kethrai's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Fat Chick Manifesto On the phone last night, I was talking to my friend A. A is pretty cool—our birthdays are a year and ten days apart, we’re both redhaired, and we’re both fat chicks with a sense of humor about it. A is about a foot shorter than me, and has bigger front teeth, and those lovely brown eyes instead of washy bluegreen, but it’s kind of funny and cool at the same time that we’re pretty similar physically. Anyway, she was telling me that she’d been suffering with a lot of the same symptoms I’ve had for the last year and more—fatigue, exhaustion, etc. She went in for bloodwork yesterday—and the 102-lb-soaking-wet-PA wrote on her chart (without even weighing her!) “poss. anemia, poss. thyroid; obese.” RIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHTTTTTTTT. Okay, A IS tubby. She could stand to lose some pounds. So couldn’t we all. But “obese”? I suppose there is a fairly strict medical definition of “obese” under which she might qualify. But how would our little toothpick PA know that without taking height and weight measurements? Okay, I’m not going to be coy here. I am five feet and ten inches tall in my bare feet, and currently I’m weighing in at 210 lbs. While I could stand to drop 20-30 lbs, I actually don’t mind my size and height. Shopping to clothe this body can be a bitch (especially jeans) but once I got over my Gawky Teen Phase, I liked the altitude. I can whine with the best of them about shopping, but panicking over my weight is just about the last thing on my mind, and frankly, I think I’m healthier for it. No eating disorders or malnutrition here; I have bones like rock and save for old injuries (knees and back) and the odd cold, tend to stay disgustingly healthy. Even in HS—which during its entirety, I never dropped below 170 (hit my adult height by the time I was 13) when I was getting a lot of exercise and generally “doing more”, well, I was never down to me bones, that was for sure. But apparently, doctors lose ALL perspective if you weigh over 140 lbs. and you’re female. I remember going to a Military Medical doctor (ever wonder where the bottom third of any graduating medical school class goes? Now you know--) when I was sixteen and my knees had started to ache on me. What I didn’t know then was that I had stripped out tendons from exercise in poor shoes. But the doctor looked at my chart, asked me if I had a boyfriend, and then came out with the most amazing statement: “I see you’re 10 lbs overweight. If you lost the weight and got a boyfriend, you’d stop bothering us with imaginary problems to get some attention.” Three years later, 20 lbs lighter, and en-boyfriended, I got out of bed one morning and collapsed to the floor, and couldn’t walk. After a certain amount of groaning and wobbling, I made it to the campus sports-medicine guy, who had seen more blown knees on football players than I dare to contemplate. He recognized what I had done immediately, put me on 800 milligrams of Motrin a day, and gave me some PT exercises, which are the reason I can still walk. It’s so reductionist of them. I mean, really. I am a lot of things—a fat chick, a poet, a jewelry-maker, a wife, a cat-mom, a Ren Fairy. There are vast numbers of reasons why I might get sick, get tired, be exhausted. I suppose I have a lovely red herring to distract them with inasmuch as I smoke, but it’s astonishing how many times I’ve gone to the doctor in the last 8 years and the answer to “why is my wound that needs stitching still spurting?” comes out as a variation of You’re A Fat Chick or You Smoke, You Demon You. Broken leg? Fat Smoking Chick. Broken arm? Fat Smoking Chick. Sneezing? Fat Smoking Chick. Splinter? Fat Smoking Chick. It’s outrageous, it’s pigeonholing, it’s reductionist and dehumanizing. I know darn well that I’ve got big meat to go on my big bones, but that is hardly all of what I am. And it never fails to astound me how thoroughly people are willing to write off a Fat Smoking Chick, or even just a Fat Chick like my friend A. What’s truly terrifying is that we’re encouraging women to look at other women in our society with those reductionist eyes. The 102 lb PA reminds me very much of a woman I used to work with years ago. Missy was about 5’6” and slender, like size 0 slender. She was tiny and thin. When I first met her, she had just moved back to this area from somewhere in the midwest, and was getting a divorce from the husband who had neglected and mooched off her. She was a hard worker and a smart woman, but somewhere in there she’d bought into Seventeen Magazine wholesale, and agonized over every detail of her already barbie-perfect appearance. She obviously had some sort of timeline in her head—married and kids by such and such age—and the deadbeat ignoring husband had derailed her. By the time I met her, she hadn’t even yet truly filed for divorce, but was already shopping for husband number two—who had to meet the usual specs, of course—and she had two on the line, just in case one didn’t work out. She had to correct the blip in the timing, of course. It ABSOLUTELY FLOORED her that I was engaged to be married. I could see her look at me sometimes (and mind you, this was a nice girl, truly, just a little wozzly in the reasoning department) and think things like “How can that fat cow be engaged when here I am and no one’s biting the bait yet?”