are younger than me, this may be complete news to you, so I will quickly explain. Truman, played by Jim Carrey, has a normal life – so he thinks. He gets up, kisses his wife on the cheek, goes to work, gets the newspaper, goes back home, falls asleep. What he doesn’t know is that when he was born, he became part of a reality TV show. He was placed in a fake world, an enormous bubble, and now everything in his life is filmed twenty-four hours a day and broadcast to the real world. Everyone in his life, including his wife, is an actor. He is given a fear of water, meaning that he can never leave his town – not cross the bridge, not get on a boat. He is stuck in this fake world, without knowing that millions of people watch his every move.
When Truman realises what is going on, he is forced to challenge his fears and get in a boat to try and get away. He doesn’t truly believe that this can be real; that his entire world, his entire life is a lie. Until his boat bumps into a wall. A blue piece of wood painted as the sky. There is a beautiful moment where Truman touches the wall. And realises that it’s true. That everything was fake. The voice of God – the producer – roars through the speakers, at Truman, that he should turn around and go back to his life. For at least he knows what that is. That he can stay happy if he gives in to the dream. If he just accepts this. And Truman is standing in front of a door, which was hidden before – it is painted blue like the fake sky – and he has a choice. He can turn around, get back in the boat, go back to his life which is a lie. Or he can walk out the door, not knowing anything about the outside world. He turns to the camera and smiles and walks through the door.
That is how it felt meeting Andrea. The same stages of denial: surely, this can’t all be fake?
If this is all true, then I have lived a lie. Then every single self-loathing thought I have ever had, every opportunity missed, every failed relationship or friendship, every harsh word said to myself, every bruise, every cut, every moment I have either starved myself or felt numb, it will all have been … due to either an individual, an industry or a system telling me to do it. If this is all true, then that means that I have said the meanest and most cruel things to myself, to my body, for no reason. It means that my body was never the enemy, my fat was never the enemy. Perhaps I was deserving of love all along. Perhaps I was worthy all along.
If it’s all true – that the beauty industry, the diet industry, the weight-loss industry and the fashion industry, all of them have created this ‘perfect body image’ and a world in which that is ‘just the way it is’ – then it is not an objective truth. It is fake. A world in which everyone is an actor and the sky is made of wood. In which case, there must be a door.
You will have to cross an ocean, petrified of water. You will have to give up this belief you had that what you see in the media is true and reflects reality. Then you have to row. And there is a storm and you feel like you might, at any second, drown. But you don’t. You reach the blue wooden wall, you touch it and feel the splinters in your fingertips. Then you see the door. And you can choose to walk out.
The reason why we empathise with Truman’s difficult choice is that in his fake world, at least, he was the star. He had a decent life. It was safe. So if he had got back into his boat and sailed back to his fake life, we would partly have understood his choice.
The fake world in which fat people live is not nice. It is not safe and we are not the stars. Instead we believe that we are not worthy, that we are not attractive, that we are lesser humans. That that is just how it is. The world is not even safe for thinner people, because it always looms over them as possible threat. What if you get fat one day? If you are a size 8, you should be a size 6. If you are a size 6, you should be a size 4. If you are a size 0, you need a bigger gap between your thighs or clear clavicles or a flatter, more toned stomach. And you need to still be able to eat burgers because you don’t want to be one of those boring girls ordering a salad for dinner.
I fully lived in that world for twenty-three years of my life and every single person in my life did as well. Like we were all part of a cult where the main mantra was ‘fat people should be ashamed’ and we all hummed in agreement whenever it was being insinuated or said.
What it took was for someone to say to me, ‘What if it’s all a lie?’
Throughout writing about my childhood, my teens and all of the self-loathing that surrounded it, I have had to take brief pauses where I held my stomach in my hands and said to myself, ‘I love you, stomach. I love you, child-me. We are good, we are safe,’ because the past is overwhelming. Maybe this is time for you to do the same. Place your hands on your body, the bits that you’ve struggled with the most and say, ‘We are good, we are safe.’
The biggest misunderstanding in the body-positivity movement that we see on social media is that you have to be ‘confident’ and ‘brave’. I have spoken to fat women who dismissed the entire idea of self-love by saying, ‘I am just not that confident.’
I am not a confident person. I always feel like I should be working harder or managing adult life better. But I can honestly say that most days, when I look in the mirror, I smile. I stare admiringly at my big thighs and I turn sideways to look at my butt and my stomach and I think, ‘Hello hot stuff!’ I am sometimes absolutely overwhelmed with how cute and beautiful my body is. But then sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and think, ‘Ew.’ I still receive compliments from people and smile and say ‘thank you’ but on the inside scoff and think ‘what’s wrong with you?’ I still sometimes instinctively take positions that make me look thinner for photographs and I would hesitate before doing jumping jacks naked in front of a person I was about to have sex with. I don’t always love my body. I love it more, way more, light years more, than I did a decade ago. When I go up a size in clothing, I don’t cheer. My first feeling is, ‘Oh …’ and my second feeling is, ‘Oh well.’ I have to repeat to myself, ‘I was a beautiful child,’ moving the emphasis from word to word in each repetition, because I need to remind myself. That I am attractive, worthy, deserving to be alive, is never something that comes easy. It is not something I just instinctively believe. It is hard work, telling myself that I am good enough every single day.
When I write down every memory related to my weight from my childhood, it is not to figure out the source of why I became fat. People are fat for a variety of reasons. It can be biological, psychological, socioeconomic, genetic or a choice. Some people just have those bodies. When I talk about the reasons for my own fatness, I am not apologising for it and nor am I explaining it to you so that you feel more comfortable with it. Usually, when the reasons for a person’s fatness are looked into, it is in order to find a solution to a problem. But being fat is not a problem. The reason I share my childhood with you is to remind myself that I was not brought up loving my body. I was not brought up confident. Every little thread of confidence was crushed under the heavy foot of societal pressure to be thin. Every sense of autonomy evaporated in the presence of my abusive grandfather. Bullying shattered my sense of self-worth, sadistic teachers confirmed that I was lesser. I did not start this journey as a confident person. If I had to go back and look at who I was before I started loving my body, I would say that there seemed to be nothing left to salvage.
The only thing that had never been touched – the only thing that they forget to destroy – is our sense of logic. Our intelligence. Our minds. If anything, our minds are strengthened because we spend most of our lives inside of our heads, as we are trying to escape our bodies. This means that we have an out. I believe we can use this sense of logic to our advantage. If we can grasp – deep down inside – that all the things we have been taught about how our bodies are wrong, are lies – then we can beat it. All we need to do is unlearn.
But now,
