Читать книгу Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You - Sofie Hagen - Страница 10

My relationship with my body only became more distorted throughout my teen years. It became a routine. I would start a new diet on a Monday and the adrenaline of thinking, Finally, I will lose weight, carried me through the hunger and desperation to eat for a couple of days – maybe even weeks, until I had to give up and binge-eat till I crushed the disappointment in myself. I would then wait till next Monday and start again on a new diet. With each failed diet, I would blame myself, I truly believed that my incapability of following a diet was a sign of absolute weakness, laziness and stupidity. Also, I was still fat. Which I believed to be the worst thing a person could be.

Finding a new diet was a rush. I remember finding out that Dr Phil’s son Jay McGraw had a diet book on the market and punching the air. I tried the Atkins Diet, the Atkinson Diet, SlimFast (a disgusting brown powder you mixed into a drink in place of every meal), the Thinking Diet (‘you will lose weight if only you THINK differently’), 5-2 Diet (‘binge then starve yourself’), Weight Watchers, Slimming World, the ‘just don’t eat after 5 p.m.’ diet, the ‘only eat fruit till 2 p.m.’ diet, the ‘no carbs’ diet and so, so many more. I found thirty-two diet books in my mother’s basement recently, like a creepy shrine to thin ‘health gurus’ with teeth that are too white. I tried karate, swimming lessons, running, spinning, tennis, badminton, dance classes, power walking, Pilates, aerobics … I have owned exercise bikes, Pilates balls, step-benches and every single exercise VHS ever made. When I was sixteen, exhausted from always being either starving or numbingly full, I tried throwing up after I ate. I purposely tried to trigger bulimia, knowing full well that this was a terribly dangerous illness. I reached that point. Where, even though I knew full well that eating disorders can have awful consequences, often resulting in bodies that will never be able to have children, which will always struggle with health issues and food, and which sometimes just die – all of this seemed like a better option than staying fat.

I started going to the gym four times a week. I got up at 4 a.m. to be at the gym at 6 a.m., exercise for an hour and then go to school at 8 a.m. On the way there, I would feel so faint from my breakfast apple that I went by the bakery and bought myself a huge cinnamon bun and a chocolate milk. I would spend the rest of the day sleeping through maths class dreaming about the pizza that I would definitely have to binge afterwards.

The irony of me attempting to get an eating disorder is not lost on me. When I was eighteen, I learned about binge eating disorder. The reason that no one knew about it was that it was not officially registered as an eating disorder in Denmark at this point. I was mostly just relieved. There was a word for it. There was a word for me stuffing my face with carbs and sugar on a daily basis. Knowing the word didn’t stop me though. It just made me feel less guilty. I continued bingeing and I continued dieting.

Throughout my teens, I was angry but my anger was misplaced. I hated beautiful people. The self-hatred, the hatred of my body and how it existed in the world had turned so strong that I needed to project it elsewhere, or I would suffocate. So I turned my anger towards thin and conventionally beautiful people. I could just about forgive someone for being thin and beautiful – but not unless they were really ashamed of this. Ideally, every thin person at my school should have to walk up to me every morning and apologise for being handed better cards than me. They could at least pity me and acknowledge that I was trying really hard to look like them.

When I was seventeen, for Danish class, we had to analyse Sleeping Beauty. I unleashed all of my fury onto this fairy tale. I wrote about Sleeping Beauty and how she – and all other thin, beauty-privileged, empty skin-vessels – could just go suck on a massive ham and shut up. I wrote something along the lines of, ‘Beautiful people can apparently just be sleeping and still get more attention than ugly people – what have we got to do, learn to juggle?^fn4 The end.’

Their pain was nothing, nothing, I tell you. I was punished with an extra assignment to write an essay. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I nearly spat in the teacher’s face when she assigned it.

I was furious. I stomped my feet when I left the classroom. Slammed the door. ‘The Disadvantage of Beauty’. I was prepared to write the word ‘NON-EXISTENT’ three thousand times on a piece of paper and hand it in. But if there was anything I hated more than beautiful women, it was getting a poor grade.

I sat down and opened MSN Messenger.^fn5 I messaged all the beautiful people I knew. Sandy, who was a model. She was my age and once told me she wanted to be my girlfriend. I had laughed in her face. Great joke, Sandy. Have you not seen how I look next to you? She would be the first of quite a few models I would reject because I felt unworthy of their genitals touching mine.^{fn6 fn7} I messaged someone I knew from an internet forum. A guy with sturdy cheekbones. A few more.

‘What is the disadvantage of being beautiful?’ I asked all of them. And waited. They were surprisingly reluctant to reply, but none of them claimed not to be beautiful.

