In sixth grade, we had our ‘class physical’, where everyone goes to the gym, takes off their shoes, gets their height and weight recorded, an eye exam. Afterwards I was standing around with some girls are on the playground, waiting for the rest of the class to finish and one tall girl says, “You really weigh 160? I weigh 92 lbs.” All of the other girls chime in with their respective weights (78, 85, 95), and I am leered at through side glances. It is clear I’m not like them, that I am fat.

I wasn’t just fat to them, I was gross. Clothing just didn’t fit me, so I wore sweatpants and sweaters with decals on them, legging pants and baggy t-shirts. I longed for pretty, cute clothes that I approved of. When I found an adult size that I liked, it virtually never fit me right, especially in the boobs. At 12 years old, I thought I was supposed to have a rack that would compete with Dolly Parton simply because everything that fit me was intended for an adult woman. So I was a round, lumpy, flat fat kid with frizzy hair and zits. Man, 7th grade was a huge bummer.

I wasn’t even the only person like me. There were other fat kids. Some of them were even popular. There was a girl named Heather who was not only heavier than me, she was taller than all of the other girls so she towered above everyone and really stuck out. Still, she was best friend’s with the popular girls, she managed to find (and afford) cute clothes and always had her hair and makeup done. If I had worn makeup to school, or done my hair in anything other than a pony tail, it would become the subject of a joke among my classmates. When I got my ears pierced in 7th grade, my whole class noticed and quickly decided I had done it so that a certain boy would like me. I didn’t even realize, then, that it was the boy that was getting made fun of in specific, not me. My very presence was being used to tease other people.

I didn’t respond to it very well, either. I was a pretty vocal kid, and when I was teased I generally had abuse to feed back. To this day when a car drives by and the passenger leans their head out and calls me a fat whore, I’ll stand in the middle of the street and respond letting them know what a worthless pile of steaming poo they are at the top of my lungs.

It was a nasty combination, being fat and being on the defensive all of the time. Whenever a kind word was offered, I usually sneered at them, discounting the offering peer, turning them against me with this learned behavioral response. I desperately wanted friends to talk to, kids to walk with at lunch, partners in gym class, friends to chat with on the bus. I didn’t want to be friends with any of them, though, because they were all horrible, and by being around them, they had made me horrible, too. I felt like trying to be friends with people who had been so mean to me would be like giving up, or worse, admitting that what they said was true.

In ninth grade, I made the decision to leave. I wanted a fresh start, in a new school with new people in a different place. My mother let me move 3,600 miles away to stay with my grandmother for 10th grade. It was pretty amazing. I went from a school with a graduating class of 78 to a school who’s pep rallies routinely had more than 4000 students. I disappeared. I was completely unimportant to anyone who might think to be nasty to me, and no one felt the need to point out my flaws. In turn, I didn’t have a need to be defensive- none of these people had proven themselves to be horrible.

I stayed fat, in fact continuing to gain weight. In 10th grade, I weighed 240 lbs, and no one seemed to care. I made friends. I went out. I had people to chill with on lunch and I had friends in every class to sit with. There were so many people around me that it wasn’t hard to find the ones that were like me. Different enough to try to fly under the radar. I watched my friends live right front and center, being gay, being fat, being just plain funny looking and even having a gimp arm. They were all cool, and none of them gave a shit. I learned to stop giving a shit, too.

This change in perception is probably what saved me. I never looked back at those horrible people from my middle school. Some people say that school is hard, and I say it can be nearly impossible for someone who is different. I think the biggest problem is that we are all different, so different that we are scared to be honest, so we pretend we are someone that we aren’t. Sometimes we even change into that person, eventually.

I am still fat. I still eat healthy and I’m still fat. It might reflect on who I am as a person, but I think it had a lot more to do with genetics than America’s obsession with dieting. I’m cool with being fat, don’t mind if someone calls me fat, like most of the clothes available for fat people. Just don’t tell me that I don’t have a right to be fat, or I’ll tell you just what I think of you.

