whilereadingandwalking:
“don’t care what i look like / but i feel good / better than amazing & better than i could”
I love this Janelle Monáe lyric. As a big girl, people tend to care what I look like. I don’t care what they see, as long as I feel good. And as a chronically ill girl, every day is a negotation between how bad I /could/ feel. So any day when I feel good at all, I feel better than I could feel. Both of those sentiments have made me embrace myself and wear what I want in recent years. I’m not going to waste my feeling good days on other people’s opinions.
Today I’m feeling meh, but I’m feeling way better than I could, and I feel great about the sunflower summer look I put together. I’m off to see Janelle Monáe on her tour. I have her book on hand and am ready to dance!
@janjan1221 : Girl how u deal with the fat comments n self security? I’m having a hard time even my mom tells me I’m fat 🤦🏻♀️ like I don’t wanna be skinny fuck off lol
It isn’t easy. It really isn’t. Some days are worse than others.
Reading has helped me with a lot of it. Digging in, instead of out. Digging into why people are so hateful towards fat people. Aubrey Gordon’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Fat helped me articulate a lot of it, and knowing the ins and outs of the cultural mindset around thinness and fatness is of course infuriating, yet also really helps, because I’m able to better understand where the comments come from, and where the anger comes from. She unpacks concepts like ‘concern trolling’ (I’m just worried about your health) and how people have turned thinness into a moral virtue, when in reality, our bodies are generally, scientifically, the size they are and will always be.
Similarly, it helps to know the science, the facts, and the proof around me. When I was a varsity athlete eating a diet of fruit, oatmeal, pasta, and raw veggies, with a mile time under 8 minutes and 6 practices, 3 games a week, doctors still lectured me about my BMI being too high. While my body image would take a long, long time to catch up, I realized early on that their idea of a healthy weight was physically impossible for me to ever achieve. The thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult was when I was having panic attacks daily, eating near-nothing, and working out twice a day every day before school began. It was incredibly unhealthy. It was the closest I got to my “ideal BMI"—and I was still 15 pounds over.
I’ve known rail-thin people who don’t exercise. I’ve known two people who started getting compliments on "how good they looked” when they’d lost an incredible amount of weight from being near-deathly ill. I’ve seen a friend gain a lot of weight because she was finally healthy after years of struggling with an undiagnosed disease. She has never been more healthy, but is no longer “skinny.”
But I’ve seen, and I know, that people don’t care about that. They don’t listen. They don’t actually care about your health—your blood pressure, cholesterol, thyroid, activity level, flexibility, vitamins, nutrition. They see a body type and size and make their judgments from there.
I’m mid-size and chronically ill. But when I make posts about fatphobia, I generally get hateful comments. Heck—when I make posts about near anything that the internet finds controversial, people go for my weight immediately. People think that weight is about willpower. Is about moral virtue. The pandemic revealed this too.
Because I think it’s easier now that I’m sick and have read so much about chronic illness and body politics for me to see that people are scared to confront the truth, which is that most things about our body, disease, and death are unknowable and out of our control. Using fatness as a scapegoat allows people to ignore all the terrifying things that could overwhelm us about our health. It lets people think they’re safe—or at least safer. And with family, I think it lets them think that they can help protect us.
That was a long and complicated way to say that it helps me to know. The comments will continue to sting. I will continue to fear that my weight will make doctors misdiagnose or dismiss me. I will continue to feel a little more self-conscious in looks that some thinner people might not even question because I know what people will think about me.
But I’m breaking the cycle of trauma. I won’t hurt myself, or others, like others have hurt me. I won’t perpetuate those ideas. I will try to make sure the people I love also don’t perpetuate those ideas, or work to break their own self-destructive cycles however I can. I will try to use my platform, whenever and however I can, to help inform others and encourage them to also pick up self-compassion. Sometimes I use it to share my worst stories and inform others about how language or certain practices can hurt.
Some days, brushing off the comments involves hyping myself up. Some days, it means refusing to care because I have too much shit to deal with and whether my belly is showing is not a top priority. Some days, I just remind myself that while eating better and being active are priorities for my chronic illness and feeling good in my body, skinniness is not. And some days, honestly, truly? I let myself be inspired by pure and petty spite for the haters.