body if you are bigger. I felt disgusted by it. Even my doctors made me feel ashamed of my body; they attributed nearly all of my health problems to my weight. I couldn’t go to my family doctor without her mentioning my weight at least once during the session.
A month before my nineteenth birthday, I tried to kill myself. I swallowed 36 tylenol-3’s between 10 PM and 3AM. The only reason I’m still alive is that despite my efforts to take the pills gradually, my stomach still rejected them in the end. I was taken to the hospital, forced to drink charcoal in order to rid my stomach of the remaining tylenol-3’s and lectured about the damage I had probably done to my liver. It’s difficult to describe why I tried to kill myself. It wasn’t necessarily because of my weight, although that was part of it. I hated myself, my body, I felt hated by everyone around me, I hated living in such a negative world. A friend had died two months earlier at the age of twenty; a two year-old cousin had been diagnosed with Type I diabetes. I remember thinking ”you’re disgusting, the world will be better off without you, the people in your life will be better off without you.” I wanted out.
When I left the hospital, everything changed. The massive influx of support from my friends and family changed the way I saw myself. For the first time in my life, I felt as though it actually mattered to the people around me whether or not I was in the world. Through talking about my experiences with them and hearing their own experiences, I found a greater sense of value in myself. I also started seeing a therapist although I have say, therapy helped me a lot less than bonding with the people around me did. It was a long, long process and to be honest it’s still not finished. I still struggle with issues about my body. There are some days when I feel so disgusted with the fat that hangs around my middle. But most days, most days I am so proud to be curvy, I’m so happy to take up space the way I do, and I believe that I am beautiful. It’s really upsetting to me to know that there are big women out there, so many of them, that feel like they are supposed to hate their bodies because our culture preaches the doctrine of thinness. Or that there are thin women who starve themselves just to get even thinner. It’s a really dangerous binary, to divide so strictly between fat and thin that women will do anything to avoid being in the fat category and those that are face life-long harassment for it.
Love your bodies. Love your friends’ bodies, because it’s so much easier for them to love themselves if you can show them how much you love them. Tell the people around you that they are beautiful because they probably don’t hear it enough; I don’t think anyone does.
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Fat Issues
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