Beauty and Broken Mirrors
‘Oh no sweetie don’t say your fat, say you have fat. No honey you’re not fat, you’re beautiful. OMG I really love your confidence.’ It’s funny how you are so convinced that the latter is a compliment when what you really mean is ‘how can you look like that and simply not hate yourself?’ The incessant weight advise now rings like a melody in her head…’Oprah says you should try….’ ‘Have you tried the gastric bypass or the surgical lap band..’
All along you fail to realize that you are not describing her, you are simply describing the body she will never have. TV commercials are rife with stories of dramatic weight loss, women like her in before and after pictures. She will always be before and that is not because of her lack of willpower, not because she cannot break her body like a wild horse and starve it into submission, this body is her reality. Her body was never broken but you certainly knew how to fix it.
The image that is painted of who she’s expected to be doesn’t just hurt, she crumbles under its weight. When she sees the image of who she is expected to be, she sinks into a wave of depression. She is somehow always too big, always too much, always too unacceptable. She must make herself smaller, small enough to make everyone comfortable. She must hide her body until it’s thin enough to be seen.
She learnt growing up that she could never go to the shop wearing sweats and a t-shirt. What? Hell no! That was a privilege that was preserved for the thin whose bodies were flexible enough to come as they are. Her’s was a deficit their’s was a credit. It’s funny because no matter how healthy she is, no matter how fit she is; there will always be one standard by which she is judged. This standard is the body that she is not supposed to have, it’s the maligned instrument that carries her around the world. By that standard she will always fall short. She has learnt painful ways of overcompensating for the trophy body she could never win, even when she can’t, even when she shouldn’t. She has learnt painfully that her body is a debt that could never be paid.
What if I told you that we are more alike than you think? What if I told that behind the trolls, the berating comments and the unsolicited advice there lies an insecure person. You demonize her body because you know that even if yours is painted as the ideal it remains contested territory claimed by everyone but yourself. You’re scared because you know that by societal standard fat is more than just 500 pounds on a scale. Fat means unhygienic, fat means unhealthy, fat is a weaponized insult. You critique her body regularly and so brutally causing her world to shrink in small and important ways. A conversation about a fat person is a conversation about weight loss and she’s forever held back in an invisible turnstile stuck there until she can will her body to change from what it has always been. Her body was never broken but you certainly knew how to fix it.
Nonetheless, she has chosen to blaze her own trail. She knows now more than ever that weight loss doesn’t lessen the pressure, the pressure just changes. She knows now that happiness has nothing to do with weight loss, if it did you wouldn’t struggle to balance out your waist to hip ratio even when you’re half her size. Her body works, her body loves, her body is her kingdom come. In this body she has found her voice and she has so much to say, she needs you to listen. Will you listen?
