What Am I Doing Here?

I was speaking this week about why I’m writing and how. My therapist says it is reclaiming something that was taken from me a long time ago. I’m wondering if it’s coughing up poison that has been fed to me and finding sweet water. Or unpeeling accretions of falsehood that have been layered over my identity. This writing is also going to be delighting in myself in ways I know I’m not supposed to.

My friend Abigail has said of the expression, “hot fat girls,” “[I]t’s about the fierce courage it takes for a fat person to claim and flaunt their sexuality, to reject the overwhelming cultural pressure to disappear.”

I’m aware that in my last post, in particular, I began a certain amount of flaunting my sexuality, and I’ve been trying to decide how I feel about that. I know that some of you found that post really affecting; you’ve written to me and told me so. And I also remember how often I was told not to look at myself in mirrors because it’s “vain,” not to “toot [my] own horn,” and to remember to be “humble.” (Also to wear black dresses shaped like sacks, but we’ll get there.)

I know that I’m doing some things that are different from the norm, whatever “the norm” means when it comes to fat people speaking for themselves in public. I’m thinking of adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renée Taylor in their Institute for Radical Permission. They talk about acknowledging our own divinity as part of the energy that created diamonds and suns, daisies and butterflies, and, my personal favorite, “whales and rainbows.” They also point out that where we do not honor the parts of us that are different from the norm, we are not acknowledging our full divinity, our own piece or emanation of the Divine. We are excluding ourselves from the Circle of the Sacred, desecrating ourselves, declaring ourselves out of bounds of the Divine. And there is no such place, not even for someone as fat as Charlie in The Whale. Not even for someone as fat as I.

I put up a photo of a person that fat every time I post. And while most of my photos are taken at my desk, they show something that is missing in most mainstream images of face people. They show my face. They are not “headless fattie” photos like the ones we’ve seen for years. Ones where the subject’s clothes don’t fit right, they have food in hand, and there’s no head. Check it out sometime. I find it really disturbing.

For one thing, by hiding people’s faces, it emphasizes that being fat is shameful. Who would want to be identified as a fat person in a photo?? For another, the subjects are often in schlumpy or too tight clothing–clothing that is uninteresting, and utterly without character. We almost only ever appear in mainstream media when the subject of an article is “obesity” and its correlated effects or attempted “treatments.” While the majority of the residents of the United States are considered “obese” or “overweight” by the medical/insurance industry, we are shown as aberrations, not the norm. The white, light-haired, symmetrical, thin standard remains a norm in media presentation.

So one thing I’m doing is showing my face for all of you to see. Every time. Not someone’s face. My face.

For another, I do indeed claim and flaunt my sexuality. Mine. Not a general idea of what sexuality looks like, whether ace, pan, polyamorous, monogamous, solitary, kinky, queer, cisstraight…not a survey of sexuality, but my own experience of myself as a very fat and sexual being. I’m not expecting everyone to identify with any of my story, but I know that some of you will and that others of you want a window into experience that is different from your own.

I’m not talking about some imagined fat person’s life in general. I’m talking about my life. This is not some thin person’s fantasy, some variation on The Whale, in which getting very fat not only kills you, but destroys relationships, undermines your authority, and warrants horrific treatment from those who purport to love you.

I am committed, then, to telling the truth about my life as it is and has been. And my life includes being fat and sexual. That’s not all it includes, but that is one combination of attributes I’ve learned I’m not supposed to have. Not only have I learned I can’t have combinations like that, but I’ve been systematically, even intentionally, taught as much.

I’ve been taught to do everything I can to be smaller. Taught to be ashamed when I’m unable to be “small enough.” Taught I don’t belong and, as Abigail says at the top of this post, should disappear.

So my writing insists on my own right to be here. A simple place to start. Fat people have–I have–the same infinite worth that all other people have. Fat lives matter. Fat bodies matter. Not only once they’re smaller. Not only if they’re trying to be made smaller. Fat bodies matter now.

And my writing has begun in places of joy. Places to tell happy truths, delightful truths, sexy truths. And my writing will tell other truths too, some of the hard and painful ones about health realities, prejudice and antagonism, self-doubt and self-loathing, and the violence of chairs. But why don’t we just take a moment to breathe in and say affirm for both of us, Yes, I deserve to be here just as I am. \

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.