pain
How To Rebuild Your Self Esteem And Reclaim Your Beauty After Being Called Fat By A Lover
He was a bad cliche: a musician who played beautiful music, but was mean and spewed words that were ugly as fuck. I had met him on Craig’s List. We exchanged torrid emails about poetry and art. When I met him in person, I saw red flags immediately- He had acne and horrible body odor. Online he confessed to being sensitive. In person I learned that he suffered from bi-polar disorder, and had gone off his medication- Hence the acne. He had lived in Jerusalem while studying to be a Rabbi, and had passionate opinions about music and culture. He was interesting, and I was in the throes of heartache, and void that left me feeling hungry. Nonetheless, I cried after the first time we slept together, and felt nothing but emptiness, and desperation.
A few months later he came to meet me at a pizza parlor after a show I had attended. The band was called Planet Booty – so I wore a form fitting sequin dress, and bejeweled cat ears. He texted that he could not wait to see my ass in the dress I was wearing, that he had viagra. It did not feel right, but I asked him to meet me anyway. He arrived while my friends and I were eating pizza. He joined us, and wolfed down buffalo wings.
Later, as we walked down the street, he said because it was the first night of Hanukkah- the festival of lights- he should be honest:
I hailed a cab as he continued on. I tried not to listen, but I kept hearing his words. I got into the cab without speaking to him. I blocked him on facebook, I blocked his number from my phone, but I could not block out the memory of his words. I kept hearing them over and over again. They rang like ugly bells.
No matter how many ways I have tried to reclaim his words, make them mine, make them absurd, I could not take away their hurt. No matter how many times I have told myself that he was crazy, I could not forget the ugliness of his words, or forgive myself for letting them get to me.
Hence, though fat-activists valiantly try reclaim the word fat, I cannot erase the way that word has at once defined and violated my body. Fat has never been a positive word for me. Not with my family, not with my peers, and certainly not with the boyfriend I had when I was twenty years old who told me I was too fat to fuck and then gave me herpes.
I am a woman who struggles with an eating disorder, and anxiety. I use food as a way to soothe myself. I have to watch not only what I eat but how I eat. Sugar and starches trigger me emotionally. I have to be careful to not overeat, or eat too quickly. Sometimes I eat so quickly out of nervousness that I bite my tongue. I like going to the gym and exercising because it helps me with my anxiety. I have weighed as much as 245 lbs and as little as 160 lbs. I like my body when it is 160 lbs more than I do when it is 245 lbs.
I refuse to reclaim the word “fat.” I want to reclaim a more powerful word than fat. I want to reclaim a different word: The night I wore that sequin dress and cat ears to hear Planet Booty, I asked a friend, “Do I look ok?”
“No,” she said. “You do not look ‘ok.’ You look beautiful.”
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Submitted to ArtParasites by Trixie Valentine
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