by Roxane Gay
79
There is a price to be paid for visibility and there is even more of a price to be paid when you are hypervisible. I am opinionated, and as a cultural critic I share my opinions regularly. I am confident in my opinions and believe I have a right to share my point of view without apology. This confidence tends to upset people who disagree with me. Rarely are my actual ideas engaged. Instead, my weight is discussed. “You are fat,” they say. Or, because, for example, I share that I love tiny baby elephants in my Twitter bio, they make an elephant joke where I, of course, am the elephant.
While on a publicity tour in Sweden, I mentioned on Twitter that the Swedes had their own version of The Biggest Loser. A random stranger suggested I was the American export for the show. The harassment is a constant, whether I am talking about something serious or trivial. I am never allowed to forget the realities of my body, how my body offends the sensibilities of others, how my body dares to take up too much space, and how I dare to be confident, how I dare to use my voice, how I dare to believe in the value of my voice both in spite of and because of my body.
The more successful I get, the more I am reminded that in the minds of a great many people I will never be anything more than my body. No matter what I accomplish, I will be fat, first and foremost.
80
During my twenties, I was broke. I remember the payday loans with the outrageous interest. There was so much ramen. Filling the gas tank with like five dollars at a time. Phone getting cut off. No health insurance for years and rare visits to the doctor. I had to get a CAT scan once, I can’t even remember why, and it took me years to pay off. I didn’t go to the dentist for years. This is not a sad story because I am lucky. This is just life, and frankly, I’ve had it easy in terms of material comfort. I am privileged. I always have been. I had a safety net because my parents would never have let me starve or be homeless, but I was on my own, as an adult should be, and I was often very, very broke. I was writing and no one was interested in that writing. I know, now, that I was putting in the work. I still am, of course, but back then I was just beginning to figure out how to use my voice in both fiction and nonfiction. I had a lot to learn and so I wrote and wrote and wrote and read and read and read and I hoped. I was going to school and then working and getting better and better jobs and then more school, and I was becoming a better writer and, very slowly, a better person. I became less broke, and then I was fine, not making that much but making enough money to always be able to handle my business. Twice in the past nine years I have moved and moving is expensive, but I could afford it. The last time I stood in my empty apartment before heading out, I sobbed. That is not something I am prone to doing. I allowed myself to feel everything. I allowed myself to acknowledge how far I have come. This isn’t bragging. This is an atlas.
During my twenties, my personal life was the hottest mess. The hottest. It will never be that messy again because I’ve grown up and I finally give enough of a damn about myself to avoid burning myself in that kind of fire. I’m still a mess, but I’m a different kind of mess now. I can generally identify what the mess is and where it’s coming from. I am learning to ask for help, slowly. I am learning a lot of things.
My eyes are wide open. They are prepared for whatever they might see.
I try to keep all this feeling in a safe place, a neatly contained place, because that is where it will always have to stay. And then there is the intensity of want. Raw urges. Engulfing. Crushing. Tenderness and fierceness, both. Possession. The container is a lie. The container has been shattered. Someone has found the way to my warm. They have taken my atlas into their hands. They trace the wildly arcing lines from beginning to end.
VI
81
I go to the doctor as rarely as possible because when I go, whether for an ingrown toenail or a cold, doctors can only see and diagnose my body. I have gone to an emergency care facility for a sore throat and watched as the doctor wrote, in the diagnosis section, first, “morbid obesity” and, second, “strep throat.”
Doctors generally adhere to the Hippocratic oath, where they swear to abide by an ethical code, where they swear to act, always, in their patients’ best interests. Unless the patient is overweight. I hate going to the doctor because they seem wholly unwilling to follow the Hippocratic oath when it comes to treating obese patients. The words “first do no harm” do not apply to unruly bodies.
There is the humiliation of simply being in the doctor’s office, which is, all too often, ill-equipped for the obese body, despite all the public hysteria about obesity and health. Many scales cannot weigh patients who weigh over 350 pounds. Blood pressure cuffs are always too small, as are the threadbare hospital gowns. It is difficult to climb onto the exam table. It is difficult to lie back, to make myself vulnerable, to be splayed wide open.
There is the humiliation of the scale, of confronting that number or confronting a scale that cannot accommodate my size. And of course, there is the performance of trying to get to my “actual” weight by kicking off my shoes and wishing I could take off all my clothes, cut off my hair, have my vital organs and skeleton removed. Then, maybe, I would be willing to be weighed, measured, judged.
When a nurse asks me to step on the scale, I often decline, tell her that I know how much I weigh. I tell her I am happy to share that number with her. Because when I do get on the scale, few nurses can hide their disdain or their disgust as my weight appears on the digital readout. Or they look at me with pity, which is almost worse because my body is simply my body, not something that demands pity.
In the examination room, I hold my hands in tight fists. I am on guard, ready to fight, and really, I do have to fight, for my dignity, for the right to basic medical treatment.