‘The worst thing,’ one of the beautiful people on my MSN Messenger chat list wrote to me, ‘is that women never become my friends just to be my friends. They always end up falling in love with me. And then I have to hurt them. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s really painful. I just love these women but not like that. And that hurts them.’

I wanted to object, but he had answered with such vulnerability and sincerity that I couldn’t help sympathising with him. Had he burst through my front door with a sign that said ‘pity me’ and had told me the same story, I probably would have wanted to push him out of a window. But I had begged him to share his feelings on the topic. These were not thoughts he ever shared with anyone. He knew how it sounded.

‘People always assume I am unintelligent. I am not taken seriously,’ someone else said.

‘I am never more than my looks.’ Another message popped up on my desktop.

‘I can never make real friends. If I laugh at someone’s boyfriend’s joke, they immediately accuse me of trying to steal him away from them. If I am polite, I am being fake. If I am mean, I am stuck-up. People tell me to my face that they hate me. They feel like they can, like I owe them something. I never chose to look like this,’ wrote another girl.

I assembled it all into an essay which I guiltily handed in the following day. I was left with a feeling of hollowness. I had a whole handful of resentment and nowhere to put it. Surely, someone was to blame for the way I felt. At this point, the best thing that could have happened was being forced by a teacher to write an additional essay on capitalism and beauty standards. But no one opened my eyes to that till years later. And it was hard to shake, this completely irrational and unfair hatred of beautiful people.

Jealousy of beautiful people is understandable. Privilege comes with what society perceives to be beautiful.

Beauty is a tricky one – because you can’t blame someone for being beautiful, but you can blame the culture that created the idea of ‘ideal beauty’. It has been decided that beauty is having a symmetrical face, straight, white teeth and white skin. Your eyes can be too far apart or too far into your head. Your ears can be the wrong angle. This is the Western idea of ‘beauty’. Of course, you must also be thin and nondisabled and definitely feminine if you are perceived to be a woman, and masculine if you are perceived to be a man. There are definitely icky racist, ableist, sexist, queerphobic and fatphobic connotations connected to ideas of what beauty is and what it is not. Class plays a role too: beauty can often be bought. Plastic surgery, teeth whitening, braces, contact lenses, and just a general ability to at least make your life look beautiful on social media. That fancy cup of coffee in that fancy coffee place with just the right filter.

Beauty is so subjective. It is laughable that we have somehow been tricked into thinking we all should find the same thing pretty. But we are frail and easily influenced. So we can’t deny that the lie that says beauty is objective means that some people who do not live up to those standards will be discriminated against. (Maybe this is why we, as a society, tend to love it when beautiful people struggle. We like to laugh at models falling on catwalks or the ‘dumb blonde’ trope in Hollywood films.)

Funnily, very beautiful people and fat people have something in common. Such as people being surprised when we accomplish things. It will stem from very different assumptions. If I ran a marathon, people would look at me with raised eyebrows and open mouths. Wow. For a fatty, she sure can run. I would be praised. If a really beautiful person gets a degree in law, they make movies about it. Wow. But why can she think? She doesn’t need to.

The idea that there is an objective beauty is soul-destroying, and it begins to feel like currency.

There is a scene in the movie Seven where a fat man is used to symbolise gluttony. He is also, surprise surprise, seemingly mentally ill, definitely poor, definitely unhygienic. Four traits that are always mushed together in Hollywood as if they are interchangeable. In another scene, the murderer has disfigured a supermodel and given her a choice: to keep on living, being ‘ugly’ for the rest of her life – or kill herself. Spoiler alert: she kills herself. This is not even that far from the truth. A study conducted by the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida in 1991 shows that out of a group of formerly fat people, given the choice between becoming fat again or going completely blind, 89 per cent will choose going blind.³ In another 2006 survey conducted by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, almost half of those asked indicated that they would happily give up a year of their lives if it meant they were not fat.⁴

I never believed that I could be found attractive. Part of me loathed the boys and girls who liked me, because surely they were either lying or horrible people themselves. Why would they want me, when they could get someone better? Someone thinner?

I remember a desperate boyfriend hissing into my face, ‘If only you could see yourself the way I see you,’ and me rolling my eyes at him saying, ‘You have to say that.’ And I laughed when he eventually cheated on me with a thin woman, because the joy of being proven right was more powerful than the pain of being cheated on.

Another boyfriend joined the military and had to be gone for long periods of time. I was so scared of being alone, of not being validated, that I joined yet another gym and started working out. Within a day, my entire world went back to revolving around weight loss. I started starving myself, counting calories, skipping school, so I could spend upwards of six hours in the gym, weighing myself four times a day and losing weight rapidly. By the time my boyfriend finally came home to see me for a weekend, I was angry at him for interrupting my stride. I blamed him for accepting me as I was, so I stopped feeling the need to exercise. As soon as he came back for a weekend, I started binge-eating again, gaining all the weight back and then some. I blamed him for that. I would not let him in. I would let no one in. I would let no one love me. Because I refused to believe it was a possibility. I was fat.

