The Problem With Being Right

I just finished reading Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong, a Huffpost article that finally (and ably) puts together all of the reasons why our cultural view of fatness is hugely and dangerously problematic.  I definitely recommend that you go ahead and read this piece and then get back to me, because my thoughts here are really a response to this piece.  While Hobbes covered many of the pains and perils of being fat in a fatphobic world, he missed an important one.  Even for those of us who know all of the facts, know that our weight is not largely in our hands and that weight and health are not synonymous, some unexpected aspects of fattness can be hugely painful.  One thing that thin people don't and can't understand is how desperately, passionately I wish they were right.  I wish that it was only a matter of willpower, that keeping the weight off is easier than getting it off, that dieting itself is not so hard.  In short, I wish that I could hope, someday, to have a thin(er) body, one that looks like all of the beautiful people on television and movie screens.  Hell, I'd be happy to have a body that could fit into clothing designed for hip, medium sized fatties.  I don't need to shop Abercrombie and Fitch; I'd be overjoyed to fit into Torrid, as long as I could stay that way.  Because I know the science, I know that there's a negligible chance that, even with compulsive diet and exercise, that will ever happen.  Even if I lose the hundreds of pounds it would take to make me more socially acceptable, I would almost inevitably (95-98%) gain it back.  And I can't do that to myself.  I can't.  I can't fight with my body for years to get to a place that I like, only to be back where I am, or maybe fifty pounds heavier, a few years later.  I can't work to lose this weight knowing that it will inevitably come back.  I also, and more importantly, look at my body and for practical reasons - ones that have to do with moving well and doing things I want to do - and wish it were smaller.  I'm sure a lot of people who know me think that I'm unaware of potential problems, but that's far from true.  I worry about future mobility, about pain, about things going undiagnosed because doctors don't want to touch - or look at - or treat fat people.
I no longer give a crap if people think I'm ugly. I've had a lifetime to come to terms with that. I care if I can do the things I want to do on a day to day basis, and because what this article says is true, that will always be something of a struggle.  I worry that I won't be treated fairly by medical personnel when I'm helpless and unable to do anything to advocate for myself.  I worry that I won't get diagnosed correctly because the best diagnostic tools are too small to fit me. I've cried over all of that, wrestled with it, tried to bargain with it, but facts don't lie. 
So what I do is try every day to live my life as a happy fat person, one who doesn't accept the limits society imposes, and that's really hard. I try to take as much beauty into my life as I can, to be as kind as I can, to create as much as I can, because that is the value and worth I can bring into the world.  And I try to advocate for myself and for other fat people.  I have lectured doctors on fat acceptance when they treated me as lesser.  I have stood up for myself and walked out of appointments.  I shouldn't have to do these things, but I do, and hopefully they make it a little easier for the next fat person who comes along.
I am fat as all hell, and I'm not ashamed of my body. I'm not ashamed of my life. I'm ashamed that I live in a culture that values people for how they look instead of for what they create, how they love and care for others; for the content of their characters. I'm ashamed of that and disgusted and furious about it when it happens to people of color.  I'm ashamed and disgusted when it happens to women.  You bet your ass I'm also ashamed and furious when it happens to people who look like me. 

I'm here. I'm a valid, valuable person. My body does not make me lesser, and neither do other people's beliefs about it.

Looking for a Fat Friendly Therapist in a Fatantagonistic World

I was reading an excellent article by Terrence Chappell on the presence of white privilege in therapy today, and it struck a depressingly deep chord.  While I'm not black, and so experience different kinds of prejudice, the fat bias I experience has made it really hard for me to find a decent therapist, or even feel safe trying one on for size.

Several years ago, when I briefly had insurance,  I went looking for a therapist to help me cope with the aftermath of my abusive marriage. I found a nice woman who did art therapy (although not with me), and whom I got along with in most senses. While she focused more on my childhood than my marriage, that was partially because I was still trying to be friends with my ex and had trouble really talking about what he'd done. That's arguably part of why I needed therapy, and a better therapist would have helped me get there, but she wasn't up to the job.Be that as it may, her inability to help me sort out my trauma wasn't her biggest issue. The real problem was her fixation on my weight.