Because doctors know the challenges the obese body can contend with, they are surprised to learn I am not diabetic. They are surprised to learn I am not on a hundred medications. Or they are not surprised to learn I have high blood pressure. They look at that number and offer stern admonitions about the importance of losing weight and getting my numbers back under control. This is when they are happiest, when they can try and use their expertise to force me to discipline my body.
As a result, I don’t go to the doctor unless it is absolutely necessary even though I now have good health insurance and have always had every right to be treated fairly and kindly. I don’t go to the doctor even though I’ve had an undiagnosed chronic stomach condition that is, at times, debilitating, for at least ten years. Doctors are supposed to first do no harm, but when it comes to fat bodies, most doctors seem fundamentally incapable of heeding their oath.
82
On October 10, 2014, one of my greatest fears was realized. I was in my apartment, commenting on stories from the graduate student for whom I was serving as thesis adviser. I had been having stomach pain all that week, but I often have stomach pain, so I paid it little mind. Eventually, I went to the bathroom and experienced a very intense wave of pain. I need to lie down, I thought. When I came to, I was on the floor and I was sweaty, but I felt better. Then I looked at my left foot, which was facing in an unnatural direction, the bone nearly poking through the skin. I realized, This is not good. I closed my eyes. I tried to breathe, to not panic, to not think of everything that would happen next. At the same time, there was a plumbing crisis, but I couldn’t cope with that and my fucked-up foot, so I just moved the plumbing issue to the corner of my mind.
When you’re fat, one of your biggest fears is falling while you’re alone and needing to call EMTs. It’s a fear I have nurtured over the years, and when I broke my ankle that fear finally came true.
Thankfully, that night, I had my phone in my pocket, so I pulled myself into the anteroom of the bathroom, hoping for a signal. My foot was starting to hurt, but nowhere near as badly as I thought it should hurt based on years of watching medical dramas like Chicago Hope, ER, and Grey’s Anatomy.
This was Lafayette, Indiana, a small town, so 9-1-1 answered promptly.
While on the phone with the kind operator I blurted out, “I’m fat,” like it was some deep mark of shame, and he smoothly said, “That’s not a problem.”
Many EMTs showed up and 83 percent of them were hot. They were kind and full of empathy, and they winced each time they looked at my foot. Eventually they sort of splinted it and dragged me out on this contraption and lifted me onto a gurney and from there it was fine. They had trouble finding a vein, so I ended up with bruises in all the wrong places. While waiting for the EMTs, I texted my person that I had an accident. I wanted to play it down, but I was slowly realizing I had really injured myself.
At the hospital, I got X-rays and the technician said, “Your ankle is very, very broken,” which is not to be confused, I guess, with just regular broken. My ankle was also dislocated. They couldn’t operate that night so they had to realign my foot. That is exactly as horrifying as you think it is. They gave me fentanyl, that stuff Michael Jackson took to sleep, and told me I wouldn’t remember a thing. They were right. When I regained consciousness I asked, “Are you going to do it now?” I got a nice little pat on my leg for that. I was grateful for the pharmaceutical industry.
Two other strange things were going on. My heart was beating in an irregular rhythm, which I am pretty sure has been the case for years, and I had a really low hemoglobin count. They were not going to send me home, so I got a room I would end up staying in for ten days. My ass became so sore I was ready to remove it surgically. I barely got any sleep, especially in the early going, so my mental state was not great. Every so often nurses would take my “vitals” and poke and do other inscrutable things to me. I hate being touched, so that was a particular treat. They did, mercifully, have appropriately large hospital gowns, but it was a very small comfort. There is so much indignity to being helpless.
At this particular hospital, they took vitals at eleven p.m. and three a.m. and seven a.m., so I’m not sure when sleep was supposed to happen. They also took vitals throughout the day. I learned a great deal about hospital routines during those ten days. I basically became an expert. In the next room over was a woman who said, “Hey,” every twenty or so seconds. She liked to pull out her IVs and was a troublemaker. She was elderly and I felt bad for her because I don’t think anyone visited her the entire time. I was not so lucky.
The night of the accident, I had texted my sister-in-law and brother, who lived in Chicago at the time, and said, “DON’T TELL MOM AND DAD,” because I knew my parents would panic. They did, of course, tell Mom and Dad. My parents did, in fact, panic. My brother and his wife rented a car and drove down to see about me. The first day was a blur of pain and confusion. The orthopedic surgeon couldn’t operate because of my low hemoglobin, so I got my first blood transfusion. I marveled at how suddenly someone else’s blood was inside of me. I also enjoyed that the orthopedic surgeon was incredibly attractive, knew it, and had the swagger of a man who is very good at what he does and very well compensated for that work. That was Saturday.
Sunday, I got another blood transfusion, so I carried the blood of at least two other people. Then the surgeon decided to operate because the ankle was unstable. When they rolled me to the operating area, I told the anesthesiologist that she should knock me out extra because I had seen the movie Awake. She shook her head and said, “I hate that damn movie.” I told her I sympathized because movies about writers are uniformly terrible. Nonetheless, I said, “But still, make sure I am super asleep.”
