11:22pm October 20, 2013

Looooong rambling on fat and self-image stuff.

…that most of the people who cyberbully me seem to love to take swipes at me about my weight.

I don’t know if it’s just that weight is an easy target that they think will make people more sympathetic to them and less sympathetic to me. Or what.

I still can’t believe that one guy who recently claimed I am “maintaining my considerable weight”. I’ve lost almost fifty pounds. Everyone in my life notices it. Random emergency room nurses and other people I barely know and barely ever see, have commented on it. My entire face is shaped different now. I don’t know how a person could miss it.

I’ve noticed that when they talk about my weight, though, they always exaggerate it. When they started all the bullying, I weighed around 185-195 pounds, fluctuating but always in that range. They described me constantly as “weighing 300 pounds” or even “weighing 400 pounds”. (Have they ever seen a 300-400 pound person?) I didn’t even quite weigh 200 at the time. I’ve never in my life weighed more than a little over 240. One of these people, by her own self-description, only weighed, at most, 20 pounds less than me when they were saying things like this.

And I really think there’s something in there a lot more sinister and planned than arbitrary and unconscious. But I can’t put my finger on what it is. It’s almost like they think that emphasizing my weight will make me look bad and disgusting to other people and make everything else they claim about me easier to swallow.

It reminds me of…

I know two people with the same movement disorder I have, and the same amount of other serious health issues. One of them is skinny to the point of being bony. The other one is fat. They both have the same circle of friends and acquaintances.

I was talking to the one who was fat, about how people always seemed to worry about the one who was more skinny. And she said it was because he was skinny and she was fat.

And I remembered that diseases that make people skinny are often considered glamorous in a sick twisted way, while diseases that make people fat are more often considered disgusting and undesirable. Not that any disease should be considered desirable. But in general if your disease makes you fat, you’re generally more likely to be stigmatized than if your disease makes you skinny. Many disease that make you fat are even treated as if being fat causes the disease, and then you’re stigmatized for supposedly causing your own disease. It’s bizarre.

I’ve also noticed that among moderate-to-severely physically disabled people I know, most people seem to be either very thin, or fat. There don’t seem to be a lot of us in the middle range. I assume that’s because physical disabilities often result in either weight loss or weight gain, directly or indirectly.

I’ve had both happen. My myasthenia-or-whatever-it-is condition got really severe in spring of 2008, seemingly in reaction to some health events after a hospitalization where I got seriously ill. I became bedridden as a result. I gained about 30 pounds almost instantly just from the change in activity level. Prior to that I’d been in a manual wheelchair, and pushed it around with my legs. Afterwards I was in bed or in a motorized wheelchair. Then I slowly gained 20 more pounds.

I’ve now lost almost all the weight I gained from that. Not because of intentional weight loss, but because of gastroparesis.

Gastroparesis is a strange disease though because it can cause both weight loss and weight gain. Through the same basic mechanism: getting less nutrition. Getting less nutrition can result in weight loss, but it can also result in metabolic changes as your body learns to hold onto every calorie it can get its hands on. Those metabolic changes can cause weight gain even if you’re getting less nutrition than you were before. It’s the same reason that most diets don’t work – you eat less, but then you end up with the yo-yo effect because of metabolic changes. It’s extremely rare, and takes a certain body type and genetics to pull off, that a person can actually diet themselves to a consistently lower weight for the rest of their life.

That, and possibly genetics, also happens to be initially how I gained weight in the first place. I had a really bad combination of orthorexia (triggered by seeing quacks who put me on restrictive diets), and a situation where I couldn’t cook or eat for myself very well and didn’t have the services I needed. I weighed in the 100-110 pound range at my skinniest. Which, with my particular body type, was actually thin enough to be so bony I couldn’t sit on hard surfaces anymore.

