Content note: extensive discussion of abuse, weight, body image, and food restriction.
As I often do when I’m nostalgic or missing my chosen family, I recently took a whirlwind tour through my Facebook photo history. I’ve had a Facebook account for ten years, so the content is seemingly endless—and more than a little cringe-worthy.
As the timestamps grew older, my heart grew warmer. From 2017, a photo of me with my favorite musician, Amy Lee, whose music helped me survive when I was a teenager, and who I got to meet years after that wretched high school era. 2015, the first time I ever called myself “spooky femme.” 2014, the first direct action protests I attended in college. 2012, working on President Obama’s reelection campaign. 2011, my best friend and I in San Francisco.
And then, 2010. Those warm, tender heart feelings caught in my throat like a fireball searing my insides without relief. 2010, me in Las Vegas in a little black dress and heels. 2010, dressed as Carrie for Halloween, fake blood streaking my body and staining my dress. 2010, touring colleges I would soon apply to. 2010, posing at the beach in a vibrant floral dress, water rising to meet my ankles.
2010, a body I didn’t recognize.
I was looking at pictures of a person much skinnier than I am. I was looking at pictures of me. But I’m not skinny. I am, without contest, now, in 2018, a fat woman. I have always seen myself as a fat woman, or when I was growing up, a fat girl. Even when I didn’t have the lexicon or tools to identify and name myself as fat non-pejoratively, I was “large” or “chubby” or “plus-sized,” or sometimes “curvy” when I dreamt of fitting in with women whose fat didn’t lump or bump or roll in the “wrong” places.
It’s unnerving and unsettling to look at pictures of yourself and not see the figure you’ve always strongly identified with—the body you were abused into hating for years when you were younger. So unnerving and unsettling, in fact, that my brain took this information and put it into a locked box. The key to this box wasn’t hidden, but I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted that fireball in my throat to find a home that wasn’t inside of me.
A few weeks after locking those deeply uncomfortable, upsetting feelings away, I started reading Jes Baker’s incredible new memoir, Landwhale. In one of the opening chapters, Jes details her experience poring over a scrapbook filled with pictures of her as a child—and how she didn’t recognize the fat girl she had always known herself to be in any of them until she reached photos of herself at age twelve and up. (I won’t ruin the rest of that story, so you should DEFINITELY read Landwhale for yourself. It’s excellent.)
I reread that chapter again and again, clutching Landwhale like it was a pot of gold. I wasn’t alone. I’m not the only person in the world who’s had this strange, isolating experience. Suddenly, that fireball ripped out of its poorly locked box and overtook my entire body, refusing to remain unexamined for even a second longer. I realized what I had been feeling so deeply while poring over my own (digital) scrapbook wasn’t just confusion or alarm. I was ashamed.
Ashamed about my body, then, now, and every moment of time in-between. Ashamed that my abuser deceived me into thinking my body was a devastating failure—a body that was much smaller during our relationship than it is now. Ashamed that I can’t always celebrate my fat body, even when I ache to do nothing but. Ashamed that admitting all of this feels like I’m betraying body liberation and fat positivity. Ashamed. Ashamed. Ashamed.
Not recognizing my own body in pictures from not even ten years ago is the catalyst—but there are other things wrapped up in that big fireball of shame, too. I’m currently at my heaviest weight. I recently unboxed a large bin of summer clothes after a long New England winter and nothing with buttons fits anymore. And then, of course, the usual suspects are at play, too: diet culture. Fat shamers. People who stare when I walk into a coffee shop wearing a crop top. Unbridled mainstream “body positivity” that only further harms fat people.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt such overt, overwhelming shame about my body. For seven years, I’ve worked incredibly hard to disrupt internalizing all of the horrible things my abuser said about and did to my body. Body liberation and fat positivity are core tenets of my work, and I do my best to turn that inwards, too, to cherish and honor and celebrate my body. But right now? Right now, it feels like there’s an enormous canyon between where I am and where I want to be.
After all of this, I returned to that extensive Facebook photo history and really started to dig in. As I went back in time, I saw my body shrinking, time period by time period. I found myself stuck on 2010 again, frantically scrolling between a handful of images, trying to decipher how that was me.
And then it registered. 2010 was the last year I was with my abusive ex-partner.
My abuser berated my body without relief for nearly four years. What started with intense critiques of how I dressed turned into demands that I wear the clothes he wanted me to wear, which turned into threats of refusing to acknowledge my presence if I dared to wear what I loved and connected to.
Once he stripped me of my self-expression, he turned to my body itself. To him, I was fat, except this time, fat had a moral value. Fat meant bad. Fat meant unattractive. Fat meant unacceptable. Fat meant no one else would ever desire me. Fat meant shouldn’t I be so grateful that someone like him would be with me, to try to make me better? Fat meant unworthy. Always unworthy.
These verbal insults quickly became more tangible, more actionable, more painful. He restricted my food intake, offered me weight loss pills, and dissected my body like I was a cadaver, picking the areas where I should lose weight, and where I shouldn’t. For the sake of my own self-preservation, I blocked some of it out, but what I do remember has scarred me deeply. Refusing to let me eat anything he deemed unnecessary. Constantly bringing up trips to the grocery store where he passed the aisle with the weight loss pills. Grabbing fleshy parts of my body, telling me “lose this.”
I saw my body as my abuser saw my body: undesirable, unworthy, and unacceptable. And all because I was fat.
But… I wasn’t fat. I was larger than many other children my age, but I wasn’t fat the way I am today. Looking back at those photographs shocked me. I saw a body that didn’t match the perception my abuser made me internalize. I saw a body I thought teenage me would have found desirable, worthy, and acceptable. But she didn’t. She despised that body, wanted to rip her skin off that body, dreamed of having any body but that body.
How do I reconcile these dueling truths of my body? I am fat now. I thought I was fat then. I was not fat then. My experience of being a fat teenager who was abused into loathing her body has harmed me in deep and innumerable ways. But I wasn’t fat.
The fat discrimination I experience now is real. The abuse directed at my body for four years was real. It’s how I perceived my body itself that differs across time.
When do I get to celebrate my fat body if I’m just learning its history?
I have more questions than answers right now. Putting this to paper feels like ripping my body apart at the stretch marks, but I need to try to move forward.
Right now, though, I’m giving myself space to mourn. I desperately wonder how I would feel about my body if my abuser hadn’t taught me it was a failure, if he hadn’t treated it like a science project to dissect and pick apart. I mourn the chance that I could have reveled in and celebrated my body when I was young instead of detesting it.
I mourn 13-year-old me, 14-year-old me, 15-year-old me, 16-year-old me, 17-year-old me. Thinking about the possibilities of what could have been shatters my heart.
If you are a survivor, you are not alone. Please know that you are loved and supported. You matter because you are here in this world, and you matter to me.