External shame no match for internal esteem

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/02/2025 (215 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a fat child, I was a disgrace.

In school, shame and isolation might prevail in any setting, on any given day. In my kindergarten class, I was a freak, twice the height and girth of my peers.

In Grade 1, my desk fell over when I tried to rise to sing God Save the Queen — a too-tight fit in the desk warranted a ruler on the back of my hand for disruptiveness. My nickname in middle school was “Hippo.” In gym class, trussed in a clown-like, dark green jumper, I was the obstacle in tumbling: students somersaulted over my crouched form.

Yet, it is transformative to remember that even in my disgrace for being neither “normal” nor “pleasing,” for having exceeded the limits ordained by acceptability standards, I seem to have had a sense of myself that existed apart from the stigma assigned.

Let me explain.

In Grade 9, an essay I had written was chosen for the school-wide oratorial competition. My essay was titled How To Go on a Diet. My mother had helped me explore the piece; the gist of the essay, as I recall, was that as human beings we might consider going on a diet of care, good will, compassion and moral action.

I believed in the focus and my mother’s enthusiasm. She had lived her life as fat and was keen to bring to dieting (she had tried every one there ever was or could be) the more philosophical dimensions I was pursuing that motivated and connected us.

I also know, if circumstances had allowed, my mother could have been a writer: our late-night-kitchen conversations were infused with her eloquence, moral imagination and understanding of writing as a process — intuitively, she knew that all writing is rewriting.

I would excitedly share a rough draft (terms I did not know then), and my mother would offer commentary. I’d head back up to my desk to revise and then we would review my emendations. Given that my language arts classes did not reference writing processes, collaboration and revision, I count it as a blessing that I learned these from my mother’s tool box. I understand now more than ever that many did not have access to the kind of kitchen talk and teaching my mother generously provided. Our sharing of ideas and forms of expression was vital to my learning.

My subsequent experience looked like this:

My essay is chosen. Standing tall in front of the assembly in what I feel a particularly fetching brown-and-black striped outfit, hair lifted into a top knot, I am nervous yet avid to deliver my focus. I begin by reciting the title. The room breaks out into laughter. It suddenly dawns on me: I am fat in a very public way in a very public-speaking contest. Fat is what my schoolmates see. They think I am a joke, that I am conscious of myself as a joke, that perhaps I might be developing a comedy routine of sorts, an adolescent version of Totie Fields, who used her size as the foundational butt of her comic material.

I am surprised by the laughter.

How could I not have known that the word diet would land only as a fat girl doing standup? I was used to being taunted mercilessly by my own brothers, humiliated in the Chubby section of the local department store, harassed by a trim next-door aunt, shunned at school dances.

And yet, in all of that shaming and finger pointing, there seemed to be a “little” core that did not feel completely unacceptable. Rather, I felt myself also a human being, one often transported by words — and I find it still somewhat miraculous — a human being interested in and fond of her self, not simply as “other,” but as acceptable, even lovable.

How those two understandings — deserving of shunning; deserving of space — existed simultaneously baffle me. I did not think about food and flesh when I chose the word “diet” for my essay. I did not see that I might be setting myself up as a joke. Neither did my mother.

Was this a failure of the imagination? An inability to hold on to the real meaning of diet? A way of avoiding the truth? How could I have been seduced by the pleasure I found in discovering that diet might equally apply to a way of life that was kind and compassionate?

I shake my head more so in these times of increasing intolerance, appreciative of the remembering my third act encourages as I embrace anew the core that persisted — that I believed, against the odds, I had the right to be, something to say (as did my mother) and the right to say it.

arts@freepress.mb.ca