Then, I began getting services that meant I got food regularly. I almost instantly went up to 150-170 pounds or so. Mind you, I was not even eating three meals a day, not even eating every day for that matter, and the food I was eating wasn’t particularly “bad for you” in any way. But my metabolism was doing its best to get the most out of every calorie, and that weight gain was the result.

At the time, I didn’t feel bad about the weight gain. I was actually happy because it meant I was finally getting enough food. And everyone around me was complimenting me on it, because they knew I’d been starving for awhile.

But somewhere between then and now I developed some real self-loathing around my weight. Particularly around the way my face looks now compared to what it used to look like. And… I won’t go into every body part that upsets me, but I find it far more upsetting than I used to.

And that’s why it hurts when these asshats constantly bring up my weight. And I still think there are specific reasons they bring it up, manipulative reasons that have to do with trying to get people to see me as disgusting, and to see me as just bad in some kind of specific moral sense. I still remember when my stalker deliberately lost a bunch of weight and then claimed it was because my existence was so upsetting to her that she couldn’t eat, then pointed at me and went “see, she’s still fat, this isn’t affecting her at all.”

That’s the kind of manipulation I mean. Being fat supposedly means I wasn’t upset or affected in any way by what she was doing to me, even though at the time I was actually so upset that I went through every single day feeling…. I can’t even describe it, like this deep terror that went all through my body and felt like it was destroying me. I’ve gotten beyond that terror now, but at the time, being targeted in that way made me feel like I was at the center of a giant eyeball that was fixated on me, and I felt like a trapped mouse.

So when they say I’m fat, they’re saying a few things.

They’re saying I’m happy, that I’m not upset, not affected by being treated like shit the way normal people are.

They’re saying that I’m healthy. Because unhealthy always means losing weight, it never means gaining it. And they try to minimize the fact that I just lost fifty pounds in a really upsetting and awful way because I can’t fucking eat anymore. So they pretend that the weight loss just didn’t happen. (But if it hadn’t happened, that wouldn’t mean there wasn’t a health problem going on.)

They’re saying that I’m bad. Morally bad. Because fat people are gluttons and slobs and lazy and stupid.

They’re saying that I’m disgusting. Because everyone knows that fat people are disgusting. I’ve actually seen people online claim that they throw up just from looking at pictures of fat people. I once had a conversation with someone who kept saying how awful it is that people are fat because it’s unhealthy and that fat people are just in denial about how unhealthy it is to be fat, and all this stuff… and when I questioned her closely enough she finally admitted that her real reason for being uncomfortable with fat people is because sometimes she ends up having to touch us on the bus. And I’ve seen people say that having to touch us on airplanes is so disgusting.

Do you have any idea what it’s like to have people say they vomit when they see people who look like you?

And they always, always, deliberately exaggerate my weight in order to deliberately exaggerate these qualities in people’s minds. This may or may not also be why some of them deliberately exaggerate my height. I’m 5'2". A person who is 5'2" and looks like me, weighs 195-ish pounds. But they try to say I’m lying about my height (why would someone lie about their height?). And that might be because their claims that I weigh more would make more sense if I was actually much taller than I am.

There’s a few sorts of insults that really seem to get under my skin.

Disability-related insults are one of them. Being called things like retard and mong and being told I’m worthless, that I contribute nothing to the society I live in, that people like me should be sterilized, or that I should’ve been killed at birth. Some people have even told me that the Nazis had the right idea about disabled people, and that it’s a shame that disability-based eugenics got connected to race-based eugenics via the Nazis, because without that historical connection to Hitler, people would realize that killing us was a good idea. Being told that it is morally wrong to bring people like me into the world if you know that your child will be like me. That stuff really gets to me.

Then there’s being told things based on class, or disability and class together. That because I’m on government benefits, I’m worthless and have no value in society. That I’m a tax user, not a taxpayer, and that the real taxpayers therefore have a total right to tell me what to do in my life, because I’m using “their” money to do it. That it would be better for people like me to die. Or better for people like me to live in poorhouses and get only the most basic necessities and no more. I’ve heard all those things.

