From Your Fat Future
Dear Adrianne (and sorry you still can’t find stuff with your name at gift shops),
You’re seventeen and you know a lot about a lot of things—more that you don’t—even though you’d never admit it to anyone. You look like your shit is completely together and your desire to not stick out too much from the crowd is super strong, almost as strong as your need to be noticed.
You’re part of a well-to-do family and have a nice house, a cute football-playing boyfriend, excellent grades, and your own car. You have all the things a person would expect to need in order to be happy—except you’re fat.
And I get it, it’s not like you hate yourself every second of the day, but you’re surrounded by so many things that make you feel different. At your school, you’re one of less-than-a-handful of Black students (people assume you’re in your all-girls prep school on hardship or due to the benevolence of good white folk), and everyone else is so petite and white and privileged and seemingly has every possible advantage just laid at their feet. You’re angrier about it than anyone knows. You’re frustrated. And you figure that there’s so much that you can’t change—your skin, racism, your family pedigree—but you can do something about the way your body looks.
Because in your eyes, your body is a betrayal. You think it’s the way it is because of something you’ve done. Been too smart-mouthed, too lazy, too needful, too greedy, too prideful. Otherwise it means that it’s simply an inexplicable combination of genetics or fate or just who-knows-what and this is just how you were meant to be and that is unacceptable. Every cause has an effect. And if something you’ve done made you this way, it can be undone.
(And I know it feels like everything is this black-and-white and will be forever, but I promise you, life will be lived mostly in that messy gray middle.)
So, despite three-hour daily varsity volleyball practices, you decide to add two more hours of working out at home. You try prepackaged food plans and those nasty shake meal replacements. Sometimes it even works, at least for a little while. You manage to subdue your body’s betrayal. But it never lasts, and you get super frustrated when you end those programs and whatever pounds you dropped creep back on. You’re tired mentally and physically and you’re so dang hungry all the time, you can barely think straight.
You feel like your body is the enemy, something apart from you, that doesn’t belong to you. Every moment is a struggle, a fight to reconcile who you think you are with who you think you want to be. Your mind, housed in this body you despise, suffers so much. You’re upset that as smart as you are, you can’t figure out how to solve this problem. That as determined as you are, you keep failing. It’s frustrating and infuriating, especially because you’re used to winning, to achieving goals. The formula seems so simple: eat less, move more. But it just isn’t working.
You’re determined to control the uncontrollable, but it’s a losing game. And not in the way you think you want, in pounds and inches, but in the small bits of your spirit and sense of self that diminish with every effort. There are so many reasons you are trying to control your weight and bring your body into submission. You’re doing it because you think it will make your boyfriend treat you better. You’re doing it because you think you’re ruining your family’s image. You’re doing it because everything in our society tells you it’s the key to happiness.
And sis, guess what? You’re wrong. But that’s OK, too. You’ll find out being wrong isn’t the end of the world. And you’re gonna get so many opportunities to make it right.
Your determination in pursuit of this goal is detrimental, to be sure. But what you need to know is this trait, when channeled toward productive, positive pursuits, is one of your greatest superpowers. Your ability to adapt, to problem-solve, to find joy in both simplicity and grandeur, is going to carry you so, so far.
I know this because I am writing to you from your fat future. I want to tell you a little about what it’s like here. Please know that your body is still sometimes a mystery. It’s thrown you a few curveballs (while also developing awesome new curves) and you’ve made it through. Once you realize that associating happiness with your appearance is bunk, the world opens. Being fat is no longer a curse or a punishment. Your body isn’t the enemy. It’s your partner, your home, your vessel in which you go through life. Even when it does something you can’t control, you don’t want to hurt it or shape it into something else. You work with it to find a solution, to treat it as well as you can, to ensure its survival. You nurture talents, develop skills, have adventures. You meet people you can’t imagine moving through this world without, but you know that if that time came—if things with those people didn’t work out—that’s not your body’s fault. Our fat future is marvelous because despite all the things we’ve gone through, we survived, thrived, and never stopped dreaming.
You’re going to encounter negativity in many forms, from people you know and trust and strangers alike, and it’s gonna hurt like hell, but you’re going to make it through.
And your body, the thing you think is holding you back, is gonna hold you up. It’s gonna hold you down. It’s a source of strength, of comfort, for yourself and for others. You’ll learn to care for it out of love rather than fear. See it as a thing of wondrous beauty. And you’ll be grateful, so grateful, that you inhabit it.
REGHAN WHITE
ADRIANNE RUSSELL
has spent most of her life making things up, and the only thing she loves more than reading grand adventures is writing them. She fully believes that if you’re unsure what to do with your characters, having them kiss or fight (and occasionally both) will unstick any plot. When she’s not managing library book groups, she’s usually napping, watching movies, and advocating for marginalized voices in children’s literature. You can find her writing at auto8collective.com.