We are seated and I perch myself on the edge of the seat. I have done this before. I will do it again. My thighs are very strong. I want to enjoy the meal, the lovely conversation with these treasured friends. I want to enjoy the cocktails and the gorgeous food being put before us, but all I can think about is the pain in my thighs and the arms of the chair pinching my sides and how much longer I will have to pretend everything is fine.
When the meal is finally over, relief washes over me. When I stand, I am dizzy and nauseated and aching.
Even the happiest moments of my life are overshadowed by my body and how it doesn’t fit anywhere.
This is no way to live but this is how I live.
60
I am always uncomfortable or in pain. I don’t remember what it is like to feel good in my body, to feel anything resembling comfort. When walking through a door, I eye the dimensions and unconsciously turn sideways whether I need to or not. When I am walking, there is the twinge of my ankle, a pain in my right heel, a strain in my lower back. I’m often out of breath.
I stop sometimes and pretend to look at the scenery, or a poster on the wall, or, most often, my phone. I avoid walking with other people as often as possible because walking and talking at the same time is a challenge. I avoid walking with other people anyway, because I move slowly and they don’t. In public bathrooms, I maneuver into stalls. I try to hover over the toilet because I don’t want it to break beneath me. No matter how small a bathroom stall is, I avoid the handicapped stall because people like to give me dirty looks when I use that stall merely because I am fat and need more space. I am miserable.
I try, sometimes, to pretend I am not, but that, like most everything else in my life, is exhausting.
I do my best to pretend I am not in pain, that my back doesn’t ache, that I’m not whatever it is I am feeling, because I am not allowed to have a human body. If I am fat, I must also have the body of someone who is not fat. I must defy space and time and gravity.
61
And then there is how strangers treat my body. I am shoved in public spaces, as if my fat inures me from pain and/or as if
I deserve pain, punishment for being fat. People step on my feet. They brush and bump against me. They run straight into me.
I am highly visible, but I am regularly treated like I am invisible. My body receives no respect or consideration or care
in public spaces. My body is treated like a public space.
62
Air travel is another kind of hell. The standard economy-class seat is 17.2 inches while a first-class seat is, on average, between 21 and 22 inches wide. The last time I flew in a single coach seat, I was in an exit row, for the legroom. I fit in the seat because on that particular airline, Midwest Express, there was no window-seat armrest in the exit rows. I boarded and sat. Eventually my seatmate joined me, and I could instantly tell he was agitated. He kept staring at me and muttering. I could tell he was going to start trouble. I could tell he was going to humiliate me. I was mortified. He leaned into me and asked, “Are you sure you can handle the seat’s responsibilities?” He was elderly, rather frail. I was fat, but I was, I still am, tall and strong. It was absurd to imagine I could not handle the exit-row responsibilities. I simply said yes, but I wished I were a braver woman, the kind who would turn his question back on him.
When you are fat and traveling, the staring starts from the moment you enter the airport. At the gate, there are so many uncomfortable looks as people make it plain that they do not want to be sitting next to you, having any part of your obese body touching theirs. During the boarding process, when they realize that they have lucked out in this particular game of Russian roulette and will not be seated next to you, their relief is visible, palpable, shameless.
On this particular flight, the plane was about to pull away from the gate when this agitated man called for a flight attendant. He stood and followed her to the galley, from where his voice echoed through the plane as he said it was too risky for me to be seated in the exit row. He clearly thought my presence in the exit row meant the end of his life. It was like he knew something about the flight no one else did. I sat there and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands as people began to turn and stare at me and mutter their own comments. I tried not to cry. Eventually, the agitated man was reseated elsewhere, and once the plane took off, I curled into the side of the plane and cried as invisibly, as silently, as I could.
From then on, I began to buy two coach seats, which, when I was still relatively young and broke, meant I could rarely travel.
The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.
Even when you’ve bought two coach seats, travel is rife with humiliations. Airlines prefer that obese people buy two tickets, but few airline employees have any sense of how to deal with two boarding passes and the empty seat once a plane is fully boarded. It becomes a big production: first when you are boarding and they need to scan two boarding passes as if this is an unsolvable mystery and then, once you’re seated, as they try to make sense of the discrepancy, no matter how many times you tell them, yes, both of these seats are mine. The person on the other side of the empty seat often tries to commandeer some of that space for themselves, though if any part of your body were touching them, they would raise hell. It’s an unnerving hypocrisy. I get very salty about that, and the older I get, the more I tell people that they don’t get to have it both ways—complaining if any part of my body dared to touch theirs if I bought one seat, but placing their belongings in the empty space of the empty seat I bought for my comfort and sanity.
And of course, there is the issue of the seat belt. I have long traveled with my own seat belt extender because it can be quite the ordeal to get one from a flight attendant. There are few discreet opportunities to request one. Flight attendants often forget if you ask when, say, boarding the plane. They tend to make a big show of handing it to you when they finally remember, as if punishing you, reminding everyone else on the plane that you are too fat to use the standard seat belt. Or that is what it feels like because I am so self-conscious about everything related to my body.
By carrying my own seat belt extender, I have often been able to circumvent these petty humiliations and nuisances, but there really is no escape. On recent regional flights, I have been told that it is airline regulation to use authorized extenders only. There was one particularly grim flight to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where the flight attendant made me remove my seat belt extender and take one from her, in front of the entire plane, before she would allow us to take off. Federal regulations, she said.
I am very lucky that I have finally gotten to a place in my career where it is part of my contract with an organization flying me to speak that they have to buy me a first-class ticket. This is my body and they know it, and if they want me to travel to them, they need to ensure at least some of my dignity.
This recitation feels so indulgent but this is my reality. This too is the truth of living in a fat body. It’s a lot of weight to bear.
V