on bones, and flesh, and how i am not

by Carmela Furio

Content Warning: Eating Disorders and unhealthy eating habits

I do not know how to react to being told I’m beautiful. Not in that humble way in which women are taught to never flaunt or be aware of their beauty—it’s more that I just can’t take compliments for the life of me. I've never felt worthy of them, and so I will never feel worthy of the term beautiful. All of this begins with the simple fact I haven’t been told I’m pretty very often. I’ll hear it from friends if I say something mean about myself, or when I turn myself into something suitable for Christmas and my extended family wants to butter me up. I do not know yet if I’m someone considered ugly, but, funnily enough, I have a go-to answer for when those around me joke that they are. Ew, I’m so ugly, someone can say, and I'll have my answer ready. Pretty is a construct, I say. Beauty standards have ties to classism, I say. It’s formulated. It’s coping. It’s my attempt at placing a ‘turn back’ sign fifty miles down an abandoned road.

I ask my mother once if I am beautiful, and she tells me if I was, she would’ve taught me how to use makeup a long time ago. I am starting to feel, though, that more than not hearing it often, I’ve been taught not to think of myself that way. That I cannot think of myself that way.

I’m a size fourteen. My BMI index, because I can’t hide from it, says that I’m apparently obese, though my friends who actually look at me daily say otherwise. I do not like to weigh myself, have not willingly done so since I was fifteen. I fear what will happen when I do. Moreso, I fear what will have become of me to have started again.

When I’m thirteen, my sister’s swimsuit gets stolen during gym class. I tell her maybe she lost it, say something along the lines of, “Why would someone steal it if they’re not sure it fits?” She screams she’s not like me. Everyone is her size.

Mom apologizes for her later.

Feelings like this are universal; I do not need to explain myself to the sea that holds me. These anecdotes are unnecessary, not because they’re unimportant, but because they’re known, to me, to the girl in the changing room next to me, to my sister, as much as it may seem she’s perfect. But, nonetheless, I want to speak this, even if only in whispered essays and their false attempt at protection: I do not like to come downstairs for dinner too early.

My father has a thing with food, which can truly only be described as his ‘thing with food.’ He needs to be the first to get at food. More specifically, he needs to get to food before I do. He thinks, somehow, I will eat all four portions by myself unless I’m held back. So I do not come down for dinner early.

But my father will also be frustrated if I take too long to come down, will call up the stairs, tell me the family is waiting. I tell my mother I can’t win. She laughs, repeats it back to me, “You can’t win.” It is as if she is saying, “You cannot swim. You will drown. Now come eat.”

Despite all of this, my father offers me bigger portions, always has, says he knows I can eat more, then accepts the fact that my sister, skinny, is full. He does not listen when I tell him I do not like being teased about food. My mother tells me I’m too sensitive. My sister ignores the conversation.

I’ve learned to stop bringing it up. I tell my mother once I do not want her to mention how much I eat and she gets mad. The words she uses are old jokes, stolen from childhood commercials in the 70s. She doesn’t get what’s wrong, and I don’t get the chance to explain.

It’s dinner and my sister has already tired of my opinion, and I, too, have tired of my opinion. 

To complain is to admit to defeat, and to admit defeat is to admit failure. I have failed to become, as I’ve failed to intrinsically be, what is expected of me, wanted of me. To dare oppose that, to say maybe it’s not me that has failed but the expectations, is too much to speak on, certainly over dinner, and certainly with those who have proven they just cannot understand. 

That’s the most wonderful thing about systems and their thinking and how they hold us—and the villainy of fatness is tied to so many systems. There is no net for us to fall into when we wriggle out of their grip. It’s all I can do to squirm, to tickle the palm, but I am too afraid of the drop. I do not stand for myself, not against those that I love.

I don’t want to paint my family as terrible, because they aren’t. They’re loving and accepting and wonderful. But they’re also conditioned. I was too. (Was, past tense to the verb ‘to be’, implying a state of passiveness, implying that I am no longer, implying that conditioning has left me. It has not.)

I don’t realize how weird weight is in my house until I tell my best friend how my mother once had my sister take me to the basement, so she could teach me how to work out before I started high school. Someone was afraid I’d be bullied for being fat. I cannot remember which of them it was, but I tell the story anyway with a laugh, and my friend looks me in the face, pulls her eyes wide and her mouth grim.

“That’s fucked up.”

I don’t want to attribute all my weight problems to my family. It’s not just them, but fatphobia is interesting in how it moves from person to person. Interesting, as in, hilarious; interesting, as in, this makes me laugh, so how can it be true? How can something held together by only thread still be held? Held so widely, so strongly. We covet these ideas and these ideals and these falsehoods as if they are Truth of God. They are intrinsic and they are nonsense and breaking them down breaks society down, and no one wants that. No one can stomach that. Least of all those with the flat stomach. This: is Interesting.

