The Beautiful Truth

I've had cause lately to consider again the difficulty of truth if you are a fat person. Whereas for other people telling the truth is mainly a question of reporting the facts as honestly as possible, the big, perhaps the biggest challenge of honesty for a fat person is to have the mettle to avoid telling the false truth dictated to you by others.

And to not be shamed by the avoidance of that.

I recognize that I may come across as a bit shifty in overly careful talk about fatness, weight etc., But I have to tame my vanity enough to press on regardless. I'm trying to reach for an elusive narrative of consciousness that's not only not available, it rarely appears except in glimpses.

I'm not sure I know what it would look like as a consistent force, as I've never knowingly come across a fat person who can speak about fatness unadulterated by the lifesapping falsehood that is the 'obesity narrative'.

Shaunta Grimes's piece is lovely, honest and everyday act of bravery in its way, but I feel the typical failure of nerve when it comes to claiming to be drunk on that which simply cannot make you drunk. It's a tribute to her skill as a writer that this doesn't deliver her tale into the usual pit of boredom waiting for the same old same. It doesn't break new ground available to a writer of her talent.

We always allow ourselves to submit to and be interrupted by others who are unworthy of such and are not fighting the same fight no matter what they assume. There comes a point when we have to ask ourselves what is our duty to the truth. How can any of us really complain when we decline to push ourselves beyond the trite handed to us merely because it means we connect through meanings that don't fit? If others hadn't done better than us, what would we have to crib and plunder?

Fat people need to take up the space of our own truth and stop waiting for permisson for that. No one will give it to us, I'm not even sure anyone can. So what if haters think our reaching is "useless" who are they to say what is useful to us or anyone else? Their talk is so dead and they don't even feel it. How would they know? They know nothing. 

We understand clothes that don't fit, why do we settle for worthless ideas that don't fit? The title is "Here's how I got fat" and it delivers on its promise to tell the same old story expected and praise is given, moving, honest, well done in using your voice to tell our version of what honesty is for you etc.,

Having most of your stomach removed is no resolution of any things that shouldn't need to be said. What is so difficult about acknowledging that? Why do the need to pretend whatever this isn't a different pathology, a more acceptable one? What is blocking that, is it vanity? Is it the need to be seen as good or healthy? If you are prepared to state you did damage to yourself with food, why aren't you able to say you damaged yourself to try and escape the trap set for all of us?

You rightly said;

I wasn’t required to live forever with the physical consequences of what I did to survive those mean years.

But it is not political consciousness that's trying to keep you stuck in what you call "physical consequences" its those waging a phony crusade. That's their trap. It's reminiscent of those who complain to activists that they want to lose weight. Activists did not create dieting. They did not promote its failed strategy as the only, the must be, the be all and end all.

Why can't we screen out those who would give praise for repeat their tired talk? Who have been happy to lead us and leave us to our fate. Haters didn't pull us through or pull us out, they've no right to regard at our own expense. None at all.

If you wish to frame your situation as substance abuse, at least impersonate many of the more admirable amongst them and their capacity to state boldly, "These are my options, they're shit, but them's the breaks", rather than cowering under them-because they're my options, they are righteous, they aren't.

They are what is deemed worthy of you. Authorities have endeavoured to leave fat with nothing but brutality and mutilation. It's not the best they could do. It's not guided by healing, its guided by the opposite of that.