My Body Your Rules
A special thing happened to me at the Erykah Badu concert on June 30. Frankly, a lot of special things happened to me, including making the decision that Erykah is one of those artists I am going to see every time she comes through town. The way that Badu and her team utilize technology to make their show more intimate, more memorable, more human is the gold standard. But I’m not hear to talk about the musical side of Erykah Badu. My wife and I got to the show on the early side, lest we miss Yasiin Bey aka Mos Def. The seats next to me were unfilled but I figured that would change at some point. When the seats next to me did get filled the woman who sat next to me was a tall, thick not mega thick, younger black woman. I didn’t register anything but positive energy from her but I still said to her “I’ll switch seats with my wife” gesturing vaguely towards my smaller wife sitting next to me to offer her a more comfortable experience. Very quickly, very sweetly the woman looked at me and simply said “you’re fine”. If I remember correctly she gave a smile that was far from flirty, but very humane. I felt seen, I felt welcome, my body felt welcome. Her voice had love and sweetness in it but frankly also just practicality. I don’t think she had an issue with sitting next to me, nor an issue with some of the very incidental contact she would have sitting right next to a fat guy. At this moment I felt very comfortable. Comfortable in a way I rarely feel trying to be in a seat at a big ass event. A seat that’s too small for me, and a seat that frankly is often too small for a lot of folks whose weight is closer to average than mine is. That woman’s comments set a beautiful tone for me for what went on to be a beautiful show. Me and everyone else in the venue spent a lot of time standing up, enjoying ourselves and seeing some of the greatest to ever do it doing it right in front of our eyes.
This all stands in pretty broad contrast to the way I feel a lot of times trying to just sit and be comfortable at events. Ticketed events are big business. The seats are not big. America’s getting bigger, the seats aren’t always moving at the same pace. American business is not always answering the need for larger spaces with the brutal speed one might expect a capitalist venture to move with. Racism, sexism, religious persecution, fatphobia. . .these are part of the relatively small list of things that can go head to head with capitalist impulses and win. At the same time scientists are learning so much about drugs that are helping many people lower their body weight, society is learning so much about what is wrong about our disposition toward fat people. A larger portion of society is looking at the data for weight loss and weight gain and the comparative futility of sustained weight loss over an extended period of time. Less doctors are white knuckling it through with the conviction that another year of telling fat people they’re lazy is the best course of action for helping this societal ill. And a lot of people, some fat, some not, are putting shots in their butts once a week and shedding large percentages of their bodyweight.
Somehow I feel the need to credential my experiences as a fat person in some way that will let you know that my experience with medical professionals has been a profound shit show for my entire life. No one has done better work in this space than the podcast “Weight for It”. This episode should make you cry pretty reliably. I went to a nutritionist with my Dad maybe fourth, fifth, sixth grade. Nutritionist was a young man, hiker biker type, had a beard, I believe his name was Tim. I don’t know the exact impulse for our visit, but the undergirding fact was I was fat and fat people, fat kids, fat everybodys went to nutritionists. Tim had some type of height, age, growth chart laid out on his desk. Tim, speaking to my Dad, not to me, pointed at some spot on the chart and said “here’s where most kids his age are”. Then Tim went ahead and cleared away his coffee cup, probably some cup of pencils, maybe a paper weight, maybe a little plaque with his name on it and then pointed to close to the very top of his desk, many inches away from the actual chart he was referring to and said “here’s where your son is”. My dad is a chart guy, an economist by trade and he and Tim seemed to both be looking at this soberly, some trackable deviation from the norm resulting in a grown man pointing out to another grown man in the presence of a boy how abnormal, how problematic, how poisoned this boy’s life is. Later in the meeting Dr. Tim suggested that I not run because of the certainty I would break my ankles under my own weight. At my best every time I finish a run I imagine the final step being upon Dr. Tim’s throat as the last breath of his little shithead life ends and his Sauconys shake with a soft death rattle.
After some years of working with a nutritionist who actually treats me like a human, some years of therapy, weekly yoga and weekly appointments with a trainer I am happy with how I live. I sleep well. I don’t drink a ton. I have multiple groups of friends I love deeply. I can cook delicious food for myself and my family. I have the agency to deal with the doctors even if it breaks my soul and my family’s bank account to do so. I have all these wonderful things. I do all these wonderful things. I am wonderful. But, I don’t know where I stand with these medications. These medications will change our bodies. These medications will change bodies that don’t need changing. Does mine? Does yours? What I wished I could change was my relationship with my body and I did change it. What a success story. What I wish I could change is your relationship with fat people. Can you look at a fat person and think of someone who has a good night sleep, who exercises, who eats well, who cooks well, who spends his life well? I know that for years I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I always felt like the boy off the charts, the boy who’d break his ankles if he dared to jog. The boy whose existence was a problem. And now that my existence isn’t a problem to me, there’s a solution that just requires a prescription. But is there a problem? The solution we really need we could never give to ourselves, that solution would be love and understanding. That solution would be giving the person next to you humanity, respect and love. A young woman gave me a little bit of that at that Erykah Badu concert and it did a lot for me, maybe more than these medications ever will.