. And I could always tell, because, as I said, she was a NICE girl, and always looked guilty and ashamed immediately afterward. When she met the Darling Husband for the first time—tattooed, pierced, long hair and all-- I think it was the only time I wanted to slap the sudden look of comprehension off her face (“Oh, THIS is the kind of man someone like that cow can catch”) before she inevitably looked guilty for thinking it. Like I said, a nice girl. I didn't have the heart to tell her I'd had rich, conventionally-good-looking men on the string before, and passed them up.... But dang. She felt that she fell short of the feminine THING all the time, and never stopped working every single minute to make sure that she fit the Seventeen ideal. Didn’t eat, always cheerful to the men she dated (and miserably unhappy and insecure the morning after a date) exercising to the point that her menses stopped. Panicking that she was 31 and divorced and not engaged yet, terrified to be alone. And sure that if she could just get her looks to the pinnacle, then she would gain all her heart’s desires. I look back and STILL think….how bloody tiring. Poor thing. Oh, I’m not saying the doctors are entirely wrong, either. I know that my extra bag of donuts might mean higher blood pressure and heart problems in the end, and frankly, I’ll worry about it when I get there. I know that carrying around the extra weight may lose me some jobs and might get me not advanced as quickly at others. I know that people like my friend A. are going to have to go through lots of painful tests and humiliation before the doctors will discover (surprise, surprise) that the cause for the exhaustion is something like anemia, and not related to her weight at all, although they will truck out every weight-related thing they can think of first, just to make the point that she’s a Fat Chick and therefore must pay double. Again, how exhausting. I’ve found it strangely liberating, myself, to be a Fat Chick. I’ve stopped apologizing for myself and my existence, which I used to do when I was thinner. I gave up, in a way , and fight harder than ever, in others. I find it ironically amusing when people get that “What…YOU…are the artist?” when I’m at shows with my jewelry. If they’d thought for just a moment—I design bold and big, which shows off beautifully on us Fat Chicks—they would have figured it out, but it seems to them that that 20 lbs of donuts should have strangled brain and creativity. Um, no. There are some foolish risks I’ve taken because I’m big—there’s a certain sense of security, false or no, that follows when you’re used to towering over most people you meet. Foolish risks, but ones that nonetheless proved my point—I’ve backed down drunks in bars, and walked through dicey neighborhoods, and never been molested by so much as a panhandler looking for spare change. Some of it is sheer dumb luck—some of it is that I’m a Fat Chick—some of it is that I’m nearly 6 feet tall in bare feet ---and most of it, I’m sure is the expression that I habitually wear, which a friend once interpreted as “If you force me to pay attention to the obnoxious thing you are doing, I will make you intensely sorry for it.” But being tall, being a Fat Chick, I find rather liberating and oddly safe. I’m not sure what to say to my friend A’s outrage over “obese”. It seems unfair, especially coming from Twiggy’s Twin like that. Being a Fat Chick rather does mean that you get substandard clothing, treatment, and health care; also substandard employment and in some cases, housing. But being skinny doesn’t seem to be much help either—then you’re always running the gerbil wheel of thin enough, thin enough, and certain things are expected of thin people that when asked of a fat one, would be ludicrous. For instance—no one is going to ask me to run a 10k race for the company. But they would think nothing of imposing upon the time, good nature, and appearance of the skinnier and fitter person to run that race, which might mean hours and months of training on their own time. I don’t think I’m more entitled to free time than they. I’m not really coming to a point here—except, perhaps, that relying on someone’s core qualities is a lot more reliable than depending on their exterior—except that even a Fat Chick can take hold of things and shake the world upside down if she needs to—that being a Fat Chick doesn’t automatically exclude you from life, or love, or happiness, or creativity, although it might keep you out of Southwest Airline’s seats. And, perhaps, that if I ever meet that PA, I’m punting her to the moon. 7:51 p.m. - 2002-06-21 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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