by Roxane Gay
I didn’t eat food correctly. I ate too fast. I chewed too loudly. I chewed ice too often. I didn’t put things away correctly. I didn’t arrange my shoes by the front door the right way. I swung my arms while walking. I would be told these things and then have to try and remember all the things I shouldn’t do so I wouldn’t be so upsetting by just existing. We would be walking, and I would remember, Okay, hold your arms at your side. Do not swing your arms. I would spend all my time just reminding myself, Don’t swing your arms. And then I might get distracted and forget and accidentally let my arm move an inch or two and I would hear this exasperated sigh, so I would redouble my efforts to make myself less upsetting to this person I loved. DON’T SWING YOUR ARMS, ROXANE. Sometimes, I catch myself trying not to swing my arms even now and I get so angry. I get so fucking angry and I want to swing my arms like a windmill. These are my arms. This is how I walk.
One day I went to a department store and got my makeup done. I thought I looked pretty. I wanted to look pretty for this person. I bought a bunch of makeup so I could be a better girl. I went to their house to surprise them and they looked me up and down and told me what else I could do to be more tolerable, more presentable to them. I stood there on the front porch, wanting my body to collapse in on itself. I had been so excited, so happy I had made myself pretty, and it wasn’t good enough. I certainly didn’t try that again. I went home with all my expensive makeup and my pretty face and then I cried that makeup off. The makeup is still in a yellow bag in my closet. Sometimes, I take it out and look at it but I don’t dare use it.
When I get my makeup done for television appearances while I am promoting a book or when I am asked to comment on pop culture or the political climate, I feel like I’m wearing a mask I have no right to wear. The makeup feels far thicker than it really is. I feel like people are staring at me, laughing at me for daring to think I could do anything to make myself more presentable. And I remember how I felt the one time I tried to look pretty for someone, how it wasn’t enough. The first chance I get, I scrub the makeup off. I choose to live in my own skin.
I was never going to be good enough, but I tried so hard. I tried to make myself better. I tried to make myself acceptable to someone who would never find me acceptable but kept me around for reasons I cannot begin to make sense of. I stayed because they confirmed every terrible thing I already knew about myself. I stayed because I thought no one else would possibly tolerate someone as worthless as me. I stayed through infidelity and disrespect. I stayed until they no longer wanted me around. I would like to think at some point I would have left, but we always want to think the best of ourselves, don’t we?
But I am a lucky girl. I think most of my sad stories are behind me. There are things I will no longer tolerate. Being alone sucks, but I would rather be alone than be with someone who makes me feel that terrible. I am realizing I am not worthless. Knowing that feels good. My sad stories will always be there. I am going to keep telling them even though I hate having the stories to tell. These sad stories will always weigh on me, though that burden lessens the more I realize who I am and what I am worth.
73
The thing is, though, loneliness, like losing control of my body, is a matter of accretion. Twelve years of living in very rural places, a lifetime of shyness and social ineptitude and isolation, these things make the loneliness build and build and it cloaks me, sometimes. It is a constant, unwelcome companion.
For so long, I closed myself off from everything and everyone. Terrible things happened and I had to shut down to survive. I was cold, I’ve been told. I often write stories about women who are perceived as cold and resent that perception. I write these women because I know what it’s like to have so much warmth roiling beneath the skin’s surface, ready to be found.
I am not cold. I wasn’t ever cold. My warmth was hidden far away from anything that could bring hurt because I knew I didn’t have the inner scaffolding to endure any more hurt in those protected places.
My warmth was hidden until I found the right people with whom to share it, people I could trust—friends from graduate school, friends I met through the writing community when I was first starting out, the people who have always been willing to see and take me exactly as I am.
I am not promiscuous with my warmth, but when I share it, my warmth can be as hot as the sun.
74
Part of the reason relationships and friendships can be so difficult for me is because there is a part of me that thinks I have to get things just right. I have to say the right things and do the right things or I won’t be liked or loved anymore. It’s stressful, so then I engage in an elaborate attempt at being the best friend or girlfriend and get further and further away from who I really am, someone with a good heart, but also someone who may not always get things right. I find myself apologizing for things I shouldn’t be apologizing for, things I am not at all sorry for. I find myself apologizing for who I am.
And even when I am with good, kind, loving people, I don’t trust that goodness, kindness, or love. I worry that sooner or later, they will make my losing weight a condition of their continued affection. That fear makes me try harder to get things right, as if I am hedging my bets.
All of this makes me very hard on myself, very driven. I just keep working and working and working and trying to be right, and I lose sight of who I am or what I want, which leaves me in a less than ideal place. It leaves me . . . nowhere.
With age comes self-awareness, or something that looks like self-awareness, and so I try to be on the lookout for patterns of behavior, choices I’m making where I’m trying too hard, giving too much, reaching too intently for being right where right is what someone else wants me to be. It’s scary, though, trying to be yourself and hoping yourself is enough. It’s scary believing that you, as you are, could ever be enough.