This was before I was really aware of fat acceptance.  While I was better with myself than I had been when I was with my ex, I still hadn't come to the realization that I didn't owe other people my body looking any particular way.  However, her preoccupation still was strange and upsetting to me. She wasn't my medical doctor, but she was pushing me to get surgery. She kept coming back to it again and again. I think now that she liked me and was trying to "fix" me so that liking me would be okay. I didn't fit her idea of what a fat person should be, so she tried to make me not fat. Eventually my therapy was more about my weight than about helping with either the emotional issues from my childhood or the ones I'd gone there to get help for.  I never confronted her about this; I'm not sure I could have at the time.  I just eventually pleaded financial constraints and stopped going.

That therapist was a sweet, well intentioned person. She wasn't perfect, but she wasn't trying to harm me; she was just part of our culture and believed that everyone always needs to be thin, no matter what the cost, and that fatness is inherently bad. She believed that she needed to save me, that I wasn't like all the other bad fatties out there, that I uniquely deserved to be thin.

I've dealt with much worse. There was the nurse practitioner who asked me if I really had a endocrinological problem or if I just had a huge appetite. There was the doctor who told me that pain in my arms was just because I was too fat. There was the pediatrician who didn't test me for hypothyroidism because it was "overdiagnosed" in children. Medical bias is a huge thing for fat people and for women (and woe betide those of us who have the intersection) and it is a similarly huge issue for people of color, LBGTQ+ folks, and members of other oppressed groups.

However, it's a much more intimate problem in therapy, and at least as damaging to treatment. When I walk into a therapist's office, I'm very aware that I'm a fat, bisexual woman. Almost any therapist I could work with would differ from me on at least one of those three axis. I narrow that problem somewhat by only working with women, but I still am fat and bi, There are probably plenty of bi therapists, but the only fat one I've worked with was my awesome therapist from high school, and even she had a lot of internalized fatantagonism..

People go to therapy to become their better, healthier, happier selves. In my case, I want to be free of some of the crippling anxiety and trauma left over from my marriage. I also want to deal honestly with my feelings about being fat, which are extremely complicated. I have anger at our culture and most people in it for treating me like I'm lesser. I have internalized fatantagonism. I have health concerns and mobility concerns that I want to talk about without getting unwanted advice. I don't need the advice; I need the conversation. I have grief for the loss of all the work I did to lose weight years ago to no lasting avail. I have overwhelming exhaustion and a realistic knowledge of current research on weight that contributes to my depression. I have all the spaces I don't fit in, all the things I can't do, all the places I can't go.

I need to talk about these things and work through them, and for that I need someone who's not going to be invested in pushing me towards the diet industry or surgery or anything else. I need someone to facilitate me making my own choices, and I don't know how to find that because our culture hates fatness so much that I feel like any acknowledgement of ambivalence or complexity of feeling will be taken as proof that I need to be thin, that fatness is bad, evil and wrong and thinness is good, true and right.

A couple months ago, I decided to start looking for a therapist again.  I'm about to visit the third I've tried out since.  The first was pleasant enough but kept losing my appointments.  The second had troubling ideas about domestic violence.  While that would have been enough reason to disqualify her, she also made a face and half covered her mouth when I talked about fatantagonism, as though she was preventing herself from saying something.  It doesn't take a genius to guess what.  I don't have much - or really any - hope that this next one will be different.  I'm going to see her because I know I need a therapist, because I know that having a good therapist would be incredibly helpful for me, and because I promised my husband I'd take care of myself and this is part of that commitment.  It would be really, really nice to be proven wrong.  
  