The main characters in the movies I watch growing up are all skinny, all fear becoming fat. Regina George loses it over a few pounds, and even those who mock her obsession with weight still wear her size. My aunt is small and thin and always grabs at her stomach and her thighs in public and in the car and at the table. She turns over, rolls down her jeans, tells me to look at how big she’s gotten.

I, at seven, ask my mother if I should go on a diet. I, at seventeen, force myself into a diet. I, at seventeen still, have an Intervention in my best friend’s kitchen, disassociating, watching pizza grease slide down my fingers as she threatens to steal the pills from me herself.

I know where you live, she jokes.

Do you know where I am? I want to ask. I do not need to. She is smaller, but she knows. We both know. We sit together in more than just the kitchen.

No one has ever told me directly that I can never be beautiful for being fat. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard the phrase “fat is ugly.” But I have heard that it’s disgusting. I’ve been shown that it’s disgusting, in over dramaticized renditions of what it looks like to be ‘fat’ in health class (Fuck Supersize Me. Watch that ‘documentary’ and replace every fat person with a cow or a pig and see if it changes the narrative. It doesn’t. Fuck Supersize Me.)

When I first start to get medicated for my anxiety as a child, an incompetent doctor gives me pills aimed towards teenage boys with anger issues. It makes me irate, volatile, aggressive. It also makes me fat. Blew you up four dress sizes, Mom used to say.

“I’m still so mad,” she tells me, over a decade later. “You were a small thing.”

As if that’s what I should aim to be. Compact. Contract. What do you mean when you say small? Enough to pick me up and spin me around? Enough to comfortably grip my thigh? Enough to forget I’m even there?

No one wants to be told that they’ve fucked up their child. It’s an especially sore point for my mother, who bore a behavioral needs daughter prone to panic attacks and outbursts, who rightfully does not like being accused of ruining me.

She has time and again been blamed for the chemical imbalances in my brain. She does not want to hear about something of mine that might actually have been her fault, if only partially, if only as a bud born off a bud born off a bud, a generational line of loathing and disgust disguised as a rose.

Hate is cyclical. Hate is passed down from woman to woman like a rite of passage. Hate is part of fatphobia, and fatphobia is a matryoshka doll.

The way we look at fat ties to so many things larger than us—to diet culture, to the skewed ideals of perfection and health, to the fashion industry and fat shaming and trauma passed down through generations. The system behind fat is the actual system of society. It’s so hard to look past fat; it’s intrinsic to nearly everything, so much so that it’s almost unnoticeable, like dust in the air. 

When I look inside myself I see the fear of fat that’s been branded on me by systems, under that I see the disgust that’s been branded on me by the media, and under that is the same hate from doctors. Under that, too, is my sister, my aunt, my own mother. They are all me and I am all them; it is only that not all of us are small enough to fit on the lifeboat (I would like to continue this metaphor, would like to say some of us are left behind, on the ship, expected to float, fat, puffy balloons in the ice water. They do say CoolSculpting works wonders. But I have omitted it because it’s too morbid).

Every time I begin to feel beautiful in life I am reminded, by myself, by marketing ploys, and by my world, that I am not. That I cannot.

As a high school senior, three months after turning seventeen, I’m popping Vivivance back despite the fact that I no longer need it. Because it turns the dried well of my stomach into a flood zone, raging waves to keep the calories away. Because I like the way it trims my waist. Because I start to feel unseen.

Five months before I turn eighteen, I’m in the car with my father, on the way back from the doctors with my weight printed on my report, a BMI chart’s QR code redirecting me back to shame. My dad says I was doing so well a bit ago. And when I swallow my whole throat, stare down at the radio, and tell him it’s because I wasn’t eating, was borderline sick, was probably actually sick … he doesn’t say anything. What is there to say?

On Christmas morning my freshman year of college, I stare down that old pill bottle and contemplate taking it back with me. The kids at Iowa don’t know me that well, won’t hone in on my deflation like my friends did. No one will stop me.

The only reason it doesn’t come back with me is because I forget.

I tell these stories like they’re successes, like it’s some kind of badge of honor to try to ruin yourself. Like it’s something to be proud of that I hated my body so much I tried to suck my soul off my bones.

There’s so much to speak on when you talk about fat. I can tell of double standards, of fat shaming, of the illusion of health in relation to weight. I can rave on about doctors’ bias against fat people, about the dehumanization of fat bodies, about the fashion industry's progressive plus-size corner in the very back of stores. So much in my life tells me that I’m inhuman, that I should strive to be smaller, dantier, that I am undesirable.

