Second of all, to actually answer the question, my relationship with my own confidence has always been strange. I am profoundly grateful to say that I have never felt inherently worthless. Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied—people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large. The world around me simply insisted on it, no matter what my gut said. I used to describe it as “reverse body dysmorphia”: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kind—why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was a home run.
So my reaction to my own fatness manifested outwardly instead of inwardly—as resentment, anger, a feeling of deep injustice, of being cheated. I wasn’t intrinsically without value, I was just doomed to live in a culture that hated me. For me, the process of embodying confidence was less about convincing myself of my own worth and more about rejecting and unlearning what society had hammered into me.
Honestly, this “Where do you get your confidence?” chapter could be sixteen words long. Because there was really only one step to my body acceptance: Look at pictures of fat women on the Internet until they don’t make you uncomfortable anymore. That was the entire process. (Optional step two: Wear a crop top until you forget you’re wearing a crop top. Suddenly, a crop top is just a top. Repeat.)
It took me a while to put my foot on that step, though. So let me back up.
The first time I ever called myself fat, in conversation with another person, was in my sophomore year of college. My roommate, Beth—with whom I had that kind of platonically infatuated, resplendent, despairing, borderline codependent friendship unique to young women—had finally convinced me to tell her who I had a crush on, and didn’t understand why the admission came with a Nile of tears. I couldn’t bear to answer her out loud, so we IMed in silence from opposite corners of our dorm room. “You don’t understand,” I wrote, gulping. “You count.”
Beth is one of those bright, brilliant lodestones who pulls people into her orbit with a seemingly supernatural inevitability. She wore high heels to class, she was a salsa dancer and a soprano, she could change the oil in a truck and field dress a deer, she got Distinction on our English comps even though she and I only started studying two days before (I merely passed), and she could take your hands and stare into your face and make you feel like you were the only person in the world. It seems like I spent half my college life wrangling the queue of desperate, weeping suitors who’d “never felt like this before,” who were convinced (with zero input from her) that Beth was the one.
She regularly received anonymous flower deliveries: tumbling bouquets of yellow roses and trailing greens, with rhapsodic love letters attached. She once mentioned, offhand on the quad, that she wanted one of those Leatherman multi-tools, and a few days later one appeared, sans note, in her campus mailbox. In retrospect, these years were a nonstop, fucked-up carnivale of male entitlement (the anonymous Leatherman was particularly creepy, the subtext being “I’m watching you”), one young man after another endowing Beth with whatever cocktail of magic dream-girl qualities he was sure would “complete” him, and laboring under the old lie that wearing a girl down is “seduction.” At the time, though, we laughed it off. Meanwhile, alone in my bed at night, the certainty that I was failing as a woman pressed down on me like a quilt.
I was the girl kids would point to on the playground and say, “She’s your girlfriend,” to gross out the boys. No one had ever sent me flowers, or asked me on a date, or written me a love letter (Beth literally had “a box” where she “kept them”), or professed their shallow, impetuous love for me, or flirted with me, or held my hand, or bought me a drink, or kissed me (except for that dude at that party freshman year who was basically an indiscriminate roving tongue), or invited me to participate in any of the myriad romantic rites of passage that I’d always been told were part of normal teenage development. No one had ever picked me. Literally no one. The cumulative result was worse than loneliness: I felt unnatural. Broken. It wasn’t fair.
“You will always be worth more than me, no matter what I do,” I told Beth, furious tears splashing on my Formica desk. “I will always be alone. I’m fat. I’m not stupid. I know how the world works.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “I wish you could see yourself the way I see you.”
I resented her certainty; I thought she didn’t understand. But she was just ahead of me.
The first time I ever wrote a fat-positive sentence in the newspaper (or said a fat-positive sentence out loud, really) was four years later, in December 2006 in my review of the movie Dreamgirls for the Stranger:
“I realize that Jennifer Hudson is kind of a superchunk, but you kind of don’t mind looking at her, and that kind of makes you feel good about yourself. But… fat people don’t need your pity.”
It was early enough in my career (and before the Internet was just a 24/7 intrusion machine) that my readers hadn’t yet sniffed out what I looked like, and coming this close to self-identifying as fat left me chattering with anxiety all day. My editor knew what I looked like. Would she notice I was fat now? Would we have to have a talk where she gave me sad eyes and squeezed my arm and smiled sympathetically about my “problem”? Because I just said fat people don’t need your pity.
Of course she never mentioned it. I don’t know if she even picked up on it—if she turned my body over in her head as she read that sentence. She probably didn’t. I didn’t know it at the time, but the idea of “coming out” as fat comes up a lot in fat-acceptance circles. I always thought that if I just never, ever acknowledged it—never wore a bathing suit, never objected to a fat joke on TV, stuck to “flattering” clothes, never said the word “fat” out loud—then maybe people wouldn’t notice. Maybe I could pass as thin, or at least obedient. But, I was slowly learning, you can’t advocate for yourself if you won’t admit what you are.
At the same time, I was blazingly proud that I’d stuck that sentiment in my Dreamgirls review—right there in the opening paragraph, where it couldn’t be missed. It was exhilarating to finally express something (even in the most oblique way possible) that I’d been desperately hiding for so long. From a rhetorical standpoint, it tidily expressed a few complex concepts at once: Fat people are not here as a foil to boost your own self-esteem. Fat people are not your inspiration porn. Fat people can be competent, beautiful, talented, and proud without your approval.
Not a ton had changed in my self-conception since that conversation with Beth. I had finally found someone to flirt and have sex with, but he wouldn’t be seen on the street with me or call me his girlfriend. He also believed in Sasquatch, wore a T-shirt that said, “I’m the drunken Irishman your mother warned you about,” and eventually dumped me for someone irritatingly named Mindy. We then had a screaming fight, which culminated in him attempting to “slam” the door in my face with a flourish, except he lived in a dank basement accessed via a garage and could only emphatically push the garage door button and stand there glaring as it “whirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”ed to the ground in slow motion. My cabdriver hit on me while I sobbed, and a small voice inside reminded me I should be flattered.