you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me tell you about Andrea.
Early twenties
I found stand-up comedy a few years after I finished school. Comedy was an amazing way of turning the self-hatred into a strength. I would stand on stage and tell the fat jokes that I had heard my whole life, but suddenly, I was controlling the laughter. It was liberating, standing on stage, saying: Hey! I am so fat and so lazy! And I am aware of it!
And hearing people laugh.
There is an annual comedy gala party in Denmark. All the comedians get drunk, horrifically drunk, and lose their already virtually non-existent inhibitions. A comic once got so upset that he lost an award that he threw his shoes into the harbour. And someone once gave a blowjob to another comedian who stopped her halfway through and said, ‘Let’s just be colleagues.’
That was me. Hello.
That evening, I was wearing a beautiful gala dress. I had come from a television set, so I was wearing television make-up – which is like normal make-up but with extra layers and done by a person tutting over the state of your skin. (Or like that one make-up artist who tried to wrap me in a giant scarf because my chest was ‘so ugly’.)
So I fell asleep with the grim taste of ‘just a colleague’ in my mouth, in full gala dress, fake eyelashes draped down my cheek, next to a mediocre comedian. I woke up and realised that I had forgotten to set my alarm. I had twenty minutes before I had to get to Copenhagen University for the first day of what was going to be three years of Russian Studies. I was about to miss first day of uni. I jumped out of bed, half-heartedly brushed my teeth, pulled the fake eyelashes all the way off and got up on my bike. I became aware that I was still drunk when I was sitting amongst the rest of the new students in my gala dress, reeking of alcohol, realising that I had not locked my bike outside. The other students were dressed, well, the way you should be dressed when attending university on the first day. They had showered and everything. I was wearing one earring and torn tights. Eyeliner was everywhere apart from along my eyelids. I am not sure if I looked like someone who took university too seriously or not seriously enough. Then I saw Andrea.
Meeting Andrea changed everything. She had unapologetically hairy armpits, a mullet and an obvious disdain for the entire system. If anyone was to ever ‘stick it to the man’, it was Andrea, and she was going to stick it to him hard. I am not sure if she saw me before she smelled me, but either way, we got talking.
Это дома. That’s all the Russian I picked up from my year at University of Copenhagen. It means ‘he is home’. Or ‘they are home’. Maybe it means ‘someone is home’ or ‘is someone home?’. Either way, I can almost pronounce it perfectly.
I failed the first exam because I put a question mark after each answer. What was the main import in the thirteenth century? Um … Corn? Potatoes?
The professor looked at me sternly and said, ‘It’s not a quiz,’ and I said, ‘Rocks?’
I love the Russian language. I think I convinced myself that it was a legitimate possibility to study it for three years and graduate. I did believe that I could do both comedy and get a degree in Russian. But I was doing comedy at the same time and always prioritised that. It fulfils me in a way that vodka and babushka dolls never could. So I very rarely went to class.
And when I did, I spent most of the lessons speaking to Andrea. I spoke about the various diets I was on, how I was going to lose the weight. She saw me perform comedy and heard me tell self-deprecating jokes about my fat body on stage. But Andrea also saw something else in me. She called me a Baby Fat – a potential future self-loving fatty. At first, it felt like a set-up.
‘You’re allowed to like your body,’ she would say. I would blink a few times. It made less sense than Russian. The words would get stuck in my brain on a loop throughout the week. It had never been an option; it had never been presented as an option.
‘If you trace it back,’ Andrea would tell me, ‘every self-hating thought, every fat-hating feeling – it stems from somewhere. An advert, a character on a TV show, a fashion magazine, a weight-loss product. It’s not something you read in The Great Book Full of Facts. It always stems from an individual or a system. And often from an individual with a product to sell. You can see it happen – the worse you feel about yourself, the more money you throw at the problem. The more people doing this, the richer these companies will get. So they keep spreading the idea that you are not allowed to be fat, that fat is the worst thing you can be – so that you will throw even more money at them.’
I had always considered my negative view of fatness as a truth, and suddenly it became subjective. In my head, it had been simple: the Earth is round. The sun is hot. Fat is bad. ✓
Now my world view was shaken. Every single notion that had ever been flung at me – telling me that my fatness made me unattractive, lazy and unworthy – had come from someone’s subjective opinion. Or – from a company with a product to sell. What Andrea explained to me was essentially capitalism. I felt like I had understood what capitalism was – in theory – but never had it applied this strongly to my very own life. Fat does not have to be a negative.
Wow.
Andrea introduced me to the possibility of loving fat. With the gentle sound of our Russian Studies professor in the background, I took in these ideas that seemed much more valuable to me than anything to do with Tolstoy. I was immediately both puzzled and intrigued.
Andrea would be writing the Russian alphabet in her notebook and I would lean in and whisper in her ear, ‘So basically, we have all just been taught to hate our bodies when really … We don’t have to?’
She would nod and continue writing. I would write down an oddly shaped B which I think was meant to be pronounced as an S. I would then lean in again and whisper, ‘So it’s all lies?’
Andrea would whisper, ‘Yes.’
I would draw a little 8 on my paper, drawing circles in the same place repeatedly till the paper evaporated and the pen started drawing 8s on the underlying piece of paper. I leaned in, ‘So I can just … be fat?’
Andrea smiled, ‘Yes.’
I would see Andrea exist, unapologetically, and she would show me fat people that did the same. I remember the first photo I saw of a fat woman being sexy. She was wearing nothing but knickers and a big, oversized, dark-red knitted jumper which was draped over one shoulder and both of her hands and part of her left thigh. She was leaning up against a high stool, her hair brown and thick, her lips slightly parted in a sexy and sultry look. And she was fat. Fat and sexy. That was just the first of many.
The internet turned out to be full of people like her. Fat people photographed from all different angles, no regard given to double chins or floppy upper arms, fat people in crop tops, fat people laughing, fat people eating. Fat people actually loving themselves.
The change wasn’t gradual. It happened overnight. I woke up and looked in the mirror and what I saw was different. On my bike ride to uni, everything was different. The billboards attempting to sell diet plans through before-and-after photos were suddenly not preaching facts, they were preaching a harmful body image. They were using my body to sell a product.
She
