Uncorrected Personality Traits

Apropos of nothing.

4 Deathfat Realities (Out of uncountable variant possibilities)

1. Every time I travel by plane, something I do often, I must confront the reality that I may be singled out by one of the flight crew as being too fat for one seat. Oh, I can put the arm rest down, but that doesn’t always matter; these are rules that are applied arbitrarily and it is possible that one day I will be asked to pay for a second seat, or else forfeit my right to be on the plane. I carry my own private seatbelt extender, because asking for one on the plane seems too great a risk of drawing attention to my size. When I board planes, I am extremely cheerful to every flight attendant I see, and make excessive amounts of eye contact in the feeble hope that a reminder of my personhood will help me avoid this fate. I sit with mounting anxiety, trying to will myself into appearing as small as possible, until the door closes and we pull back from the gate.

2. I cannot just go to any restaurant without considering the seating situation. Familiar restaurants, most chain restaurants, are not a problem, but booths in places unknown (or sometimes, chairs with arms) can be extemely uncomfortable, and the only way to find out if I fit is to sit in one. If I’m with close friends, it’s no big deal to ask if we can move tables, but in circumstances where I do not know people well, bringing it up means identifying myself as the kind of fatass who can’t always fit in a fucking booth. Doing this can be very uncomfortable, for me and for the people I’m with, and so this is something I have to privately worry about prior to going out to eat with people.

3. I live in a major city, and even in this major city, within thirty minutes’ drive from my home there are exactly three stores that carry my clothing size. Within an hour’s drive stretches that number to five. The overwhelming majority of shops, and there are multitudes of them, do not carry clothing that I can even try on. Because the shops that do exist are exclusively filled with clothing I despise, I must order all of my clothes online. This means paying for shipping and not being able to try stuff on before I buy it. When things don’t fit, I have to pay to ship them back. If I go on vacation and forget my swimsuit, I will probably just have to do without, as I won’t be able to easily find one that fits in a brick-and-mortar shop. If I have an underwire snap while I’m at work, I can’t just jet over to a big-box store for a replacement bra; in fact, I can’t even walk into a Lane Bryant and find one in my size. I have to order it online and wait for it to arrive.

4. When I go to the doctor, I always need to remind the nurse who takes my blood pressure that I need a larger size cuff, which she then has to go hunting through the rest of the building for. Measuring with a too-small cuff gives a false high reading, and if I didn’t know this I might be medicated for a condition I don’t actually have. If I am in a car accident and need to be airlifted to the hospital, I might have to wait for an ambulance because the helicopter may not be rated to carry my weight plus that of the equipment, the EMTs, and the pilot, so I am at greater risk of dying because I couldn’t get the care that might have saved my life. If I need an MRI to assess a head injury, I may have to travel hundreds of miles to find a machine that will accomodate me, again hurting my chances of survival. If I need medicine, odds are good that the dosage will never have been tested on a person my size, so its efficacy may be in question.

I weigh something in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. This is what I look like.

Body fascism affects everyone, there is no denying that. It affects everyone. However, everyone being affected by a culture of body fascism does not mean we all experience it in the same way, nor that it is applied equally and in the exact same manner to all bodies. Experiences are different, and they are different not just because one person is larger or smaller than another, but because of the myriad ways in which our body shape and size intersects with our race and our ethnicities and our gender identities and our economic status and the degree to which we are able-bodied or disabled and our backgrounds and our health and our relationships with our families and our relationships with food.

Fat identity is not a race you run, nor a prize you win. The lived embodiment of fatness is often dramatically different from one person to the next, and denying that difference is not only shortsighted and offensive, but profoundly damaging. Pretending that all applications of “fat” are universally the same hurts people like me, who have concerns that need to be heard and addressed as much as anyone else’s, but whose experience is often erased in bodily discourse. Who knows what an airline seatbelt extender is, if you’ve never had to use one? Why memorize the standard blood pressure cuff ranges in centimeters and know your own arm measurement, if you didn’t have to? How many fat people are out there desperately in need of this information but who will never get it if we insist upon the fallacy that “fat” is just a solipsistic construct to be shaped for whatever oppressive convenience a random person may require?

It is not a matter of determining who has it worse; there is no hierarchy of suck, and imposing one is futile. It is rather a matter of learning to when to shut one’s damn mouth, stem the narcissistic tide of self-reflection, and fucking listen to the voices that are hardest to hear. The voices that say the shit that makes you uncomfortable, the shit that you don’t want to know, the shit that you don’t understand in the least, because the listening is how you get past these obstacles.

Listen.