Voices
My Life as a Practicing Fatso
By Janice Scull
Everybody thinks they've got it bad. All you ever hear from anybody is how things are harder for them because they're dyslexic, had an alcoholic father, or an inborn talent for spending vast amounts of money. Everyone has their unchosen handicap, and I'm not trying to ignore any of these. And maybe I'm prejudiced because of my own personal trials, but I think: chubby girls, now they've got it bad.
 | Illustration by Rebecca Kramer |
We learn early on that appearance matters. The way you wore your hair and tucked in your shirt, the way you wore makeup and nail polish and earrings all determined who you were. If you were, for some odd reason, unfortunate enough to be born not to look like a cutout from a magazine you were punished with ridiculing remarks from those who were "better" than you. This is especially true with young girls who are fat. I myself wasn't actually born fat but around the age of about ten I had suddenly doubled in size. And I say suddenly, because it really felt like I woke up one day to find myself plumper and a bit more roly-poly than past years.
The day I got my first love letter from a friend named Jose, I hadn't yet gained the weight. "Dear Janice," it read. "You are pretty and I want you to be my girlfriend. Will you go out with me? Circle yes or no." As I read this, the blood from my entire body rushed to my head and I could feel my face turning red. I was embarrassed yet extremely flattered, and as I began to circle no, I looked over at Jose and saw an anxious face. I passed the note back and saw the face droop and I knew his heart was in a billion little pieces.
I remember when he stopped liking me. He walked up to me with pride in his face and said, "I don't like you anymore because you're fat."
"Oh," I said and tried to blow it off like nothing had happened. That night I went home and examined my body. I mean really examined it. A head to toe search. I was determined to find fat, all this fat, and I did.
This moment, the moment I became conscious of my obesity, I lost myself as a person. I wasn't Janice anymore; I was corpulent, I was fleshy, I was fat. I'd look at my cellulite and cry until my swollen eyes couldn't pump out any more salty emotions. As far as I was concerned I was all lard and no brains and I soon began to convince myself that that's what everyone else saw too. It wasn't hard to prove. Jose wasn't the only one who noticed my obesity. My mother had taken it upon herself to tell me how overweight I had become. "If you could just lose a little weight, honey, you'd be so pretty."
As my complex grew, being self conscious became a 24-hour job. I started wearing bigger shirts, baggier jeans, shorts below the knees, no tank tops, and under no circumstance, even if life threatening, did I ever expose the belly. I learned how to sit so as to not look like my fat rolled. Folding the arms in order the slyly cover up the blubber was a definite favorite. It wasn't hard to contort my body in order to appear thin. Whether it worked or not ... well, I'll probably never know.
Kevin Paisley was the first boy to see my stomach; the first ever to see my body in its first-born state. I was quite shy at first and continued to do things like lie on my back. I made the mistake of asking him if he thought I was fat. "Not fat, but maybe a little chubby," was his response.
"Chubby," I snapped back. "So you're saying I'm overweight?"
"Well, maybe a little overweight but not in a bad way." He was being nice.
"What do you mean, not in a bad way? How can you be overweight and it not be bad?" This went on for several hours until we exhausted the issue to the point that I left for home. It never did get resolved.
Bathing suit season was the worst. Anytime I had to try on anything was bad, but to have to wear something that tight, that revealing ... Every suit always seemed to accentuate the really fat parts. If the suit showed off my wrists I wouldn't have a problem, but why my butt, thighs and stomach? My thighs sort of touched each other and my belly stuck out. I tried wearing a shirt or even boxers when going swimming but I still felt like a beached whale no matter what I did.
There was this test in high school. The dreadful fat test required they pinch some fat from your arm and leg and then measure how much you had with this weird claw like device. I hated this test. I really loathed it. Not only did I have to go up in front of all my classmates to be tested for my fat content, but I thought, surely if this test was a pass or fail type of thing I would definitely fail. The fact that nobody really knew what the measurements meant made no difference whatsoever.
My appearance being more important than my mind was very hard for me to grasp. Yet my mom's voice, the look on Jose's face when he told me he didn't like me anymore and the image of a slender body all rattled in my brain. Constant reminders of how I should be instead of who I was. The image that stared back at me from the mirror was fat and ugly and I hated every part of it. Even to this day, after becoming a feminist and assuring myself that size doesn't matter, I catch myself looking at my reflection on store glass windows and thinking fat. And even though I never do anything about it, I'm always promising myself that I will diet and exercise. I can't help it. Growing up with magazines, Barbie Dolls and my mother constantly telling me to lose weight, I have become a non-practicing anorexic. If only I had a fast metabolism.
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