Looking back, I was in a fairly fortunate position. I was fat, but I was a small-fat. I was just about excluded from being able to buy clothes in straight-sized stores. I was ‘Aw, you’re not that fat’-fat. At the same time I had stumbled into a group of friends who cared about me and who had forced me out of my shell. It’s important to note that a lot of fat teens are pretty secluded and isolated – a consequence of bullying and having internalised the fatphobia they’ve experienced and witnessed. I talk flippantly about my teen years and the dramatic stories of love and sex, but I do so with the knowledge that not all fat people have had this experience. I especially feel this as I have grown older and fatter and my anxiety has risen. Being able to date and fool around is not a given for everybody.

I am not even sure you know how horrible it is being a teenager before you’re an adult. When you are a teenager, your hormones take full control of your every move. When I was a teenager and I fell in love, I loved more than anyone had ever loved before in the history of the world and I would die, simply die a violent death for a person with whom I had never even spoken. It’s truly a matter of swaying between all the extreme versions of every emotion to the sound of a hundred adults asking you to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you are both scared and at the same time, convinced that you definitely know better than these adults. Your teen years are also full of warnings. All the monsters that you thought were under your bed when you were a child are suddenly real – and they are not under your bed where you can see and contain them. They are the reason you are asked to never leave your drink out of sight, the reason you don’t walk home alone, and the reason you have to learn how to say no if there is something you don’t want to do. Yet, fairly often, we are not warned about the monsters that we can see – the people controlling everything that we consume. The people targeting marketing campaigns at teenagers’ fragile self-esteem, confirming their worst fears: that they are not okay, that they should be prettier and thinner and better. Basically shaking the groundwork for the person they are to become. You don’t know who you are or who to be? We will tell you. Be thin and pretty. How? By using our products. Daddy, is there a monster under my bed? Yes, actually, and he is holding a Slimming World brochure.

One day, when I was single and in my late teens, in the first week of my new job, I met a man who openly declared that he liked fat women. It was not directed at me, it was not to get me into bed, so I trusted it, weirdly. He told us, after a shift when we were getting drunk in the pub next to the office, that his father used to say to him: ‘Get yourself a woman with curves. They’re the best ones.’

He told me this with pride. I disregarded the problematic nature of that sentence because suddenly, I wanted to be the woman that he ‘got himself’. Hey, fuck feminism, this guy with sandy blond hair and wide shoulders who smokes a pipe despite being only twenty-one just told me he might fancy my fat stomach. Feminism can wait. Sure, Emily Davison threw herself under a horse to get me the vote, but I was not willing to challenge this man now – because there was the faint shadow of a promise of a kiss within his charming anecdote.

A year later, I found myself wishing that his father had told him, ‘Son, go get yourself a woman who is wilfully obsessed with you and who will write and send you poetry and always be so close to you that you can smell her breath,’ because then maybe, I would have had a chance. Instead he moved to the Danish island furthest away from Denmark. I take no responsibility for that.

Some people have fathers who do positive PR for fat women from an early age. I remember falling in love with him for just this reason. It was hard to believe that other people like that existed. Most people will have parents who tell them to ‘never get fat’, who will pinch their own stomach fat and say ‘eww’ and who will point at fat people in the shops and say words like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘gross’. The negative attitude towards weight is so all-encompassing that the chances are that whoever you meet has been taught to hate fatness, long before they even had a chance to make up their own minds about what it is they like and don’t like.

So I spent all of my teenage years hating myself, hating fatness and hating women and hating thin women, hating people who loved me and hating myself. I wasted so much time. I wasted so much money on attempting to make my body smaller.

When I was seventeen, I applied for part-time jobs. There was a plus-size clothing store selling everything from tent-like ponchos for fat people, to tent-like ponchos for fat people – with tassels. I had circled the shop a few times before I gathered the courage to go inside and apply. A large, older woman with a smile on her face took my application, looked me up and down and led me into her office. After a bit of chit-chat, she told me that she’d love to hire me. I said, as confidently as I could manage, ‘Just so you know, I am going to lose this weight soon.’

The woman’s face burst into a huge grin as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, sure!’

Today, I like her. Back then, I detested her and the shop and I never, ever wanted to work there. I stormed out, furious that she did not believe me because I would lose the weight, I would lose all the weight and I would be thin. The alternative did not even bear thinking of.

Sometimes you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me tell you about Andrea.