Fat: I am a Woman of Size

September 08, 2003
From Rootswomen

We have published this personal correspondence (with permission from the author) in the hope that others who may have felt discriminated against because of their size realize that this is another negative discrimination that afflicts mostly western societies. Unless one's size is affecting one's personal health then one should be comfortable being who they are.

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Necessity is the great spiritual motivator, I think, so I am smart enough to be grateful for the rejection and oppression I have experienced in my life, for they have caused me to look deeper, and to be deeper. I am fat. I am a woman of size.

I have suffered with this, silently for the most part, for as long as I can remember. I imagine myself as a small child, so open to the world, and cringe at the thought of the systematic violation of her natural joy in living. I even vaguely remember the feeling-tone of that, which I had no words for then. When I did, all I knew was that I wished with all my heart that I could be small, and quiet Then maybe I would not receive those disapproving and sad looks from my mother and father. What I was was not okay. That much I understood clearly and early.

I furiously blamed my mother for years. Because she was ashamed of her own big body, she transferred that shame to me. I thought I was fat because I labored under constant shame, and because of my shame was too depressed to take myself in hand, as it were. Maybe this is true, but what I didn't admit fully to myself is that I and so many fat people, especially women, labor under some vicious societal prejudices. I realize that my mother's suffering and the transferring of it to me were due to the oppression she herself had experienced. She looked so sad when she looked at me because she wished she could have spared me.

I virtually never have shared this issue with my friends or my family, though it has formed some of the subtext of my various relationships. My friends have always felt the need to assure me that I am ok. I don't really know how they see me, as this great woman with a tragic flaw, or what. I got into the habit of displaying something of my shame to men with whom I was intimate, maybe so they would know I was aware of my 'ugliness', and their nobility for taking me on, but mostly I believe I shared my little heart of darkness because I felt that if there was a man to truly love me, the weight would melt away. And so I'd trot out my body issues as a test of their potential. This fixation on a man to fix me has been one of the biggest preoccupations of my life.

During my 17-year marriage, I blamed my husband for not loving me right, and even our friends did too. "You need to be delighted in," one said. And another, "If he loved you right you would just lose all that weight." Well my husband was clearly aghast at my weight gain with the pregnancy and birth of our eldest son, and my weight became the issue of our marriage, partly due to his prejudice, but no one was capable of relieving me from my shame and pain. There have been ones who have come and loved me, or at least tried, but the pounds did not magically vanish away.

With puberty I managed to get myself quite thin, and thus mercifully spent my years of sexual awakening at a socially acceptable size. The problem was I loathed my body. I had an ugly red scar like a band around my belly that actually made a dent, from being provided by my mother with girdles from the age of 9 or so on. I remember one flowered panty-girdle vividly. The elastic at the waist cut into me.

I look at pictures of myself as a teen and as a young woman. I was simply beautiful, and experienced none of that. Not a bit.

I had recurring dreams as an adult of being literally split in half at the waist. I hoped sex could heal the split, but I could not be free with it, and was inhibited and afraid. My boyfriend when I was 18 broke up with me briefly because our sex was not as adventurous as he wanted. I was always afraid. The girdles may have been gone, but I was constricted and unable to move in my own rhythms. Before my husband and I married, a few months into our relationship, he told me, "I wish I found you more physically attractive." It was a stunning blow, and had I been healthy, I would have gone running. But as it was, my self-esteem was completely dependent on having this incredibly handsome man by my side. When I got pregnant I didn't think about an abortion for a second. My body sighed with relief and I gained 50 pounds.

I did develop a 'beautiful mind', largely perhaps because my intelligence in school kept the worst fates of fat kids away from me. I always had friends, and was popular. I was sharp, funny, an actress, a singer, a poet, a performer. My talents meant I would only get an occasional 'fatty fatty two by four' from some scruffy boy, but I was loved. I shook it off.

I was physically extremely timid. I never learned to ride a bike. I have never until quite recently had the sense of completely inhabiting my body. Sex was the closest I could get, and so I developed a great fondness for it.

