Hunger

by Roxane Gay

  When you’re fat, no one will pay attention to disordered eating or they will look the other way or they will look right through you. You get to hide in plain sight. I have hidden in plain sight, in one way or another, for most of my life. Willing myself to not do that anymore, willing myself to be seen, is difficult.

  I was not fat and then I made myself fat. I needed my body to be a hulking, impermeable mass. I wasn’t like other girls, I told myself. I got to eat everything I wanted and everything they wanted too. I was so free. I was free, in a prison of my own making.

  I got older and I kept eating mostly just to keep the prison walls up. It was more work than you might imagine. Then I was in a great relationship with a great man and I was finishing my PhD and my life was coming together and I thought I could see a way out of the prison I had made.

  We suffered a loss and it undid me. I needed to blame something or someone, so I blamed myself. I blamed my body for being broken. My doctor did not dissuade me from doing this, which was its own kind of hell—to have your worst fear about yourself affirmed by a medical professional who is credentialed to make such judgments.

  My body was to blame. I was to blame. I needed to change my body but I also wanted to eat because eating was a comfort and I needed comfort but refused to ask the one person who could comfort me for such sanctuary. This was something I had long known so well. Before that point, I had often joked that I wasn’t bulimic because I couldn’t make myself throw up, but when I really want to do something, I get it done. I learned how to make myself throw up and then I got very good at it.

  I am fat, so I hid in plain sight, eating, throwing up, eating. I am perfectly normal and fine, I told myself. One day, my boyfriend found me in the bathroom, hunched over the toilet, my eyes red and watering. It was a nasty scene. “Get the fuck out,” I said quietly. I hadn’t said more than a few words to him, to anyone, in months.

  He grabbed me and pulled me to my feet. He shook me and said, “This is what you’re doing? This?” I just stared at him because I knew that would make him angrier. I wanted to make him angrier so that he could punish me and I could stop punishing myself. He deserved to punish me and I wanted to give that to him as penance. He was, is, a good man, so he wouldn’t give me what I wanted. He uncurled his fingers and let go of me and backed out of the bathroom. He put his fist through a wall, which only infuriated me because I wanted him to put his fist through me.

  After that, he tried to never leave me alone. He tried to save me from myself. Ha! Ha! Ha! I’m better, I told him. I’m done with all that, I told him. I was better, I suppose. I was better about hiding what I was doing. He couldn’t follow me everywhere. I learned how to be very quiet. We were better, or as better as we ever were going to be, and then I graduated and I moved and he didn’t follow and I was finally living alone and I could do whatever I wanted. I was an accomplished professional, so it was easier than ever to hide in plain sight.

  In the new town no one really knew me. I had “friends,” but it’s not like they came over to my apartment or had gotten to know me well enough to see that anything was off. When we’d go out to dinner, friends remarked that I always went to the bathroom after I ate. “I have a bad stomach,” I demurred, politely. It was a half-truth.

  Immediately, I was extraordinarily on the rebound, involved with a guy. The one time he caught me throwing up he said, “I’m glad you’re working on the problem.” For him, the real problem was my body, and he never let me forget it. He punished me and I liked it. Finally, I thought. Finally. He made his cruel comments and gave me “advice,” which only reminded me that everything wrong with my body was, indeed, my fault. “Why are you with this asshole?” so many people—friends, strangers who saw us together in public—asked. The longer I stayed with him, the worse he made me feel, and the better he made me feel because, at last, someone was telling me a truth about myself I already knew.

  Something had to give. Something always gives. My grief began to subside. I was way too old for this shit, I realized. The heartburn had started up and I realized I needed to stop punishing myself. I had finally, after more than thirty years, found a best friend who saw the best and worst parts of me, and even if I didn’t talk about what was going on, she was there and I could have told her and it would have been fine. That’s a powerful thing, knowing you can reveal yourself to someone. It made me want to be a better person.

  I wanted to stop, but wanting and doing are two different things. I had a routine. I starved myself all day and then I ate a huge meal and then I purged myself of that meal. I made myself empty and I loved that empty feeling. I ignored my yellowed teeth and my hair falling out and the acid burns on my right fingers and the scabs on my knuckles. “Why is my hair falling out?” I asked the Internet, as if I didn’t already know.

  The truth was more complicated and I didn’t know how to share it. I didn’t think anyone in my life would even care about the truth so long as I was dealing with my body by any means necessary. We have to worry about the emaciated girls being fed through a tube in the nose, not girls like me. And also, I was really so old to be dealing with what we think of as an adolescent problem. I was embarrassed. I am embarrassed. You can’t look up to me. I’m a fucking mess.

  I became a vegetarian because I needed a way of ordering my eating that was less harmful. I needed something to focus on that didn’t involve bringing my guts up every day. I thought I would only be a vegetarian for a year, but it ended up sticking for nearly four years, until I became too anemic and had to start eating meat again.

  The word “heartburn” is rather misleading. It has nothing to do with the heart. Or it has everything to do with the heart, only not the way you might think.