Every time I walk into a new doctor's office I brace myself,  I know that there's a fair chance I'll be explicitly or implicitly fat shamed, that I'll have to advocate to get basic, reasonable treatment, that I may not receive treatment at all.  However, most doctors can do the basic things like draw blood, prescribe drugs, and so on.  Even the most fatantagonist doctor is capable of providing care.  They might fail to do so, or provide inadequate care, but ultimately when they send my blood out for a blood test the results will be as valid as those a thin person would get.  The problem is convincing them to offer the care in the first place, not an inability to provide it.

By contrast, a therapist who has a bias against my body cannot provide me care no matter how well intentioned she may be because her vision of both my experiences and who I should be fundamentally conflicts with mine and erases much of the pain I need to address.  A therapist who cannot accept and respect my other identities - fat, bi, woman, feminist - can never help me become the person I desperately want to be.  

Who's Got the Mic

One really difficult problem in discussing systemic oppression is how to explain the way our society hears and values some voices more than others.  It's a hard concept because it requires those of us who get heard more easily to be quiet in order to let others talk.  Some people feel like this, in turn, oppresses them, and like holding their voices down shouldn't be necessary to lift others up.  That's not really what's going on, but I've often had a hard time clearly stating why that is.  Because of that, I think about it, maybe not a lot, but bits at a time.  From that bits at a time, I've come up with a metaphor that I think may work.

Imagine your'e in an enormous school auditorium with hundreds of other students having a group discussion.  You've all been given microphones so that people can hear the discussion better.

There's a problem, though; the microphones don't all work very well.

Some of the microphones work fine.  They give voices full amplification with no static and never cut out.  The school gives these microphones to heterosexual, cis-gendered white boys who are thin, able bodied and well off.

Some of the microphones mostly work okay.  They might have some static and cut out some, and they're not as loud as the first set, but they still get the job done.  They mostly go to thin,cis-gendered, white girls who are also well off and able bodied.  A few might go to particularly well off white gay dudes, or other people who are one step away from being like the guys who got the best batch.

The remaining microphones suck.  Some are still better, some still worse, but in general they don't amplify the voice much, they cut out a ton, and they're static city.  Everyone else - black women, trans-women of color, genderfluid disabled folks, everyone gets these.  The further away you are from being an affluent white dude, the crappier your mic is.

Because of this, whenever a conversation happens, the white dudes are going to be the easiest to hear, and the ones people are most likely to listen to.

White women, gay men, and others who have a second tier mic will get drowned out by them a lot of the time.  However, their mics still work well enough that they get heard some of the time by some people.

The people who have the third tier mics rarely get heard at all.  Even when they do, the amount of static and crap their mics are generating make it hard to get their points across.

Now, understand, the white dudes did not choose to have the loudest mics.  They might not even like public speaking.  They also don't have the option of adjusting their mic or lowering the volume.  It's not that we're accusing them of intentionally hogging the stage.  However, while they're talking,people literally can't hear anyone else, so even though it's not their fault, sometimes we need them to be quiet for a while so that the people on the second and third tiers have a chance to talk.

Just as importantly, the people on the second tier - like me -  still have a huge advantage in being heard over people on the third tier, so even though we also have trouble being heard, we sometimes need to be quiet and listen carefully so we can hear what the third tier has to say.

Now in reality, oppression is much more complex than a three tier system, but the fact remains that, as a society, people who are not members of oppressed groups are listened to with more focus and respect than people who are, and similarly people who only belong to one oppressed group (ie. women, people of color, LGBT folks, fat folks, disabled folks etc) usually have an easier time getting heard than ones who belong to multiple oppressed groups.  Because of that, when we ask you to stop talking and listen, we're not accusing you of doing anything wrong, or even saying what you have to say is bad; we're just saying that your mic is louder and there are other people who also need to be heard.

 

On Hope, Transcendence and the Meaning of Success.