I formed an intense inner life, fueled by much reading, and later, by writing. I had many fantasies of salvation coming in one form or another, most often in a man. I feel this innerness opened me to many experiences that more physically-oriented people might not encounter, at least with such intensity. I am extremely observant and sensitive to the feelings of others. Perhaps because I have received much unkindness from people, lovers and strangers alike, I have become very watchful for the nuances of prejudice. It is no accident that issues around race are primary for me, that I think about and teach about and write about white privilege. At the same time I have developed a certain kind of mental and emotional toughness, which allows me to receive insult and move on. It is hard to receive insult and stay sensitive, but somehow I have known that my sensitivity is key to my development, and I have guarded it like a fabulous treasure.

I also developed a charming personality, which my husband never tired of reminding me was false, a compensation. Well yes, but my over-compensation got me beautifully educated, and made me intellectually curious, and spiritually yearning. One of the great moments of a human life is when you can look back and see the purpose of even the 'worst' things, when every little particular of your experience suddenly makes sense, and you feel the grace of the universe for having led you through these to reconcilement, and you are home at last.

My worst times were during my marriage and childbearing years. My husband was sleeping with many woman, and of course I could not blame him, since I was so ugly. I was a tortured soul, depressed to a point where I could not write, and scarcely get out of bed in the morning. My poor kids suffered a raging, depressed, preoccupied mother.

I was obsessed by my fatness, and tried to get to the psychic root. I read every self-help book, running with the wolves, loving too much, wailing with my inner child. I tried Overeaters Anonymous. I read about the tyranny of slenderness, and about how the only diet there is is love. I did not diet except sporadically. I was a spiritual seeker, and I felt that if I discovered some spiritual truth I would find the key to my fatness, and thus my suffering. I said to myself that my problem was spiritual, a lack of faith.

I hated hearing, 'you have to love yourself' because I couldn't see how. I became obsessed with the idea that I was sexually abused as a child and had buried the memory. That is possible, but now I see that my obsession with getting at 'the truth' was because I always felt so desperately wrong, so out of place. But that hunger for truth was always bigger than my hunger for food, and it too has served me well.

Finally, I went to graduate school so I could get a high school teaching certificate, and this lifted me out of my self-absorption. At least I was now engaging the larger world of people and ideas instead of just me me me. My preoccupation as a student and a citizen has always been with justice, I now see, because I have labored for so long as a victim myself. People feel tempted to laugh at this idea, that being fat makes one a victim of societal prejudice and discrimination. And it is not pleasant at all to entertain the idea that I have been a victim. After all, being fat is not like being black, or Native American. All I have to do is lose weight and the prejudice stops. Well, I did not feel better when I was thin. I am only now, on this very day, beginning to understand the damage that was done, as well as the great gifts I received. As I said, I cannot remember a time in myself when I was not laboring under shame and the conviction that I was essentially unacceptable, that I did not belong on this planet. The persistence of this prejudice, of any prejudice based on physical appearance, mangles everyone. And there is something insidious about a prejudice that even the ones that love you most can engage in while they are still loving you.

I made progress looking at the issue as an inner one, trying to address and treat my own neurosis. I found the Jungian psychologists particularly helpful: 'the god comes through the wound'. I held onto that idea with all my might, that this was a spiritual quest I was on. I did not really look at the devastation of societal prejudice. I shielded myself from the idea to protect myself.

Shortly after my husband told me I would never get a teaching job because of my size, I broke out of my marriage in a dramatic manner, taking a lover, for the first time in my marriage, who literally helped me wake up. All I could think of was Sleeping Beauty, or Persephone. My personal archetypes. This male adored me, and loved to love my body. I took my three kids, aged 13, 10, and 8, and ran, I know now, for my life. I would have died if I didn't run: maybe a car wreck, or cancer...I would have died.

Well within a few months I sent my new man away, because he was a drunk. Fat women often get the men others want to throw away, and actually I think we get peculiar gifts from that. I proceeded on with my kids, and over the last 11 years have tried to build a life that makes sense. I saw that this agony of mine could indeed be transmuted into a quest for spiritual wholeness. I began to accept that my depression was part of it, an underworld journey, that I was gaining nourishment by hugging the roots., and felt no need to 'process' or 'let go' but just be in my sad times, and know that rebirth was coming.