  58

  Sometimes, people who, I think, mean well like to tell me I am not fat. They will say things like, “Don’t say that about yourself,” because they understand “fat” as something shameful, something insulting, while I understand “fat” as a reality of my body. When I use the word, I am not insulting myself. I am describing myself. These pretenders will lie, shamelessly, and say, “You’re not fat,” or offer a lazy compliment like, “You have such a pretty face,” or “You’re such a nice person,” as if I cannot be fat and also possess what they see as valuable qualities.

  It’s hard for thin people to know how to talk to fat people about their bodies, whether their opinions are solicited or not. I get that, but it’s insulting to pretend I am not fat or to deny my body and its reality. It’s insulting to think I am somehow unaware of my physical appearance. And it’s insulting to assume that I am ashamed of myself for being fat, no matter how close to the truth that might be.

  59

  There are very few spaces where bodies like mine fit.

  Chairs with arms are generally unbearable. So many chairs have arms. The bruises tend to linger. They remain tender to the touch hours and days after. My thighs have been bruised, more often than not, for the past twenty-four years. I cram my body into seats that are not meant to accommodate me, and an hour or two or more later, when I stand up and the blood rushes, the pain is intense. Sometimes, I’ll roll over in bed and wince and then remember, yes, I sat in a chair with arms. Other times, I catch a brief glance of myself in the mirror, maybe while wrapping a towel around my body, and I see the pattern of bruising inching from my waist down to my midthigh. I see how physical spaces punish me for my unruly body.

  The pain can be unbearable. Sometimes, I think the pain will break me. Anytime I enter a room where I might be expected to sit, I am overcome by anxiety. What kind of chairs will I find? Will they have arms? Will they be sturdy? How long will I have to sit in them? If I do manage to wedge myself between a chair’s narrow arms, will I be able to pull myself out? If the chair is too low, will I be able to stand up on my own? This recitation of questions is constant, as are the recriminations I offer myself for putting myself in the position of having to deal with such anxieties by virtue of my fat body.

  This
is an unspoken humiliation, a lot of the time. People have eyes. They can plainly see that a given chair might be too small, but they say nothing as they watch me try to squeeze myself into a seat that has no interest in accommodating me. They say nothing when making plans to include me in these inhospitable places. I cannot tell if this is casual cruelty or willful ignorance.

  As an undergraduate, I dreaded classrooms where I would have to wedge myself into one of those seats with the desk attached. I dreaded the humiliation of sitting, or half sitting, in such a chair, my fat spilling everywhere, one or both of my legs going numb, hardly able to breathe as the desk dug into my stomach.

  At movie theaters, I pray the auditorium has been outfitted with movable armrests or I am in for some hurt. I love plays and musicals, but I rarely attend the theater because I simply cannot fit. When I do attend such events, I suffer and can barely concentrate because I am in so much pain. I beg off socializing a lot and friends think I am more antisocial than I really am because I don’t want to have to explain why I cannot join them.

  Before I go to a restaurant, I obsessively check the restaurant’s website, and Google Images and Yelp, to see what kind of seating it has. Are the seats ultramodern and flimsy? Do they have arms, and if so, what kind? Are there booths, and if so, does the table move or is it one of those tables welded between two benches? How long do I think I can sit in those chairs without screaming? I do this obsessive research because people tend to assume that everyone moves through the world the way they do. They never think of how I take up space differently than they do.

  Picture it. A dinner, two couples, a trendy restaurant. As we are seated, I quickly realize I haven’t done my homework. The chairs are sturdy but narrow with rigid arms. I ask the hostess if we can sit at a booth, but even though the restaurant is empty, she says they are already all reserved. I want to cry but I can’t. I’m on a date. We are with friends. My companion knows what I am feeling but also knows I wouldn’t want any extra attention, knows I will endure the chair rather than make a scene. I am between a rock and a hard place.

  We are seated and I perch myself on the edge of the seat. I have done this before. I will do it again. My thighs are very strong. I want to enjoy the meal, the lovely conversation with these treasured friends. I want to enjoy the cocktails and the gorgeous food being put before us, but all I can think about is the pain in my thighs and the arms of the chair pinching my sides and how much longer I will have to pretend everything is fine.

  When the meal is finally over, relief washes over me. When I stand, I am dizzy and nauseated and aching.

  Even the happiest moments of my life are overshadowed by my body and how it doesn’t fit anywhere.

  This is no way to live but this is how I live.

  60

  I am always uncomfortable or in pain. I don’t remember what it is like to feel good in my body, to feel anything resembling comfort. When walking through a door, I eye the dimensions and unconsciously turn sideways whether I need to or not. When I am walking, there is the twinge of my ankle, a pain in my right heel, a strain in my lower back. I’m often out of breath. I stop sometimes and pretend to look at the scenery, or a poster on the wall, or, most often, my phone. I avoid walking with other people as often as possible because walking and talking at the same time is a challenge. I avoid walking with other people anyway, because I move slowly and they don’t. In public bathrooms, I maneuver into stalls. I try to hover over the toilet because I don’t want it to break beneath me. No matter how small a bathroom stall is, I avoid the handicapped stall because people like to give me dirty looks when I use that stall merely because I am fat and need more space. I am miserable. I try, sometimes, to pretend I am not, but that, like most everything else in my life, is exhausting.

