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Fat and Thriving

by
ISABEL QUINTERO

See, your body never stops changing. Ever. It is a magnificent thing. In all its rolls and all its jiggles. It is a beautiful thing. Sometimes though

my body feels

like a chore

like it does not belong to me

my limbs my panza

just weights to keep myself tethered

to the ground

sometimes it’s like other hands

hold my body up

or down

hands that do not belong to me

touching and molding what isn’t theirs

usurping the shape of my skin.

The first time I realized I was fat was in the fourth grade. My mom told me I looked like a pregnant woman. I went to school the next day and asked friends if I looked pregnant to them. I remember that as the moment my weight shifted in my brain into something important. I don’t hold it against my mom. At least not now. Though I used to. I really did. What I’ve come to learn now is that parents are simply people who are trying their best, and therefore will mess up. Often. I’ve learned that my mom is a cis woman like me, and as such, she was teaching me how to survive as a woman when much of the value we have is put into how we look. Especially in terms of finding a mate—something that’s always stressed for me. Now, my mom, like most folks who love us do, framed the push to lose weight as being healthy. It was always about health. Health, health, health. And to be honest, I believed her because she’s my mom and worried about me. Remember, she was teaching me how to survive. And because of her upbringing my mother is a hell of a survivor. To her, being healthy and beautiful was part of how you survived as a cis woman.

If you’ve read my first book, Gabi, a Girl in Pieces, you may remember the section where Gabi makes a list of questions she wants to ask her mom but is too afraid to ask. Perhaps you have a list of similar questions anxious to be asked but know that’s not going to happen because opening your mouth and letting them out may come with consequences or shame. Gabi’s list of questions is also a list of questions that as a teen I wanted to ask my mom.

I was raised to be independent

but to need

a man. to want to have a man.

not a woman. a man.

because men are strong

they can do things we can’t

because women are not enough

on their own.

my mom’s friend warned that

my growing waistline

my lack of lipstick

would scare my husband into

the arms of some thin thing

who knew how to use her mouth

to say sweet things

that slipped out tinted red or

pink.

I was never asked if I even liked

sugar.

Before I was married, I was a teen who was lost in her own body. I remember telling my best friend in high school, “If I ever hit two hundred pounds, kill me.” I’m glad she forgot because I would’ve been dead years ago. I think of that now and am ashamed of how much I hated that body. I would like to go back and tell teenage Isabel how amazing she was and how powerful her body could be if she simply accepted it as hers. Because despite looking in a mirror that for so long only reflected what I didn’t like about my body or what others saw could be changed, I more often than not am able to see how complete I really am.

When I was asked to write something for this anthology, I was excited. But then I had a moment that many of us who are fat go through—doubt of our magnificence. It happens and it’s shitty. It’s painful and discouraging. It makes me question the validity of what I had to say to you, young person who is learning to love their body as a given and not on someone else’s terms on what that love should look like or at what size it’s OK to love that body. I talked to my friend, and poet, Allyson Jeffredo, and she said, “Write that! It’s vulnerable and real. One will never feel 100 percent about their body in this world.” She was right. Loving our bodies, especially our fat bodies, especially fat bodies of color, fat queer bodies of color, is never easy. I recognize that as a light-skinned Chicana I have privileges that my darker skinned hermanx are often not afforded. White people, in many of the spaces I move through (publishing, education, coffeeshops), seem to be real comfortable around me until I open my mouth. Sometimes a shift happens in the conversation when the Mexican jumps out my mouth. A step back. A reassessment. I become a little exotic. A different kind of Mexican than the one they expected.