Fat makes you start to question things. Why is skinny pretty? Why is fat only also pretty? What even is pretty? You work yourself down the line—from beauty, to beauty standards, to desirability, to commodity. We are simply a commodity. Why else would we need to take care of our weight when weight doesn’t mean health, doesn’t mean fitness, doesn’t even mean size.

The thing to note in all of this, about me being fat and being indirectly told to be ashamed of it, is that my size is not that big. Genuinely. I’m the smallest of plus-sizes, can barely be considered plus-size, and yet I feel degraded all the same. There’s no winning with being big. And that’s something people who have always been skinny will never understand.

Though people will get told they’re too boney or too thin, they’re never made out to be subhuman because of it. My mother, a woman who grew up skinny and only became bigger after having children, will never come to understand this. I tell her for years that I envy my sister, that it’s easier for her to find clothes. And she waxes on about how my sister is long-waisted, how it’s hard for her to get clothes.

My mother hears me but does not acknowledge me. She sits with her daughters and her sister in her backyard and recalls to us the time her brother says he got lost at Disneyland because a fat woman walked in front of him and blocked his view. And everyone laughs. And I laugh, because they will notice if I don’t.

I tell my mother, “But what about Lizzo” and she tells me, “Oh, no, but Lizzo is beautiful.”

I ask her if she’s not, and she only looks at me. My twin, the doll I grew out of, the carbon I was copied from. My mother says she misses when she was skinny. My mother laughs when people say we’re spitting images of each other. My mother agrees.

My mother wonders why I hate myself.

Despite what all these past years have preached about self-love, in the end this self-love is just whittled down to finding yourself beautiful, or accepting your imperfections as beauty, or being beautiful in unconventional ways.

Humans are made up of more than looking good, for someone else, for themselves. We are not priceless, because that insinuates we need to be given a price range, a value, to begin with. It is not our job to become desirable. It is not our job to find beauty in the little things. It is not our job to be that little thing. It is only our job to care for these bodies.

I tell myself this every day, and yet I still cry over my fatness. The ideal of thinness has been so ingrained in me by society that even when I write essays on not needing to be skinny to look pretty, even when I tell myself I don’t even need to look pretty, I will still wake up the next morning and think I’m not enough. By being too much, I am not enough.

My whole life, my body has been policed under the assumption that it’s advice, under the assumption that those who are policing me are doing so because they care for my health or are worried for me.

I work five-hour shifts in the summer heat without AC, without eating, the year I turn nineteen and my father pokes his head into my room to tell me, beaming, that it looks like I’ve lost weight. I deadpan “what is that supposed to mean?” and his face drops. He is hurt. I have hurt him. This is how he has been taught to compliment me, so he does and prods something he never knew existed. I tell him nevermind. I tell him thank you. What else is there to say?

People talk about wanting to fall in love with your shape, your weight, your body. But I don’t want to fall in love with my body. I want to fall out of it. Some days I want to fall into another version of it, or leave this one long enough to whittle it down to acceptability. I always come back to it in the end. My body is not capable of loving me, and I do not have enough of a definition of me to begin to love it back.

These are not the kind of feelings you can explain to someone in person. They’re not the kind of things you can even really try to talk about with yourself. They’re the things you think under the protection of your blankets, in the shower, places you feel secure, alone, empowered by the idea of stepping outside of exceptions and idealizations. These things are what you forget by morning, or when you step out of the shower, what you lose when you become small again.

No one wants to admit this—this, as in what we’ve been taught; this, as in, what we can’t even begin to fix. No one wants to admit they are a student, that we have, in fact, been taught. Fat jokes. Fat fears.

Everyone thinks they preach that fat is beautiful. But we’ve been conditioned by everything in our lives, by this world that secretly holds self-hate in its heart, that we’re not. We’ve been conditioned to hold beautiful above being, desirability over self. No matter what you say you cannot reverse the learning you’ve spread to your friends, to your sisters, to your daughter.

I’ve learned I do not want to be beautiful. I simply want to exist. Want to be. Attractiveness is a vice. Desirability is a vice.

People always respond to “I feel fat” or “I look fat” or “I am fat” with an attempt to soothe. I say that I do not feel seen by anyone in any industry or anyone I’ve ever known. I say that mirrors scare me and cameras scare me and even eyes themselves scare me, most of all my own. I say that I feel fat, I say that I am fat, and I’m told with desperate eyes that I’m not, or that thick is in, or that I’m beautiful in spite of it.

I say, I am fat, and I am never told, it’s fine just to be.