Finding value at any size
My journey from being affected by fat shaming in elementary school to adopting radical self-love in college.
An umbrella sits over a group of colorful homes as rain falls down. The pressure to look the same as everybody else is like a constant gloom over the neighborhood of diversity that is body types. Radical self-love is like an umbrella that shields this beautiful variety from the gloom and lets it shine. // Illustration by Julia Vreeman
Written by Jacob O’Donnell
Imagine for a moment that your body is your dream home. A beautiful dwelling that can take an infinite number of forms and yours is the only one of its kind. Having a bigger one isn’t a bad thing: A bigger house has room for more of the people and things you love. A bigger body is simply more to go around.
I have a bigger house. I have for a long time.
Only 100 years ago, people thought fatness was beautiful, according to Anne Hollander in the 1977 article “When fat was in fashion.” Today, having a bigger body is seen as a sign of unhealthy excess, according to Garabed Eknoyan’s 2006 study “A history of obesity, or how what was good turned ugly then bad.”
I experienced society’s obsession with fatphobia firsthand in sixth grade. My peers called me “Peter Griffin.” Then, as now, I had that character’s double chin and beer belly.
I hated that nickname.
I didn’t hate it because of the character’s fatness — I hated it because his character played into the stereotype that fat people were gluttonous and foolish. The nickname made it clear to me that other people saw my body as gluttonous and foolish.
My peers demonstrated their cruelty by poking my belly and commenting on how squishy it was. They would even offer me sweets and taunt me for weeks when I naively accepted.
It turned out I wasn’t alone. Obese children in America have an 85% chance of being bullied for their physique, according to the 2010 study “Weight status as a predictor of being bullied in third through sixth grades” by Julie C. Lumeng, et al.
This bullying can lead to a host of mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder, according to an article from McGovern Medical School.
I discovered the mental health effects of my bullying the hard way.
When I was 21, I arrived in Washington, D.C. for an internship during the summer of 2021. I barely remembered the torment I endured in sixth grade. I was nearly three thousand miles away from my old elementary school in Mount Vernon, Wash.
Then came a fateful encounter.
I was on a walk behind the Supreme Court Building when a random man came up beside me and said “gluttony is a sin too,” pointing at my belly.
With those five words, all the feelings from sixth grade rose to the surface like a geyser.
I went back to my apartment and cried for hours, wanting to disappear. I felt the same way in sixth grade every time I was teased, but this time felt much more intense because I remembered all those times of torment at once.
The stranger’s comment did me a service. I realized that I had unhealed pain. I realized that I needed to detach my body image from what others thought. I realized then that I had to come up with a new way of relating to myself.
It took me a while to find that new way. It came to me just as unexpectedly as the naysaying stranger in D.C.
On my first day of class in my fifth year of college at Western Washington University, I met a kind graduate student who saw I was mired in gloom and mentioned a book to me called“The Body is Not an Apology.”I ordered a copy the moment I got home. It turned out to be one of the best purchases I ever made.
The cover itself was liberating. Author Sonya Renee Taylor was on the cover wearing nothing but some flower petals. She was beautiful.
Upon seeing that cover I began to ask: can my fat body be beautiful, too?
Taylor answered my question swiftly as I began reading. She introduced the term “radical self love,” and rested it on three pillars of peace.
The first pillar of peace was “peace with not understanding.” I connected that back to the comment about gluttony the stranger in Washington D.C. made. He didn’t understand that my size did not come from eating too much. It was for a reason not even I could explain.
Two years later, just before I sat down to write this story, I saw a house along Chuckanut drive I didn’t understand. It was domed and had hexagonal skylights that made the whole thing look like a giant bug’s eye. Despite its oddness, it was kind of cool.
When I saw that house, I connected it to myself and to the framework of radical self-love. I realized that I didn’t need to understand my body — my house — for me to love it, and neither does anybody else.
The second pillar of peace was “peace with difference.” I connected that back to my bullies. They likely bullied me because they were uncomfortable with my differences, but it harmed me by making me see myself the same way they did.
I’d always embraced and celebrated difference, but never for size — until I read Taylor’s book. It made me think of how much more interesting and beautiful cities and towns would be if everyone were able to design their own house, and that humanity has already been given this blessing of diversity through our infinite variety of body types.
The final pillar of peace is “peace with your body.” Everything that happened to me because of my fatness, and everything that reminded me of it threw me into turmoil because I never made peace with myself.
I realized that I couldn’t rely on other people to give me that peace. I had to train myself to find it on my own.
One way I’ve learned to find peace is to think of castles. I think castles are some of the most beautiful homes in the world, andthey are enormous. To me, the example of castles proves that a thing can be big and still be beautiful, and so can I. So can you.