us feel bad for eating it. They wanted us to say no to food. They wanted us to deprive ourselves, and why would they want that if we were really worthwhile? It was hard to figure out as a young person. Not all kids were expected to say no to food. Most of the boys were growing, and that was a good thing. They needed to eat. A few girls were too skinny, and they needed to eat (but still be careful not to eat too much). Most girls got support, got love if they were being virtuous, and so the adults supported us by encouraging us not to eat. Some girls, like me, were never lovable when we were eating. We were already too large, already a problem to be solved. Even if we were hungry and the kitchen was full, even if everyone was eating together, even if a family member made something we loved, in order to show love, we were supposed to not eat it.
People looked at me with pity when it was clear that I was left out of all the deliciousness and kindness and collaboration and community and belonging and satisfaction involved in eating. And then they’d tell me how good I was being when I was starving. “You look great!” People said it, and I’d respond with something morose. “Well, I’m dying.” The speaker would look nervous or act like I was joking. With a smile, the person would say, “Wow. Well, you look great. Keep it up!”
Those grim comebacks were my first experiments in using my voice to state the truth of my experience. I couldn’t say much, but the responses helped me understand the world I was in. It’s hard to make sense of it all when you’re young, but those comebacks, simple statements that I was starving, left no ambiguity. I lived in a world that did not love my body.
And the shame. Oh, the shame of being wrong, all the time wrong, impossible to erase the wrong-bodied-ness that you express everywhere you go. Hide yourself. Don’t move. Don’t dress flashy. Don’t be loud. No one wants to hear you. No one respects you. No one will ever respect you.
Little by little, my body began offering its own counter-narratives. I learned that this body wants to live and would not let me kill it with misinformed virtue. My voice, when I was able to use it, caused a vibration in my body that made me feel connected to the universe itself. It was like being part of a choir only I could hear when I took a full breath and spoke of my experience. I learned that there is no substitute for voice. Not even observation and compliance. I learned that deciding not to move and sweat and enjoy the outdoors makes you feel like you want to die, even when the body refuses to let you go.
This was my childhood. It’s where I come from. My stepfather sexually abused me regularly from age twelve to fourteen, and I remained compliant, cool, and competent.
I had my first consensual sexual relationship at age fourteen, and suddenly—through my own erotic urge—I knew that I had a greater power within me than could ever be diminished by the judgment of others. We fell in love and ate pizza and vegetables and turkey dinners standing in front of the refrigerator wrapped in blankets after sex, licking mayonnaise off each other’s fingers. I saved my life by taking a lover. The love didn’t last more than a year, but I did. And the power my body discovered began moving into every cell of my being. I looked like sex, walking down the street. No way around it—and sexual urges became part of how I found a home in my body. At fourteen, I left home and gained a hundred pounds over the following year. I was eating, and the weight just came, quickly. I found a voice and a sense of purpose—it’s hard to explain the conviction really. Somehow I was important to the world. I knew it unequivocally. At seventeen, I found movement again, rhythm and sweat and the joy of a heart-pounding workout. I still felt virtuous when not eating and sometimes relapsed into old behavior, on and off, for a few more years. Keeping up appearances still seemed important, as was the performance of virtue. At twenty-five, I stopped dieting forever. I started the lifelong process of accepting how I look and eventually celebrating survival in a body that many disdain. My appearance provokes both joy and disgust in others—that’s still true—and now it rarely provokes shame in me. I am what I am, every day, every breath; I become a new version of myself. Others still affect me, but I define myself. My dignity is inviolable.
I stopped dieting and started just living. I now maintain the appearance of a person who lives and breathes and moves and makes love. I think all of that is visible on me even now, at middle age. Maintaining appearances is important because it helps others know that they can find a home in their bodies too. My body was trying to tell me that it was my ally all along. I was simply mistaken when I tried to starve it into compliance. I forgive my mistakes, other’s mistakes. Appearances matter. That’s why I keep showing up.
2. Language, Fat, and Causation
These are facts: my Body Mass Index (BMI) is over 40. This is the highest classification of the BMI, level-three obesity. Those who use this scale call me “morbidly obese.” In my culture, I am embodied as something morbid. How easy it was for language to take my life and turn it toward death and disease. And it’s not so easy to re-language myself back into full life. Let me bring this to the level of sensation. When I type or say that I am morbidly obese, something occurs in my body that was not happening just a moment before. My pulse quickens, and my head throbs. Sometimes I feel panic and want to cry. I feel like I need to take a deep breath, clear my lungs. I have been handling the themes and language of embodiment for decades, and this is still my experience with the language. It’s not like I’m dealing with a sudden diagnosis that brings a fear of the unknown. It’s not like when someone says, “You have cancer.” There is no disease in my body, no illness, yet, according to the BMI, my existence is morbid. This statement is brought to describe an everyday experience in a body that lives and acts and makes love and experiences joy. My body, that lives and acts and makes love and experiences joy, in simple, everyday ways, is labeled “morbidly obese.” I’m affected by this classification and language, and I carry the classification in the body. I feel my stress level increase just so I can tell you this—there will be effort involved in bringing this anxiety back to neutral.
There is nothing neutral about being fat in America.
It’s great that we want to talk about health, but we dwell on things that may be germane, but not causal. Let me say this another way. Numbers may be factual and still not tell the truth. We are not separate from the social sea in which we swim. Physical outcomes cannot be isolated to bodily circumstances alone. The stress of ridicule, exclusion, underemployment, diminished dating ability, and lessened respect are external forces that influence physical outcomes. Stress is culturally assigned based on appearance and especially vicious if one’s physical appearance is deemed to be one’s own fault.
I am walking up a hill a few paces behind my best friend. We are teenagers coming home late from a party. It’s ten past ten in the evening, and we are walking back to her house where I will stay the night. Our curfew is ten, and she picks up her pace to one I can’t match. This is not the first time she has done this, nor will it be the last. She often walks at a formidable speed. I am working to match her stride, but my feet hurt, and I’m tired. I wonder, as I have always wondered, if this is simply the pain I deserve for being too fat, for not exercising more. I want to keep up, and I am simultaneously angry at this desire. She should respect me and my limitations. I am sweating out this anger. Is it excess sweat because fat people sweat more? Or is it because I am unfit or because I am angry, anxious? And then, as she leaves me behind, turns the corner ahead of me for the final quarter-mile home, I am also afraid. It’s ten past ten, and it’s dark, and, before she left me behind, she said she wanted to honor her mother’s request that she be on time. And off she went, sort of trotting along the dark street. Perhaps I could keep up, but I don’t even try now. I am seething with anger at this stupidity, this humiliation, and the fear that some ill could befall me, alone, in a military-base part of town. I want to be as brave as she, but I also think she is stupid. Why would her mother prefer her arriving home alone at ten past ten rather than the pair of us arriving with apologies at ten twenty? But I am also not sure whether I deserve humiliation. I steel my demeanor and decide that I will not accept humiliation, whether or not I deserve it. In those last five minutes of the walk, I consciously slow my breathing and work on the comments that will
