Every year in London, there is a moment when the Tube becomes unbearably hot. It tends to come one day in late May, and all of a sudden something chemical changes: the air, the dust, the hundreds of years of skin particles floating down there? They all warm up.
It’s on this day that I start to feel panicked about the months to come. The heat. The sweat. The inconvenience of my fatness, and how, no matter how many times I post online about fatphobia being wrong and my body being right just the way it is, I refuse—through such heat that it has brought me to tears—to take a layer of clothing off on the tube. Or on the beach. Or at the restaurant, or in the club. As the temperature rises, I remain the same, wearing a T-shirt, jacket, an oversized coat that will make me disappear from view.
It’s difficult to describe the feeling of an unruly body to those who have never had one. Of course, whether man, woman, or anything in-between, we have all had the borders of our body policed by society; but when you’re fat, you’re made to feel like a traitor simply because of your body and its unruliness. A traitor to yourself, a traitor to your health, a traitor to the healthcare system, a traitor to the children to whom you set a bad example by merely existing in front of them.
And so we are hemmed in by what we as fat people have internalized, and what society continues to preach: that to be thin is to be pure, and to be fat is a moral failure and utterly undesirable. I have friends who have to book two airplane seats because the discomfort of being looked at the way they are looked at when they sit down is too painful. I have friends who won’t go to the theater because of the way they are treated by other theatergoers. I have friends who have lost a lot of weight—I myself spent years throughout my teens being bounced around various “diet clubs”—and yet still can’t find peace with their bodies.
I would love to say that I haven’t internalized the prejudices of fatphobia, but in truth, my body is the thing that’s hurt me the most. I’d love to tell you that—as with my transness, my class, my sexuality—I have learned to ignore society, cure my shame, and draw strength and power from my fat body like the impeccable examples I see online. But I haven’t. Far from it. It can take one wrong angle in the mirror and I am thrust into downward spirals of entertaining diet culture and wondering if it would be better to do Atkins (again); to have a heart attack young, but at least get rid of the rolls that sit below my chest as I type right now.
For 28 years, I lived like this. My life was about constraint, abstinence, constant self-punishment, and certainly never giving my body the grace it deserved to at least be cool on a summer’s day. Jumping into swimming pools, splashing in the sea, spending the day at the beach? Only while wearing a giant T-shirt. Friends and family members would nag, sweetly, for me to take it off. (“Nobody’s looking,” they would say.) But I could feel thousands of eyes, even on empty beaches, or by empty pools, or in cities so hot they are emptied out. I can’t remember a single time, even when I should have been too young to notice, that I had felt the warmth of the sun on my shoulders. All I remember is humiliation and wet T-shirts.
Last year, I went to the beach again. Due to the pandemic, I had barely been seen IRL by anyone except my housemates for two years. My body had changed—again—and it had gotten bigger in some places and smaller in others. I was, like most of us, differently active during that time. But what had been so unusual—since my body is always changing—was that those changes had not been observed. None of me had. I had, in some senses, forgotten about my body, forgotten about being tutted at on a train, forgotten that other people were allowed to have an opinion about my body.
The stakes of daily life had become different. I was—like so many of us—just praying for my body to stay healthy, and simply showing my body the care it deserved. Before then, I used to describe it as a wreckage, but faced with an unknowable health crisis I felt, for the first time in my memory, like my body was something worth protecting.
Coupled with fewer eyes on us all than ever, an overwhelming joy that we were able to do simple things like take the Tube again, and a new understanding that my body deserves care and grace and attention; that it deserves to be thought of in its context, with its own history, and as something that has carried me a great distance, I began to feel a little differently about it.
I began to realize those eyes didn’t have power over me. I had not been seen for nearly two years, and I had, away from the audience of society, been able to reimagine myself. And so when I finally got on a plane, and left a hot city for a hot beach, I felt an overwhelming urge to be touched by the sun. To feel what it felt like to be outside. To imagine the eyes on me as, first and foremost, being far fewer than my internalized fatphobia had led me to believe; and secondly, to be asking different questions than what I had before. Then, I heard them asking, “Why are they here? Why are they not humiliated?” Now, it was “How did someone free themselves like that?"
After all, people who don’t know you? They don’t really care about you. And if they do, it’s because they are projecting something they have yet to work out onto you. In the end, self-loathing became so boring. Worrying about other people’s ideas of my body became too exhausting. Being a living embodiment of joy and of freedom for myself (even if some days I still Google keto, or calculate the sugar in a glass of orange juice) is a far superior feeling to being disgustingly sweaty on the Tube.
What I have learned, and I hope to remind myself of when that hot day on the Tube in May comes again, is that if you’re fat, people will stare at your unruly body whether it is covered in countless layers of wool on a boiling hot day or in tiny speedos on a beach. So I may as well enjoy the sun. And I may as well enjoy my body—or at least, keep trying to.