  I do my best to pretend I am not in pain, that my back doesn’t ache, that I’m not whatever it is I am feeling, because I am not allowed to have a human body. If I am fat, I must also have the body of someone who is not fat. I must defy space and time and gravity.

  61

  And then there is how strangers treat my body. I am shoved in public spaces, as if my fat inures me from pain and/or as if I deserve pain, punishment for being fat. People step on my feet. They brush and bump against me. They run straight into me. I am highly visible, but I am regularly treated like I am invisible. My body receives no respect or consideration or care in public spaces. My body is treated like a public space.

  62

  Air travel is another kind of hell. The standard economy-class seat is 17.2 inches while a first-class seat is, on average, between 21 and 22 inches wide. The last time I flew in a single coach seat, I was in an exit row, for the legroom. I fit in the seat because on that particular airline, Midwest Express, there was no window-seat armrest in the exit rows. I boarded and sat. Eventually my seatmate joined me, and I could instantly tell he was agitated. He kept staring at me and muttering. I could tell he was going to start trouble. I could tell he was going to humiliate me. I was mortified. He leaned into me and asked, “Are you sure you can handle the seat’s responsibilities?” He was elderly, rather frail. I was fat, but I was, I still am, tall and strong. It was absurd to imagine I could not handle the exit-row responsibilities. I simply said yes, but I wished I were a braver woman, the kind who would turn his question back on him.

  When you are fat and traveling, the staring starts from the moment you enter the airport. At the gate, there are so many uncomfortable looks as people make it plain that they do not want to be sitting next to you, having any part of your obese body touching theirs. During the boarding process, when they realize that they have lucked out in this particular game of Russian roulette and will not be seated next to you, their relief is visible, palpable, shameless.

  On this particular flight, the plane was about to pull away from the gate when this agitated man called for a flight attendant. He stood and followed her to the galley, from where his voice echoed through the plane as he said it was too risky for me to be seated in the exit row. He clearly thought my presence in the exit row meant the end of his life. It was like he knew something about the flight no one else did. I sat there and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands as people began to turn and stare at me and mutter their own comments. I tried not to cry. Eventually, the agitated man was reseated elsewhere, and once the plane took off, I curled into the side of the plane and cried as invisibly, as silently, as I could.

  From then on, I began to buy two coach seats, which, when I was still relatively young and broke, meant I could rarely travel.

  The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

  The bigger you are, the smaller your world becomes.

  Even when you’ve bought two coach seats, travel is rife with humiliations. Airlines prefer that obese people buy two tickets, but few airline employees have any sense of how to deal with two boarding passes and the empty seat once a plane is fully boarded. It becomes a big production: first when you are boarding and they need to scan two boarding passes as if this is an unsolvable mystery and then, once you’re seated, as they try to make sense of the discrepancy, no matter how many times you tell them, yes, both of these seats are mine. The person on the other side of the empty seat often tries to commandeer some of that space for themselves, though if any part of your body were touching them, they would raise hell. It’s an unnerving hypocrisy. I get very salty about that, and the older I get, the more I tell people that they don’t get to have it both ways—complaining if any part of my body dared to touch theirs if I bought one seat, but placing their belongings in the empty space of the empty seat I bought for my comfort and sanity.

  And of course, there is the issue of the seat belt. I have long traveled with my own seat belt extender because it can be quite the ordeal to get one from a flight attendant. There are few discreet opportunities to request one. Flight attendants often forget if you ask when, say, boarding the plane. They tend to make a big show of handing it to you when they finally remember,
as if punishing you, reminding everyone else on the plane that you are too fat to use the standard seat belt. Or that is what it feels like because I am so self-conscious about everything related to my body.

  By carrying my own seat belt extender, I have often been able to circumvent these petty humiliations and nuisances, but there really is no escape. On recent regional flights, I have been told that it is airline regulation to use authorized extenders only. There was one particularly grim flight to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where the flight attendant made me remove my seat belt extender and take one from her, in front of the entire plane, before she would allow us to take off. Federal regulations, she said.

  I am very lucky that I have finally gotten to a place in my career where it is part of my contract with an organization flying me to speak that they have to buy me a first-class ticket. This is my body and they know it, and if they want me to travel to them, they need to ensure at least some of my dignity.

  This recitation feels so indulgent but this is my reality. This too is the truth of living in a fat body. It’s a lot of weight to bear.

  V

  63

  In Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child writes, “Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes. But like any art it requires practice and experience. The most important ingredient you can bring to it is a love of cooking for its own sake.”

  I did not think it was possible for me to love cooking. I did not think such a love was allowed. I did not think I could love food or indulge in the sensual pleasures of eating. It did not occur to me that to cook for myself was to care for myself or that I was allowed to care for myself amidst the ruin I had let myself become. These things were forbidden to me, the price I paid for being so wildly undisciplined about my body. Food was fuel, nothing more, nothing less, even if I overindulged in that fuel whenever I could.