And then there’s the stuff based on how I look. That includes being fat. But it also includes being hairy. And ugly. And stuff like that.

One of my stalkers used to be really attracted to me when I was thin. And he actually told someone online that it was a real shame that I got fat because I used to be beautiful. And I know what he means by beautiful. He means fuckable. He was one of the worst womanizers I’ve ever met. And when he said all that, I had really mixed feelings. Part of me was disgusted with myself. Not that I ever wanted him to think I was attractive. But just the idea that I’m somehow worthless now that I’m not attractive to him. But at the same time, I was almost happy that an asshole like him doesn’t see me as attractive anymore, like “cool maybe now he’ll leave me alone”. But he didn’t leave me alone, because his stalking is not just based on his former attraction to me, it’s based on obsession and the way he felt that he owned me and that I had no right to walk away from him.

And I have such mixed feelings about my body in general. The weird thing is that if I was looking at someone who looked just like me, I’d consider them attractive. But when I look at myself, I don’t. Or I don’t always. Sometimes I’m fine with how I look. But other times I just see myself as a collection of ugly parts, each part one that someone has given me shit for in the past. So I’m a unibrow plus a double receded chin plus body hair in the “wrong” places plus a big stomach and flabby arms and etc.

Someone once complimented me on my “total lack of vanity”. She was wrong. If I had no vanity, I wouldn’t get upset sometimes about being ugly by many people’s standards. She just thought I had no vanity because I was willing to put myself out there in videos despite how my body looks and the way my body moves and stuff. But I do have vanity, I have physical vanity and I have spiritual vanity and a lot of other unpleasant things I shouldn’t have. I wish I looked better than I do, even though it’s hard for me to define “better”.

And it bothers me how damn hypocritical it is for some of these people to focus on my weight all the time, and all these superficial things, while claiming to have the moral upper hand. And all they’re doing is trying to make it easier for other people to hate me and see me as a bad person.

I also think there’s some element of… the way some people try to make fat sound like it means the same thing as privilege. Like you’ll hear socialists talking about fat in the same sentence as rich. When actually it’s poor people who are most likely to be fat. But I get the sense when some of these people call me fat they’re trying to give it the connotation of rich and healthy at the same time when I’m neither one in the least bit. It has the same effect as when they refer to my support workers as servants, implying that I only have them because I’m too lazy to take care of myself. Or the ones who try to claim I grew up rich. (I grew up middle-class in money, upper-working-class depending on your exact kind of class analysis, but nowhere near rich. And now I’m poor and my parents are poor and there’s no middle-class in sight.)

That’s why I knew that when that guy referred to my considerable weight, that he was not just a random visitor to my blog. Random visitors might mention fat, but there’s something really pointed about the exact way he mentioned it, that I could feel as something “off” long before I recognized his name as the name of a repeat cyberbully who had harassed my friends both online and offline. (He actually made threatening phone calls to an online friend of mine.) There was something in there that felt like he was doing the weight == privilege thing. I don’t know how I find these connotations in things, they’re not something I can describe easily, but sometimes I just know somehow, by the phrasing people use, that they’re affiliated with the clique that bullies me online. Like when someone I didn’t even know was remotely associated with them… I was busting my ass trying to make my writing accessible to her, I couldn’t, I asked if anyone around there might be able to help translate my words, and she said something like “Do it yourself – this isn’t your home, there aren’t any servants here to do it for you.” (I’d been trying all day to do it myself to the point of head-banging meltdowns. And she managed to make me feel like dirt for not being able to do it.)

I don’t know. I don’t know why stuff about being fat affects me so badly. I can’t stand being around people who are always talking badly about fat people. It doesn’t matter if they’re talking about it in an openly disgusted way. Or whether they’re disguising it by talking about ‘health’ and 'weight loss’ and things like that. It just makes me feel like slime.