My weekend has been filled with standing on my feet painting multiple doors in my home vibrant shades of banana yellow and a dark, brooding charcoal gray. I am going to try and write down some coherent thoughts about softer bodies while I take a “foot break.”
If you’ll allow me to paint with a broad brush, living while fat is, in itself, a vibrant declaration. Fatness is particularly loud, if you, like me, step out in anything other than a shapeless tent. Hiding your fat body is acceptable. Wearing a cheetah print, not so much. A jewel tone? Forget about it. Fatties are supposed to hide in the shadows and lurk in the nightmares of the skinnies.
Which, if I am being honest, is just fine with me. Haunting the thins with my delicious style choices and saying, “Sorry, babe, this only comes in 2X and up, is forever and ever goals — whether I’m horizontal or begrudgingly vertical.
Look, I know everyone has their own journey and blah blah, but who has the time to hate their bodies any more? I mean really. The magazine industry has been decimated by Instagram. And we’ve all, if you’re currently reading this, survived a pandemic. Never before has it been so easy to not give a flying fuck about your size. Block bitches on social with their Before and Afters and take no prisoners for your mental health — softness is in, babes.
If you are not following any fat people on Instagram, if you do not have any fat friends, find some. But not as a token, not as your “designated uggo” so you look “better” by proxy. But more so because fat people are doing incredible things — with fashion, with music, with art, with their voices in essays and books.
I would very much like to get back all of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, and whole years I spent trying to make myself smaller. Whether that’s in size or voice. I didn’t wear a bathing suit or enter a body of water from the time I was 12 until around 22, and already a mother.
I will spare the inner workings of my thought process over that decade because it could dabble, quite literally, in sad-fatty porn, which is the last thing I want to do. Despite my hang ups, I did bone quite a few hotties and I feel like that is actually more important than sharing how I agonized over my upper arm blankets and droopy muffin top. There is a vast library of well received books crying over stretch marks and double chins and, y’all, I am not gonna do it. I am not going to write about how hard it is to be fat unless someone wants to pay me a lot of money and I can cash those pity checks right into looking out my window and waving to my next-door neighbor, Oprah.
When I think about myself and the kind of energy I want to put out it all comes down to Jack Black. Being fat is rough, everyone knows this, and I will always pull up to a conversation about why your doctor, whenever they whip out a BMI chart can go eat dicks, but my life is far too short to focus on what I am not.
I want to lead with Jack Black energy, a kind of truth in representation. The guy is who he says he is: short, hilarious, confident. And then there’s the other stuff: musician, actor, whatever else he does, I have no idea. I realize he is also white and cis and very wealthy, but he’s still very short which means he’s still top of the food chain but, like, at the back of the line, and could possibly be picked off by Sheryl Sandberg.
What I am trying to write is this: we all have so much to offer beyond the swipe. Who you are doesn’t change based on a number, on a size, on your chin finding it has a twin. Who you are is already baked into your person, and wouldn’t it be fan-fucking-tastic if you let that person out, without all the hateful sprinkles that got added after the fact to make yourself more “presentable” to …
Men??
HAHA. That’s funny.
Repeat after me: Literally nothing I do is for men.
Gwyneth Paltrow??
Again, repeat after me: rose-quartz-in-her-coot-shoot does not rule me.
Now, ask yourself: What would Lizzo do, and then do that.
Within reason.
On this Memorial Day, as you think about what bathing suit you’ll be wearing this summer, I hope you lead with thunder thighs and confident vibes. I hope you put the sun block on your Instagram account. This is where you block those hoes who do not know how to keep their misery private. I wish you the best beach body this season because you are a human person with a body and we all need more vitamin D.
I am halfway through this, and I know I should lead with “you gotta read this” but I can’t stop wondering, why is this book so damn long?? Is this woman embellishing? Come talk about it with Lib + Me on IG Live in June.
CURRENTLY
Reading: Sinead O’Connor recalls ‘SNL’ Pope Furor in new memoir // Watching: Derry Girls // Listening: Hot Butter Soul // Coveting: Virgencita-inspired artwork meant to “strike fear in the heart of creeping evil” // Arriving on my doorstep: “If Marcia Clark could get through 1995 then I can get through this day” t-shirt
If you love FLOP ERA share it with the kind of friend who will sit on the beach with you and run with the kids so you can chill with your cool beverage and dog-eared book you started six months ago.
Thick Thighs and Confident Summer Vibes
This is exactly what I needed to read today. Also, can you tell me where you got this amazing bathing suit? I also asked you on Instagram. I'm charming like that. https://www.instagram.com/p/COOoYFnH02T/