big invisible me

It's a great paradox: taking up more space and becoming invisible.

I think about this in terms of culture and self. As fat people, we are seen, then ignored. I think it's a repulsion thing. A turning away. As though looking at us too long will turn the viewer into us. There are undertones of politeness strewn in-- as in, don't look at the person with the deformity, don't draw attention. This may read like oversimplification. Maybe it is. But then it goes deeper. I don't know that we are seen as being as human as fit people. We don't look familiar, like the signifier (forgive my deconstructionist tone here) of a human. We're not the drawing, the textbook representation, the image from the 3rd grade photostrip. We are, in our own way, Frankenstein. Off the slab of childhood, of culture gone decadently mad, of familial dysfunction and comfort where we can find it. We amble through life awkwardly at times, not because we aren't capable, but rather, we are encumbered.

I'll drop the we, because it's getting patronizing, I fear.

I've walked through life encumbered with this coping mechanism, and to some extent, a series of beliefs about my own capabilities. Some of these I learned early on, and I'm not gonna say I was traumatized by Junior High Gym class, but as a fat kid, there were things I couldn't do. No hurdles. No climbing up the rope. No running "cross country" in anything under 11 minutes. No gold shorts in the President's Fitness Challenge every year. But I could throw and I could kick. So I tried to take pride in those things, but right underneath was this knowledge that there were all these other things I wasn't so great at. Sure, I was an A student. I knew I had smarts, but I believe that knowledge of my athletical abilities-- my sense of a physical self-- was already nagging at me.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I've been lucky enough to have a few experiences that have shown me my physical capabilities. It's just that there is a way where I want so hard to not be in the way. I still feel it. If someone is pushing a cart past in practicum, and I suck in my gut and scootch in as hard a possible, and they still graze me as they pass, there's this cringe that has to do with it all being my fault. Nevermind the tiny space we're working in. It's a feeling of always being in the way. It's hard to shake. I don't know that folks who've been thin/average their whole lives carry this.

There's another element of the invisibility. It's a way to be dismissed. To be seen as incapable, as undisciplined (these are, afterall, the big beliefs), as genderless, harmless, I don't know what else. I've been stuck here, and I've hidden here. It's kept me from change (bad change, bad) and it's held me in my own little cocoon and kept me feeling safe (and warm, yes warm). It's also left me fucking depressed, because I've bought into all those misconceptions and beliefs. I've seen myself through the eyes of this culture and I'm gonna say it right now: I've despised myself.

This is starting to feel like a Sunday confessional. It's not. So in the interest of winding things up and moving out and into my day, I'll tell you that I'm armed with this information. I'm watching it. I'm asking myself how I comply with it, and how I'm gonna shake it up, and off, and move further out into the world.

Here I go.