There is an anxiety in being yourself, though. There is the haunting question of “What if?” always lingering. What if who I am will never be enough? What if I will never be right enough for someone?
75
My fat body empowers people to erase my gender. I am a woman, but they do not see me as a woman. I am often mistaken for a man. I am called “Sir,” because people look at the bulk of me and ignore my face, my styled hair, my very ample breasts and other curves. It bothers me to have my gender erased, to be unseen in plain sight. I am a woman. I am large, but I am a woman. I deserve to be seen as such.
We have such narrow ideas about femininity. When you are very tall and wide and, well, I guess the tattoos don’t help, you all too often present as “not woman.” Race plays a part in this too. Black women are rarely allowed their femininity.
There is also a truth that runs deeper. For a very long time, I only wore men’s clothes. I very much wanted to butch myself up because I understood that to look or present myself like a woman was to invite trouble and danger and hurt. I inhabited a butch identity because it felt safe. It afforded me a semblance of control over my body and how my body was perceived. It was easier to move through the world. It was easier to be invisible.
In relationships with women, presenting as butch meant that I didn’t have to be touched. I could pretend I didn’t want to be touched and I could stay safe. I could have more of the control I constantly crave.
It was a safe haven until I realized that I was playing a role rather than inhabiting an identity that felt true to me. People were seeing me but they weren’t seeing me.
I started to shed that identity, but people continued to see only what they wanted to see. Today, the people who misgender me aren’t doing so because they perceive a queer aesthetic. They’re doing so because they don’t see me, my body, as something that should be treated or considered with care.
76
The body is not a fortress, no matter what we may do to make it such. This may be one of life’s greatest frustrations, or is it humiliations? I spend a lot of time thinking about bodies and boundaries and how people seem hell-bent on i
gnoring those boundaries at all costs. I am not a hugger. I never have been and I never will be. I hug my friends, and do so happily, but I am sparing with such affections. A hug means something to me; it is an act of profound intimacy, so I try not to get too promiscuous with it.
Also, I find it awkward, opening myself up, allowing people to touch, to breach my fortress.
When I tell strangers I am not a hugger, some take this as a challenge, like they can hug me into submission, like they can will my aversion to hugs away by the strength of their arms. Oftentimes, they will draw me into their body, saying something condescending like, “See, it isn’t that bad.” I think, I never thought it was, and I stand there, my arms limply at my sides, probably grimacing, but still, they don’t get the message that I am not a willing participant in this embrace. The fortress hath been breached.
At readings, eager fans often ask for hugs and I offer my right hand saying, “I don’t do hugs, but I do handshakes,” and their faces fall in disappointment as if a hug with me is the necessary currency for their attention. Or they say, “I know you don’t like hugs, but I’m going to hug you anyway,” and I have to dodge their incoming bodies as politely as I can.
Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push? Once, I was at a restaurant with a large group of people and the waitress kept touching me. It was really fucking annoying because I don’t want to be touched like that unless we are in a sexual relationship. Every time she passed by, she would rub my shoulders or run her hand down my arm and I kept getting more and more irritated but I said nothing. I never do. Do my boundaries exist if I don’t voice them? Can people not see my body, the mass of it, as one very big boundary? Do they not know how much effort went into this?
Because I am not a touchy-feely person, I always feel this light shock, this surprise, really, when my skin comes into contact with another person’s skin. Sometimes that shock is pleasant, like Oh, here is my body in the world. Sometimes, it is not. I never know which it will be.
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More often than not, I feel hopeless. I give up. I cannot overcome myself, my body, these hundreds of pounds shrouding my body. It is easier, I think, to be miserable, to remain mired in self-loathing. I don’t hate myself the way society expects me to until I have a bad day and then I do hate myself. I disgust myself. I cannot stand my weakness, my inertia, my inability to overcome my past, to overcome my body.
This hopelessness is paralyzing. Working out and eating well and trying to take good care of myself start to feel futile. I look at my body, and I live in my body, and I think, I will never know anything but this. I will never know anything better than this.
And then I think, If I am really this miserable, if my life really is this hard, why do I still do nothing?
All too often, I look at myself in the mirror and all I can do is ask myself, Why? and What is it going to take for you to find the strength to change?
78
One of the many things I have always loved about writing (not to be confused with publishing) is that all you need is your imagination. It doesn’t matter who you are, you can write. Your looks, especially, don’t matter. As a naturally shy person, I loved the anonymity of writing before my career took off. I loved how my stories didn’t care about my weight. When I started publishing that writing, I loved that, to my readers, what mattered were the words on the page. Through writing, I was, finally, able to gain respect for the content of my character.
That changed when I started gaining a national profile, going on book tours, doing speaking engagements and publicity and television appearances. I lost my anonymity. It’s not that my looks mattered but my looks mattered.
