by Lindy West
I don’t remember much about the appointment itself. I went in, filled out some stuff on a clipboard, and waited to be called. I remember the waiting room was crowded. Everyone else had somebody with them; none of us made eye contact. I recognized the woman working the front desk—we went to high school together (which should be illegal)*—but she didn’t say anything. Maybe that’s protocol at the vagina clinic, I thought. Or maybe I just wasn’t that memorable as a teenager. Goddammit.
Before we got down to business, I had to talk to a counselor, I guess to make sure I wasn’t just looking for one of those cavalier partybortions that the religious right is always getting its sackcloth in a bunch over. (Even though, by the way, those are legal too.) She was younger than me, and sweet. She asked me why I hadn’t told my “partner,” and I cried because he wasn’t a partner at all and I still didn’t know why I hadn’t told him. Everything after that is vague. I think there was a blood test and maybe an ultrasound. The doctor, a brisk, reassuring woman with gray hair in an almost military buzz cut, told me my embryo was about three weeks old, like a tadpole. Then she gave me two pills in a little cardboard billfold and told me to come back in two weeks. The accompanying pamphlet warned that, after I took the second pill, chunks “the size of lemons” might come out. LEMONS. Imagine if we, as a culture, actually talked frankly and openly about abortion. Imagine if people seeking abortions didn’t have to be blindsided by the possibility of blood lemons falling out of their vaginas via a pink photocopied flyer. Imagine.
That night, after taking my first pill, as my tadpole detached from the uterine wall, I had to go give a filmmaking prize to my friend and colleague Charles Mudede—make a speech on a stage in front of everyone I knew, at the Genius Awards, the Stranger’s annual arts grant. It was surreal. Mike and I went together. We had fun—one of our best nights. There are pictures. I’m glassy-eyed, smiling too big, running on fumes and gallows humor. I remember pulling a friend into a dark corner and confessing that I had an abortion that day. “Did they tell you the thing about the lemons?” she asked. I nodded. “Don’t worry,” she whispered, hugging me tight. “There aren’t going to be lemons.”
She paused.
“Probably no lemons.”
Afterwards, Mike didn’t want to stay over at my place because he had to get up early to go to his high school reunion. That was fine. (It wasn’t.) I’ve got some uterine lining to shed, bozo. I tried to drop him off Fonz-style, but he could tell I was being weird. It’s hard to keep secrets from people you love, even when your love isn’t that great.
“What’s going on?” he said, as we sat in my quietly humming Volvo in the alley behind his house.
“I can’t tell you,” I said, starting to cry.
There was silence, for a minute.
“Did you have an abortion?” he said.
“Today,” I said.
He cried too—not out of regret or some moral crisis, but because I’d felt like I had to keep this a secret from him. We were just so bad at being together. He felt as guilty as I felt pathetic, and it made us closer, for a while.
He still went to his reunion the next day, and he didn’t text enough, and I cried a little. I lay in bed all day and ached. No lemons came out. It was like a bad period. The day after that, I felt a little better, and the day after that was almost normal. I wasn’t pregnant anymore. But instead of going back to our old routine—him running, me chasing—something had shifted inside me. Within six months, we were broken up for good. Within seven months, I wasn’t mad at him anymore. Within a year, he moved back east. He was a good guy.
I hesitate to tell this story, not because I regret my abortion or I buy into the right-wing narrative that pregnancy is god’s punishment for disobedient women, but because it’s so easy for an explanation to sound like a justification. The truth is that I don’t give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grows inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies.
For that reason, we simply must talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities, and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, always an impossible decision. Well, we’re not, and it’s not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex, and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine.
Paradoxically, one of the primary reasons I am so determined to tell my abortion story is that my abortion simply wasn’t that interesting. If it weren’t for the zealous high school youth-groupers and repulsive, birth-obsessed pastors flooding the public discourse with mangled fetus photos and crocodile tears—and, more significantly, trying to strip reproductive rights away from our country’s most vulnerable communities—I would never think about my abortion at all. It was, more than anything else, mundane: a medical procedure that made my life better, like the time I had oral surgery because my wisdom tooth went evil-dead and murdered the tooth next to it. Or when a sinus infection left me with a buildup of earwax so I had to pour stool softener into my ear and have an otolaryngologist suck it out with a tiny vacuum, during which he told me that I had “slender ear canals,” which I found flattering. (Call me, Dr. Yang!)
It was like those, but also not like those. It was a big deal, and it wasn’t. My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.
You’re So Brave for Wearing Clothes and Not Hating Yourself!
Probably the question I get most often (aside from “Why won’t you go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to debate why rape is bad with five amateur MMA fighters in a small closet?”) is “Where do you get your confidence?”