While all this was going on, I was communicating with my person on the phone, via text message. She was freaking out in the calmest way possible. She wanted to be in the hospital with me, but circumstances made that impossible. She was there in every way that mattered and I am still grateful for it.
In the operating room, I don’t remember anything other than the oxygen mask descending upon my face. I woke up in another room to see a lady staring at me and I didn’t want her staring at me so I said, “Stop looking at me.” Then I went blank again. I heard from my brother that the surgery went well but that my ankle was even more broken than the doctor originally thought. A tendon was torn, this and that and the other. I have hardware in my ankle now. I am a cyborg.
My niece, with whom I am very close, eyed me suspiciously after surgery. She was two years old and not a fan of the huge cast on my left leg. She gave me a very reluctant air-kiss and went about her business. She also didn’t like hospital beds. She did, however, like the rolling chair in the corner of my room. When I got back to my room after surgery, my parents had magically appeared, along with my other sister-in-law and niece and my cousin and his partner. I mean, talk about it taking a village. I was reminded, once again, that I am loved.
Over the course of the ten days, I listened to other people snoring very loudly, making growly sounds. The temperature fluctuated wildly. I became constipated. I wanted to shower very badly but couldn’t. Instead, I was bathed by nurses’ aides who had things like dry shampoo and the body-sized equivalents of moist towelettes. I was given a lot of good drugs and I really enjoyed that part. I had to face the severity of my injury and that I would be out of commission for quite some time. I had to cancel a few events and disappoint people, but I was going to be housebound for six weeks. I arranged, with my university, to teach my courses online while I recuperated.
I was well taken care of by the medical staff, but they were not good communicators. I became a throbbing mass of fear, loneliness, and neediness even though I was rarely alone for any amount of time. Everything was out of my control and I love control, so all my trigger points were being pressed at the exact same time.
I was absolutely terrified going into surgery. I realized I have so much life yet to live. I did not want to die. I thought, I don’t want to die, and it was such a strange thought because I’ve never actively wanted to live as much as I did when I had to face my mortality in such a specific way. I began to think of all the things I still wanted to do, the words I had yet to write. I thought about my friends, my family, my person.
I don’t do fear very well. I try to push the people I love away. I worry that I’m not allowed human weakness, that this makes me not good enough.
I was not at my best during the hospital stay because so much was out of my control and the bed was too fucking short and the hospital gown did not make me feel safe and I couldn’t bathe and I couldn’t really move and I wasn’t eating because the hospital food was gross. I am not much of a crier, so I didn’t really break down for several days, until one morning when the doctor told me I wasn’t going home anytime soon.
I tried not to sob. I tried to cry in that neat way that delicate ladies cry in movies but . . . I am not a delicate lady. When a nurse would peer in, I’d rub my eyes and bite my lower lip so I might appear stoic, and then when they looked away, I’d start crying again. I babbled all kinds of sorrowful stuff. It was a low point, one of many.
Everyone was so worried about me when I broke my ankle and it confused me. I have a huge, loving family and a solid circle of friends, but these things were something of an abstraction, something to take for granted, and then all of a sudden, they weren’t. There were people calling me every day and hovering over my hospital bed and sending me things just to cheer me up. There were lots of concerned texts and e-mails, and I had to face something I’ve long pretended wasn’t true, for reasons I don’t fully understand. If I died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don’t have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time. When I broke my ankle, love was no longer an abstraction. It became this real, frustrating, messy, necessary thing, and I had a lot of it in my life. It was an overwhelming thing to realize. I am still trying to make sense of it all even though it has always been there.
It has now been more than two years. There is a throbbing in my left ankle that reminds me, “Once, these bones were shatt
ered.”
I always wonder what healing really looks like—in body, in spirit. I’m attracted to the idea that the mind, the soul, can heal as neatly as bones. That if they are properly set for a given period of time, they will regain their original strength. Healing is not that simple. It never is.
Years ago, I told myself that one day I would stop feeling this quiet but abiding rage about the things I have been through at the hands of others. I would wake up and there would be no more flashbacks. I wouldn’t wake up and think about my histories of violence. I wouldn’t smell the yeasty aroma of beer and for a second, for several minutes, for hours, forget where I was. And on and on and on. That day never came, or it hasn’t come, and I am no longer waiting for it.
A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don’t always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming. I harbor less hatred toward myself. I try to forgive myself for my trespasses.
In my novel, An Untamed State, after Miri, my protagonist, has been through hell, she thinks about how sometimes broken things need to be broken further before they can truly heal. She wants to find something that will break her in that necessary way so she can get back to the life she had before she was kidnapped.
I was broken, and then I broke my ankle and was forced to face a lot of things I had long ignored. I was forced to face my body and its frailty. I was forced to stop and take a breath and give a damn about myself.