—–

Listen Here:
MP3

Passions and Interests…Wow, that is an open-ended question, isn’t it? I’m passionate about people, like, my friends, my family, myself — like, life lessons. I’m really passionate about learning. Not necessarily academic learning, but spiritual learning; self-betterment. Music, art, the Internet (I’m such a geek.) Comfort. Making a more comfortable world, like, comfortable for me — in nesting in my home, or comfortable in the world. I feel like without comfort, people can’t be…it’s like Maslow’s Pyramid. The levels of need, of basic need — the basic needs are security, food, shelter, love…and I think that a lot of people are missing that basic thing, which means that nobody can advance because you’re just too busy surviving. So, comfort is definitely a big passion of mine. And activism. Making the world, at least my little corner of it, as much improved as I can.

interviewer: I haven’t heard you talk about comfort before. That’s interesting. What is the relationship between comfort and your fat activism?

Stacy Bias: Well, I feel like there’s a basic level of comfort in our skins that we are not allowed to have, or that we have been taught not to have. Our bodies are tools, right? They’re tools for pleasure, they’re tools for function, they’re tools for…anything we need to do in the world, we do in the company of our bodies. And if we have been taught to disconnect from that, if we’ve been taught to be so uncomfortable about the things that we experience aesthetically about our bodies, or even in terms of mobility - then we lose out on significant experiences. Either we do them, but we’re kind of checked out while we do them, so we’re not present for them, or we just miss doing them at all. So I feel like comfort is a huge — it’s absolutely the root, I feel, of this kind of deprivation model that I’ve seen in all the interviews. I feel like discomfort comes — it’s hard to explain;

When people have talked about eating, they’ve been talking about comfort. When people talk about sneaking off and those kind of moments of zen that they get, you know, just being blank, or just consumed by flavor, or whatever, I feel like comfort is what that’s about. And that means that it’s missing.

Interviewer: How does that work with people finding that, and then not feeling comfortable in their bodies?

Stacy Bias: Well, it’s kind of a catch-22. You’re missing that kind of basic level of comfort and security, safety, love, whatever it is that’s kind of pulling at your rickety foundation. And this obviously is not true of everybody who is fat - I’m just talking about the people who have a common experience to mine; So you go out and you do this comfort-seeking in the form of eating and while it’s actually a truly loving thing for a child who doesn’t necessarily have tools at his or her disposal to create that sort of higher level of comfort for themselves, like, they don’t really have the autonomous control as a child to say “Hey, you’re not making me feel secure, Mom. You’re not making me feel secure, Dad.” Who has the words for that, or even the understanding of that as a kid, so the accessible things become that; TV, friends, food, whatever. We seek comfort. And then there’s the shame that follows immediately, because you’ve done something wrong, because you’re sick to your stomach. Because you weren’t, even though you were, it felt like you weren’t in control in that moment. You weren’t strong enough to stop it, you knew the consequences in that you would be fatter, or you would be sick or whatever - and so it becomes this kind of spiral of self-loathing that leads to more and more acting out, and more comfort-seeking because you’re just furthering that lack of comfort for yourself, and it’s a vicious cycle that is un-fulfilling.

I keep coming back to the fact that, as children, it’s actually a truly loving thing to do for yourself; to provide for yourself. I mean, you’re caring for yourself in that way. ::pause for emotional overwhelm:: But you know, as adults, we grow and we have more autonomous control over our lives, and that habit doesn’t necessarily serve anymore. But it’s really hard to un-do and there’s a lifetime of shame behind that behavior. You’re ashamed of yourself for doing it, other people are ashamed of you based on the proof of having done so, unless you’re bulimic or anorexic, and then you get shamed for a whole other reason — and it’s this incredible circle of shame and self-loathing that’s just simply rooted in wanting to be comforted. It’s such a natural, basic thing, but so frequently missing.