A Moment of Healing, Humility, and Hope

It has been almost a year since I have written anything. Partially this is because I couldn’t think of what to say and partially this is because I have just been too exhausted. This blog has mostly revolved around my thoughts on being in my body and finding acceptance, peace, freedom, and delight as a fat woman. My intention around sharing this content with others was to find my people who were doing the same thing. I am returning to try and articulate where I am on this journey now.

For the past 2 or so years, I have been suffering from an assortment of autoimmune disorders that are barely visible, but guarantee that I am in constant pain. My body is attacking my skin, my muscles, tendons, and joints. It has been very hard to move at all. Yesterday, I woke up and realized that I felt bruised all over my body. I was excited because that means it was going to be a good day. Most days I feel like I am actively being battered from the inside out, so being able to feel bruised, meant that I would be able to move relatively easily. It wasn’t until that moment that I got some perspective on the amount of pain I have been in.

Being unable to move in the ways that nourish me has been hard. Even restorative asana has been challenging. My yoga has been mostly occasional pranayama and meditation when I can muster the attention to be in my body that much. There has been no weightlifting, no walking, no anything really. It is a project to walk across my house or stand in the shower. I don’t brush or floss my teeth as much because it is exhausting. I mean, I have been unimaginably exhausted. Anyone who knows me personally will immediately understand how pissed I have been about this. I have enjoyed being invincible for a long time and now I am stuck on my couch.

I think about my experience teaching yoga to people in large bodies and I can remember many of them had chronic pain and I remember how I perceived that. I can remember watching my students with chronic body pain move through it with clumsy courage. At the time, I felt that I knew what they had to battle to get to the mat. I can tell you now, I was completely wrong. I had no idea. Y’all, it has been my life’s work learning how to be present in my own body, but these last couple of years had me profoundly dissociated. I am now starting over with occupying my body.

About 3 weeks ago I decided to force myself onto my stationary bike for 5 minutes. Those five minutes were some of the worst minutes of my life. I did it the next day because I could tell that the movement, though painful, moved my air and blood around my body and it started to bring me back. I kept up five minutes a day and now I am up to twenty minutes a day. Old me would not have been impressed by this. New me measures success much differently. Yesterday I was able to do four or five basic standing poses, which felt difficult but great. Every day, I begin to inhabit my body a little more, listening for what my body will open to.

All of this non-moving has been incredibly damaging. I have been gaining lots of weight and losing lots of strength. The fat on my body is now causing problems that did not exist before and I have been forced into medications that I dislike very much. Now, fat bodies are vilified and blamed for illness, I will not do that here. Being fat does not universally make one unhealthy. There are many concurrent problems that happen alongside fatness that have nothing to do with body size. For me, however, that is not the case.

Because of my particular point of view about the potential for fat people to maintain their health and dignity, I was very unwilling to look at the role that my body weight was playing in my health. I focused on acceptance. I found doctors that showed empathy and told the truth at the same time. While I have been focusing on acceptance, my body began to attack me more, the interventions started to stack up and I moved more and more away from having a real connection with my body.

I made the decision to have weight loss surgery. I have many feelings about this. I am sad because I have always wanted to find peace for my body on my terms. I am pissed because I wanted to somehow emerge from a lifetime of fat oppression victorious and free from the shame and blame of sexism, diet culture, and the beautification industry. I wanted to find comfort in my fat body. I wanted to embrace pleasure and nourishment as core values in my life. Unfortunately, I can’t battle on all fronts and have the life I want. I am going to have to let go of the battle for fat dignity and move on to reducing the amount of ammunition my body has to attack me with.

Through years of advocating for myself and other fat women, I believe that fat people can live big full lives, experience, joy, pleasure, fitness, love, health, and happiness. My position on this remains unchanged. I maintain the perspective that there is dangerous and false virtue assigned to thinness, fitness, dieting, and athleticism and that virtue ushers us deeper into the heart of capitalism and all manner of oppression including racism, sexism, and classism.

I am aware that weight loss surgery is dangerous and sometimes ineffective. I am aware that it perpetuates the idea that fatness is a problem to be solved. For me, right now, If I am ever going to have a path to health, I must have movement. It is unreasonable to try and reclaim movement from under this weight alongside all of the pain.

Nobody in a fat body including me should be harassed by the medical industry or pushed into surgery like this. I have fired dozens of doctors for recommending this path over the years. At this moment, it’s just me fighting for a quality of life that I have been missing for a couple of years now. I often feel like a lifetime of diet culture has finally broken my spirits, but that is not the truth. The truth is I am making a powerful decision for my future health.

I hope that anyone reading this can trust my mind and be in my corner. I will see you out there walking in the park, in yoga classes, building my strength back. I have a surgery date of Dec 20, 2021

Love,
JGC