“Where do you get your confidence?” is a complex, dangerous question. First of all, if you are a thin person, please do not go around asking fat people where they got their confidence in the same tone you’d ask a shark how it learned to breathe air and manage an Orange Julius.
As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, “Where do you get your confidence?” is, “You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.” I’m not saying there’s no graceful way to commiserate about self-image and body hate across size-privilege lines—solidarity with other women is one of my drugs of choice—but please tread lightly.
Second of all, to actually answer the question, my relationship with my own confidence has always been strange. I am profoundly grateful to say that I have never felt inherently worthless. Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied—people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large. The world around me simply insisted on it, no matter what my gut said. I used to describe it as “reverse body dysmorphia”: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kin
d—why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was a home run.
So my reaction to my own fatness manifested outwardly instead of inwardly—as resentment, anger, a feeling of deep injustice, of being cheated. I wasn’t intrinsically without value, I was just doomed to live in a culture that hated me. For me, the process of embodying confidence was less about convincing myself of my own worth and more about rejecting and unlearning what society had hammered into me.
Honestly, this “Where do you get your confidence?” chapter could be sixteen words long. Because there was really only one step to my body acceptance: Look at pictures of fat women on the Internet until they don’t make you uncomfortable anymore. That was the entire process. (Optional step two: Wear a crop top until you forget you’re wearing a crop top. Suddenly, a crop top is just a top. Repeat.)
It took me a while to put my foot on that step, though. So let me back up.
The first time I ever called myself fat, in conversation with another person, was in my sophomore year of college. My roommate, Beth—with whom I had that kind of platonically infatuated, resplendent, despairing, borderline codependent friendship unique to young women—had finally convinced me to tell her who I had a crush on, and didn’t understand why the admission came with a Nile of tears. I couldn’t bear to answer her out loud, so we IMed in silence from opposite corners of our dorm room. “You don’t understand,” I wrote, gulping. “You count.”
Beth is one of those bright, brilliant lodestones who pulls people into her orbit with a seemingly supernatural inevitability. She wore high heels to class, she was a salsa dancer and a soprano, she could change the oil in a truck and field dress a deer, she got Distinction on our English comps even though she and I only started studying two days before (I merely passed), and she could take your hands and stare into your face and make you feel like you were the only person in the world. It seems like I spent half my college life wrangling the queue of desperate, weeping suitors who’d “never felt like this before,” who were convinced (with zero input from her) that Beth was the one.
She regularly received anonymous flower deliveries: tumbling bouquets of yellow roses and trailing greens, with rhapsodic love letters attached. She once mentioned, offhand on the quad, that she wanted one of those Leatherman multi-tools, and a few days later one appeared, sans note, in her campus mailbox. In retrospect, these years were a nonstop, fucked-up carnivale of male entitlement (the anonymous Leatherman was particularly creepy, the subtext being “I’m watching you”), one young man after another endowing Beth with whatever cocktail of magic dream-girl qualities he was sure would “complete” him, and laboring under the old lie that wearing a girl down is “seduction.” At the time, though, we laughed it off. Meanwhile, alone in my bed at night, the certainty that I was failing as a woman pressed down on me like a quilt.
I was the girl kids would point to on the playground and say, “She’s your girlfriend,” to gross out the boys. No one had ever sent me flowers, or asked me on a date, or written me a love letter (Beth literally had “a box” where she “kept them”), or professed their shallow, impetuous love for me, or flirted with me, or held my hand, or bought me a drink, or kissed me (except for that dude at that party freshman year who was basically an indiscriminate roving tongue), or invited me to participate in any of the myriad romantic rites of passage that I’d always been told were part of normal teenage development. No one had ever picked me. Literally no one. The cumulative result was worse than loneliness: I felt unnatural. Broken. It wasn’t fair.
“You will always be worth more than me, no matter what I do,” I told Beth, furious tears splashing on my Formica desk. “I will always be alone. I’m fat. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”
I resented her certainty; I thought she didn’t understand. But she was just ahead of me.
The first time I ever wrote a fat-positive sentence in the newspaper (or said a fat-positive sentence out loud, really) was four years later, in December 2006 in my review of the movie Dreamgirls for the Stranger:
“I realize that Jennifer Hudson is kind of a superchunk, but you kind of don’t mind looking at her, and that kind of makes you feel good about yourself. But… fat people don’t need your pity.”
It was early enough in my career (and before the Internet was just a 24/7 intrusion machine) that my readers hadn’t yet sniffed out what I looked like, and coming this close to self-identifying as fat left me chattering with anxiety all day. My editor knew what I looked like. Would she notice I was fat now? Would we have to have a talk where she gave me sad eyes and squeezed my arm and smiled sympathetically about my “problem”? Because I just said fat people don’t need your pity.
