My Improvisational Life

When I was about 12 I went on vacation with my mother and sister and another family. The other family had a son, the son brought a friend, and both boys discovered a fun game that week: torment the fat girl. I don’t need to explain the game, every person who didn’t grow up on a deserted island has either played or been a victim, or maybe both. That week they were vicious, and the message was obvious; that I was not worthy of even basic human dignity or respect because I was fat.

I have a very distinct memory from that trip of sitting in a restaurant shortly before we were supposed to go home. I am sure it was a good restaurant — it was Hilton Head, after all, and the people we were with had expensive tastes — but I don’t remember what I ordered. All I remember is sitting at the end of the table trying desperately to look like I was eating so no one would pay any attention to me, possessed of the absolute certainty that if I put so much as one bite of that salad in my mouth that I would throw up. I remember being beyond tears at that point. I remember shame. Worst of all, I remember thinking that I deserved it.

In differing degrees, shame is a part of every fat person’s experience. There are messages everywhere screaming OMG TEH FATZ IS EEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIILLLLLL and it is impossible to screen out every one of those messages, particularly when you are a child. When no one ever tells you those messages are bad, or worse, when the people you most love and trust reinforce those messages, they become internalized to the point where they become personal truth, and it is nearly impossible to conceptualize of anything else.

I am currently wrestling with a pursuit of truth, not just in the arena of body acceptance, but in many other areas of my life, and in that pursuit I discovered something yesterday. It’s in the book of Joel, one of those minor prophets that most people, even those of us who went to Christian college, forget even exist. Joel 2:26 says

“You will have plenty to eat and be satisfied
And praise the name of the LORD your God,
Who has dealt wondrously with you;
Then My people will never be put to shame.”

Maybe this is a radical interpretation of the text, or maybe this is just what the verse says to me right this minute, but it seems to me that God is not so much a fan of starvation OR shame, and is pretty much about eradicating both.

Today I wanted hot fries. I rarely eat them, but for some reason they looked really good to me today. I started to do the rationalizing mental dance in front of the vending machine, thinking how I didn’t really need hot fries, maybe some nice fruit would be better, how bad I would feel if I ate them, what if someone found out I ate them, blah blah blah, all those old lies that come along with the shame of being a fat person in a thin obsessed Calvinist food-as-sin culture. But then I realized, if I want hot fries, I can eat hot fries.

I am not ashamed to say they were delicious.