An Excerpt
from:
Fat Body, Lost
Soul:
A Journey of Personal
Discovery
by Dixie L.
King
I am fat.
This isn’t a case of thinking I
am fat when I’m not, the scourge of many American women. I have been fat to one
degree or another for most of my life. And I haven’t always been just a little
bit fat; for over twenty years, I was morbidly obese. My top weight was 313
pounds.
Probably, only the use of the
past tense—the “was”—in that last sentence is what allows you to keep reading.
People read the words, “I am
fat,” and they push aside the story in the same way they push away their
discomfort when they look at someone obese, or look in the mirror and see
themselves as obese. They will do it with distaste, or disdain, or judgment. If
they are very insecure, very immature, or with little sense of their own
empowerment, or if they are in the full blaze of youthful beauty and haven’t yet
realized it isn’t theirs to keep, they will do it with a giggle, a catcall, or a
rude joke.
You don’t buy credibility, and
you don’t sell books, by writing, “I am fat.”
You buy credibility and you sell
books by writing the words, “I once was fat. I know the pain, the
discouragement, the hopelessness of being trapped inside a fat body. I, too,
have dieted, binged and purged, and stretched the limits of the women’s sizes at
Macy’s. I’m here today to tell you there is hope.”
That is what you write if you
want to be a credible voice in the wilderness of female
desperation.
What you don’t write is: I am
fat.
I have been fat to one degree or
another for about fifty-six of the last fifty-nine years of my existence.
I now compound my wrongdoing by
mentioning age. And what an age to mention! Fifty-nine is not a
looking-forward-with-hope age, or a “thank God I’m doing something about it now”
age, or a “the best years of my life are still ahead” age. In our society,
fifty-nine is, kindly speaking, the age of the senior citizen. It is the age of
the crone. It is the age in which the amount of Botox it takes to appear young
and vibrant is enough to poison a pachyderm. It is the age when even if you do
something about the fat, you don’t make yourself more marketable. It is the age
when you finally come to grips with the realities of gravity and decay. Or you
don’t, and render yourself even more pathetic. Add fat to the mix, and the
concoction is lethal.
Just as being fat breaks the
rules, so does talking about it—especially if you aren’t talking about it as a
state of transition. Fat is only acceptable if you have left it or are in the
middle of divorcing it, just as getting older is acceptable only if you find
creative and believable ways to deny it.
I am fat and mostly always have
been. I didn’t deal with this state, this fate, in the way many “women of size,”
as they euphemistically call us, deal with it. I didn’t hide inside a marriage
or a low-profile job. I didn’t keep my head down, my eyes lowered, as I passed
people on the street or in the grocery store. I didn’t restrict myself to my
home or refuse to fly on planes. I didn’t do those things because I’m innately
defiant and a pretty good actress. So instead, I pursued my education, and
became an anthropologist, an educator, a trainer, a researcher, a business owner
and a public speaker. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the subject of eating
disorders. I do diversity training and make size a part of it. The rest of the
time I passed myself off as “normal”, as though at my higher weights I didn’t
notice my own struggle in theater seats. I treated with seeming kindness and
compassion the idiocy of the passing car of teens who screamed insults in which
the words “pig” and “elephant” tended to dominate. I laughed off the people who
attended my workshops and sent me anonymous flyers about weight loss programs
and bariatric surgery with tiny print at the bottom, “It changed my life. It can
change yours.”
Although you might be forgiven
for thinking so, I am no flag bearer for fat rights, no hero of the people of
size; nor have I ever been. I do not find fat in any way a comfortable state of
being. I incorporate fat into my work to get beyond the social barrier it
imposes, to create a zone of comfort for myself in what would otherwise be an
unbearable pillory of shame and isolation. I don’t celebrate fathood. Instead, I
have brought fat, my enemy, to my table, keeping it close at hand, watching its
every move so I can circumvent its destructive intent.
Trust me, it has been not a
comfortable relationship.
So, understanding the rules as I
do, why would I write about being fat?
Because of a dream I had of
holding my own starving body. Because it is time to tear away the mask. Because
I am writing for my life.
--Excerpt from a personal essay
by Dixie L. King