I was once at a hot springs (I had convinced myself that my body was good enough to be seen wearing only underwear in public by asking myself, “What would Virgie say?”), enjoying the water and sun, when I found myself (along with my friend who is half white/half Mexican, and white passing) in a very vulnerable and uncomfortable situation. We were talking to a seemingly nice young white couple, and their older, creepy white hippie friend, when the conversation turned racist. I spoke up and it got worse and we left. But this privilege, this ability to “dupe” the white gaze, if for a few minutes, coupled with the fact that I am also the kind of fat that leads well-meaning friends to say, “Stop. You’re not fat,” which almost feels a little bit like rejection (at least rejection of a part of myself), allows me to move a bit more freely across spaces than other fat folx. This fucked up privilege allows me to let the Mexican jump out, to be more myself, more “weird,” more “quirky,” more “different” without the same kind of repercussions (being silenced, omitted, rejected) because that light-skinned part of me has already been accepted. I can usually find clothes that fit in-store. Traveling is easy for me. Rarely is my weight pointed out in public. However, I have been given diet tips while on a date and, once, while out dancing with a fellow fat girl, a guy kept urging his girlfriend to “hit the fat girls.” I had to remind my friend that we were educators and probably should keep our earrings on. For the most part, I do all right. And yet . . . sometimes I still don’t feel enough.

Sometimes I’m still on survival mode. And when you’re on survival mode, you don’t have room for vulnerability, room to thrive, to grow.

This dark hole

I peer into

pretends to be a mirror,

pretends to be a truth-teller.

Only sees one side of me

and not even fully.

But I remind myself,

again and again,

that looking into the mirror

is like seeing an eclipse

through a pinhole projector—

you only see a semblance of the

sun,

a sliver of the wonder in the sky

because its actual resplendence

would surely blind you.

When I feel low, when the rolls feel extra, I look to women who inspire me. Women like Virgie Tovar, Yesika Salgado, and the first fat woman who let me see myself as enough: my friend Amanda. These women have showed me what it looks like when we love our bodies. When we let ourselves be happy and live and thrive in our fat selves. They are vulnerable, they are real, and they are brave. Brave because this world doesn’t like its women and femmes and nonbinary folx brave. Much less its fat women and fat femmes and fat nonbinary folx. Because if we’re brave, if we love ourselves, if we say fuck your diet culture, fuck your beauty standards, fuck you, not only do we have time to devise different ways to bring down the patriarchy and create change, but we are seen as combative and promoting an unhealthy lifestyle. But how can one be considered healthy if we don’t love our bodies? If worrying over calories or cheat days or diets causes anxiety? Makes us feel defeated? One thing I’ve learned from reading and following Virgie Tovar and other fat women on social media is how fat doesn’t mean unhealthy, and thin doesn’t equal healthy.  There are so many things we ignore in those conversations—food deserts, access to health care, to mental health care, culture, physiology, heredity, poverty, personal choice. I do not deny that there are health issues that are related to being fat, but there are also health issues related to being thin. The difference is that one set of issues is always seen as more problematic and urgent.

I’m not here to tell you to stay fat, get fat, or not to lose weight. What I want to do is remind you that you own your body. Your body is yours. If you want to stay fat, stay fat. If you want to lose weight, lose weight. But remember that your body is worthy of love simply because it exists. I know that it’s hard. But there is a freedom to wearing a crop trop and letting the panza out in a beautiful hot springs without caring what other people have to say. And people, well, they will always have something to say. Those people, they don’t want you to thrive. To grow and own your power. Those people are concerned with staying in boxes that fit just so, and don’t have the imagination or pleasure of knowing that beauty and love can be fat. They are cursed with being boring, with conformity, with fear. They are not concerned with your comfort, but with theirs.

And our job is not to exist to make other people comfortable or to convince them of our worth. Our job is to exist and thrive.

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CHARLES LENIDA

ISABEL QUINTERO
is a writer and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She lives and writes in the Inland Empire of Southern California. Gabi, A Girl in Pieces, her first YA novel, was the recipient of several awards, including the William C. Morris YA Debut Award. She’s also the author of a chapter book series, Ugly Cat & Pablo; a nonfiction YA graphic biography, Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide, which received the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award; and a picture book, My Papi Has a Motorcycle. Isabel also writes poetry and essays. Her work can be found in various print and online journals.