A male appeared in my life whom I had met years before. He told me that he had always found me beautiful and incredibly desirable. I was shocked. At the time I met him I could not have been more convinced of my complete undesirability in the eyes of the world. I hated having sex with my husband, even though he told me he liked sexing me. I hated to be naked. I hated to feel myself. At the same time I was very sexual.

Over the years, I heard that more. I had some nice male friends and good sexual encounters. Non-European males in particular seemed to have no issues with my body at all. I remember one male telling me as he regarded my naked body, after I had pulled my usual 'I hate my body routine', "Well if that's ugly, I want to know what ugly is." It came as a shock to me that not all men share this revulsion at body fat. I was able to enjoy sex more and more and be less inhibited.

When I think of the good things I have experienced as a fat woman, my experiences with males has been one. If a male, in the face of all societal prejudices, desires me and is glad to be seen with me, it is because he shares with me a tendency to look below the surface of things for truth. I never believed a single one of them for a minute, of course. I thought maybe they went out of their way to tell me I was beautiful because they were nice people and felt I needed to hear that. I have had better luck with males than many thin women I know, ironically. I know that my experiences do not apply for many. Many large women have males come to them who were rejected everywhere else, and so if they see these females as a last resort, they also feel free to use them terribly and leave when something better looking comes along. I have gotten some of this too.

I also see now that I have been extremely angry, and that this also formed part of the reason why I refused to diet. Just pure defiance. I became more and more insistent that the world would just have to accept me on my own terms, and that I was not going to surrender to the world's view on how I should be. I vowed that no male ever would touch this body who did not love this body, and that is pretty much the way it has been.

I have to say that over the past few years, more and more, I have had profound experiences of my own beauty, days and moments when I have just felt beautiful, and claimed my beauty, walked my beauty, been my beauty. And I don't mean 'beautiful on the inside', which is what well-meaning people often tell us that hurts so so much, that we are beautiful on the inside. Does that mean we are ugly on the outside? I mean beauty in the flesh, delight in all my curves and valleys, and even my scars and stretch marks and other natural features of my various terrain. I know I am multiple, and I know I am wrapped around a wonderful mystery. I do feel that because males have been able to enjoy and even luxuriate in my largeness I could too. I have become large in other ways too.

I no longer cringe at the idea of loving myself. Sometimes when I am out and about in this body, walking down the street straight and strong, or at a dance dancing free, I see they way other big women look at me, and I think maybe I am helpful to them. I hope so. I have come to see this as one of the larger purposes of my largeness. I have a large body, and perhaps to compensate I have developed a big spirit and a big understanding of some things. Even if the original purposes were some sort of neurotic compensation for the great sense of lack and unworthiness I felt, I claim all now.

I have quoted Dr.Martin Luther King to many a student over the years, most of whom have been poor nonwhite victims of this American system: "Unmerited suffering does not go unredeemed". In other words, I tell them, if you get through this, you not only get survival, but you receive a great gift from this suffering, that you can then give to yourself and others. I did not realize in those times that this applies to me as well.

For years I looked for the psychological explanation for why I am fat, like the knights looked for the Holy Grail, the cup I could drink from to take away my pain. What I did not see is that the 'problem' lay not in some weakness or wound of mine. The wounding came from how the world perceives me and receives me, and every insult and cruelty added to it. The more inner work I did, the more confused I became by my inability to lose weight. I did all that work in service of one aim: to be thin. Well the joke's on me, or something, because now I care far less about how I look and far more about my integrity and conduct, and my aspirations for myself are of a non-material kind. In other words, I just don't care the same way about my fatness anymore.

I can't say that I have transcended this issue. I still have bad moments every day, the old sadness, the sense of my ugliness. And I myself share in the same prejudices that have undermined me. I look to slenderness as the ideal. I most often find fatness in myself and others aesthetically unpleasing, no matter what my lover might say. I accept the fact that most males will never want me. But all it takes is one man. And he found me.

I have constructed a spiritual earthworks that protects me against the worst of the insult that fat people experience. I am gifted by many loved ones. I have a sharp mind and a good strong heart. I eat extremely well: no meat, very little sugar or unrefined food. No dairy.

I have lots of energy and mental focus and sleep little. But I am fat, and am beginning to accept the idea at last that perhaps I always will be, and that this body is not some tragic accident, or evidence of my weakness and unsuitability, but simply, one expression of who I am.




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