It’s one thing to write as if you have no skin. It’s another thing entirely when photography is involved. I have to have my photo taken often, which makes me cringe. Every part of me becomes exposed to the camera. There is no hiding the truth of me. Often, there is video and then my truth, my fatness, is amplified. As my career has taken off, my visibility has exploded. There are pictures of me, everywhere. I have been on MSNBC and CNN and PBS. When a certain kind of people see me on television, they take the time to e-mail me or tweet at me to tell me that I’m fat or ugly or fat and ugly. They make memes of me with captions like “Typical Feminist” or “The Ugliest Woman in the World.” Sometimes Google Alerts takes me to a forum of MRA acolytes or conservative assholes having a field day insulting my looks with a picture of me from an event or magazine. I’m supposed to let it go. I’m supposed to shrug it off. I’m supposed to remember that the kind of people who would do such cruel things are beneath my regard. I am supposed to remember that what they really hate is themselves.
When I was doing publicity for Bad Feminist, I was interviewed for the New York Times Magazine. They needed a picture to accompany the interview and were not at all interested in my head shot or a random snapshot from my phone. I went to New York and had a photo shoot in a fancy photographer’s studio, where the receptionist, a tall and lithe young woman clearly modeling on the side, offered me water or coffee while I waited.
In the magazine, they used a full-length picture of me, from head to toe. I am staring at the camera thinking, This is my body. This is what I look like. Stop being surprised. It’s the kind of picture I always avoid, as if somehow, I can separate myself from my body if I am only photographed from the waist or neck up. As if I can hide the truth of me. As if I should hide the truth of me.
The photographer was charming, handsome. He and his wife were remodeling a home in Hudson Valley. I learned this because he apologized for not being able to attend my event that night. I don’t even know how he knew about my event. He asked me if I wanted to freshen my makeup, but I was not wearing any, so I just smiled and said, “This is my face.” Before we got started he asked me what music I wanted to listen to and I blurted out, “Michael Jackson,” because that is all that came to mind. A few moments later, Michael Jackson began piping through speakers and I felt like I was in the middle of a movie.
Things only became more surreal. The photographer had two assistants who would hand him the camera or lens he wanted. He told me where to stand and how to pose like an action figure. He wanted me to loosen up, but I am not good at loosening up when a camera is pointed at me. Eventually I got the hang of it and cracked a smile or two. I started to feel cool, like I was having a moment. Then I remembered what would happen when these images were published. I knew I would be mocked, demeaned and degraded simply for existing. Just like that, the moment was gone.
In the early days, before there were a lot of pictures of me available online, I would show up to an event and organizers would often look right through me. At one event, a gathering of librarians, a man asked if he could help me and I said, “Well, I am the keynote speaker.” His eyes widened and his face reddened and he stammered, “Oh, okay, I’m the man you’re looking for.” He was neither the first person nor will he be the last to have such a reaction. People don’t expect the writer who will be speaking at their event to look like me. They don’t know how to hide their shock when they realize that a reasonably successful writer is this overweight. These reactions hurt, for so many reasons. They illustrate how little people think of fat people, how they assume we are neither smart nor capable if we have such unruly bodies.
Before events I get incredibly stressed. I worry that I will humiliate myself in some way—perhaps there won’t be chairs I can fit in, or perhaps I won’t be able to stand for an hour, and on and on my mind goes.
And then, sometimes, my worst fears do come true. When I was on book tour for Bad Feminist, I did an event in New York City at the Housing Works Bookstore to celebrate Harper Perennial’s fiftieth anniversary.
There was a stage, two or three feet off the ground, and no staircase leading to it. The moment I saw it, I knew there was going to be trouble. When it came time for the event to begin, the authors with whom I was participatin
g easily climbed onto the stage. And then there were five excruciating minutes of me trying to get onto it too while hundreds of people in the audience stared awkwardly. Someone tried to help. Eventually a kind writer onstage, Ben Greenman, pulled me up as I used all the muscles I had in my thighs. Sometimes, my body is a cage in the most glaring ways. I was filled with self-loathing of an intense degree for the next several days. Sometimes, I have a flashback to the humiliation of that evening and I shudder.
After hauling myself up onstage, I sat down on a tiny wooden chair and the tiny wooden chair cracked and I realized, I am going to vomit and I am going to fall on my ass in front of all these people. After the humiliation I had just endured, I realized I was going to have to stay silent on both counts. I threw up in my mouth, swallowed it, and then did a squat for the next two hours. I am not sure how I did not burst into tears. I wanted to disappear from that stage, from that moment. The thing about shame is that there are depths. I have no idea where the bottom of my shame resides.
By the time I got back to my hotel room, my thigh muscles were shredded, but I was also impressed with how strong those muscles are. My body is a cage, but this is my cage and there are moments where I take pride in it. Still, alone in that hotel room, I sobbed and sobbed. I felt so worthless and so embarrassed. Words cannot convey. I sobbed because I was angry at myself, at the event organizers and their lack of forethought. I sobbed because the world cannot accommodate a body like mine and because I hate being confronted by my limitations and because I felt so utterly alone and because I no longer need the layers of protection I built around myself but pulling those layers back is harder than I could have ever imagined.