Of course she never mentioned it. I don’t know if she even picked up on it—if she turned my body over in her head as she read that sentence. She probably didn’t. I didn’t know it at the time, but the idea of “coming out” as fat comes up a lot in fat-acceptance circles. I always thought that if I just never, ever acknowledged it—never wore a bathing suit, never objected to a fat joke on TV, stuck to “flattering” clothes, never said the word “fat” out loud—then maybe people wouldn’t notice. Maybe I could pass as thin, or at least obedient. But, I was slowly learning, you can’t advocate for yourself if you won’t admit what you are.
At the same time, I was blazingly proud that I’d stuck that sentiment in my Dreamgirls review—right there in the opening paragraph, where it couldn’t be missed. It was exhilarating to finally express something (even in the most oblique way possible) that I’d been desperately hiding for so long. From a rhetorical standpoint, it tidily expressed a few complex concepts at once: Fat people are not here as a foil to boost your own self-esteem. Fat people are not your inspiration porn. Fat people can be competent, beautiful, talented, and proud without your approval.
Not a ton had changed in my self-conception since that conversation with Beth. I had finally found someone to flirt and have sex with, but he wouldn’t be seen on the street with me or call me his girlfriend. He also believed in Sasquatch, wore a T-shirt that said, “I’m the drunken Irishman your mother warned you about,” and eventually dumped me for someone irritatingly named Mindy. We then had a screaming fight, which culminated in him attempting to “slam” the door in my face with a flourish, except he lived in a dank basement accessed via a garage and could only emphatically push the garage door button and stand there glaring as it “whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”ed to the ground in slow motion. My cabdriver hit on me while I sobbed, and a small voice inside reminded me I should be flattered.
Lots of men wanted to have sex with me—I dated casually, I got texts in the night—they just didn’t want to go to a restaurant with me, or bring me to their office party, or open Christmas presents with me. It would have been relatively simple to swallow the idea that I was objectively sexually undesirable, but the truth was more painful: There was something about me that was symbolically shameful. It’s not that men didn’t like me; it’s that they hated themselves for doing so. But why?
The question, “Why am I like this?” gnawed at me. The media tells me that I’m fat because a weird sandwich exists somewhere with Krispy Kreme donuts instead of buns. But I’m sure that’s not it. I would definitely remember eating that sandwich. Internet trolls tell me I’m fat because I eat lard out of a bucket for dinner, which would be a weird thing to do, and use a Toblerone for a dildo, which really isn’t an efficient way to ingest calories at all. The fact is that I’m fat because life is a snarl of physical, emotional, and cultural forces both in and out of my control. I’m fat because life is life.
Like most fat people who’ve been lectured about diet and exercise since childhood, I actually know an inordinate amount about nutrition and fitness. The number of nutrition classes and hospital-sponsored weight loss programs and individual dietician consultations and tear-filled therapy sessions I’ve po
ured money into over the years makes me grind my teeth. (Do you know how many Jet Skis I could have bought with that money? One Jet Skis!!!) I can rattle off how many calories are in a banana or an egg or six almonds or a Lean Cuisine Santa Fe–Style Rice and Beans. I know the difference between spelt bread and Ezekiel bread, and I know that lemon juice makes a great “sauce”! I could teach you the proper form for squats and lunges and kettle bell swings, if you want. I can diagnose your shin splints. I can correct your jump shot.
I never did manage to lose weight, though—not significantly—and my minor “successes” weren’t through any eating patterns that could be considered “normal.” The level of restriction that I was told, by professionals, was necessary for me to “fix” my body essentially precluded any semblance of joyous, fulfilling human life.
It was about learning to live with hunger—with feeling “light,” I remember my nutritionist calling it—or filling your body with chia seeds and this miracle supplement that expanded into a bulky viscous gel in your stomach. If you absolutely had to have food in between breakfast at seven a.m. and lunch at one p.m., try six almonds,* and if you’ve already had your daily almond allotment, try an apple. So crisp. So filling. Then everyone in nutrition class would nod about how fresh and satisfying it is to just eat an apple.
One day, during the Apple Appreciation Circle-Jerk Jamboree, the only other fat person in the class (literally everyone else was an affluent suburban mom trying to lose her last four pounds of baby weight) raised his hand and mentioned, sheepishly, that he sometimes felt nauseated after eating an apple, a weird phenomenon I was struggling with as well. What was that all about? Was there any way to fix it? The nutritionist told us she’d recently read a study about how some enzyme in apples caused nausea in people with some other elevated enzyme that became elevated when a person was fat for a long time. So, basically, if we fatties wanted to be able to eat apples again, nausea-free, then we’d really need to double down on the only-eating-apples diet. The only real cure for fatness was to go back in time and not get fat in the first place. I started to cry and then I started to laugh. What the fuck kind of a life was this?