I'll start by saying that I didn't really know where to put this.  While my size is relevant to it, it's not about that per se, nor about geekery or feminism.  I initially thought about just writing it for myself, keeping it private on an old Livejournal account or something, but ultimately I think there's something here I want to share, so here I go.

I've been in a very dark place lately.  I'm 38 years old, and by society's standards I haven't accomplished much of worth.  I have a degree, but the college I have it from isn't prestigious enough.  I'm an artist, but not one who has managed to sell her work.  I do my best to speak out on important issues, to be an advocate for women (especially survivors of intimate partner violence and rape), people of size, and those dealing with mental illness (groups I belong to), and a good ally to members of other oppressed groups, but my words only reach so far on the Web, and my physical limitations make in person action difficult.  I have a wonderful partner who is loving and kind and good hearted, and I do my best to make sure he knows those things, and how much I appreciate them, and to be a good partner myself in turn.  However, while having a wonderful partner makes the microcosm of my life infinitely better, it is not enough to counteract my sense of failure.

So, that's where I've been.  I've been wondering what I bring to the world, and if there's any point to it.  I've been worried about whether anyone will ever see my art, and frankly grappling with the idea that my work might be meaningless, that it will never be respected or admired or understood.  I've been twisted up in knots about whether my advocacy was meaningless because it wasn't "enough", because I wasn't reaching thousands or changing the world.  I was worried that all my passion, intelligence and creativity were ultimately worthless because what they produced wasn't being seen by "enough" people or making a "big enough" difference.

Yesterday, I found out that a favorite song of mine, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, had been rewritten into a twee, poorly done Christmas carol.  I found that upsetting for a number of reasons (he's Jewish, he's a poet whose words are remarkably beautiful, the song is not at all about that), and posted about it on Facebook.  One result of that post was a friend asking me how I'd interpret the last verse of Cohen's original:

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

To be honest, I hadn't really thought much about those lines for a long time.  I've been a fan for a couple of decades, and long since come to my interpretive conclusions and moved on to listening to the marvelous pictures he paints.  However, in this case I needed the reminder.

The first two lines, talk about the struggle to make love or meaning out of desire.  "I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch".  I couldn't experience the whole, so I reached for the parts.  That's a common experience, and not just when it comes to sex.  We often try to build the appearance of joy because we don't know how to find the reality of it.  We think that if we have the right car, and the right job, and the right partner, the ones the world tells us we should want, that those generic pieces will somehow become our very personal happiness.

It's easy to forget that life is more complicated than that.      

That's an important idea, and one to hang on to, but it was the last three lines that really punched me in the gut.  Those lines reminded me that flawed, imperfect lives - lives like mine - are still beautiful. They say that there is joy to be found in looking at the horror and chaos and unyielding complexity of the world, all the things you have no control over, and loving it anyway.  In loving yourself, "even though it all went wrong", in seeing the beauty in your struggle, and ultimately in accepting that there are genuinely things that you can't control, and that it's okay.  It's okay to not always be in control.

 Most of all, those lines talk about transcendence.  That transcendence can be found in religion, or meditation, or in a moment of absolute beauty, in sex, or pain, or honesty.  Some people find it in Beethoven and others in martial arts.  It can certainly be found in a cry to the heavens when there is nothing else that can be done.  It can be religious, but it doesn't have to be.    

Anyway, as I wrote a response to my friend explaining my personal interpretation, and it occurred to me that I hadn't had much of that in my life for a long time.  My focus on doing and achieving, and on my failure to do and achieve, hasn't left room for transcendence.

I moved on to other things, and went about my day, but last night while I was trying (and failing) to sleep, I came back to it.  I thought about the fact that my focus on success was very much an outward focus, a focus on meeting the arbitrary standards society has set on what has meaning and worth.  On a personal level, I've always, to a greater or lesser degree, rejected the idea that I have to be like everyone else to be valuable.  That's partially because I've never had any talent for pretending to be someone I'm not, but also partially because I strongly believe that thinking for yourself, making your own choices, doing things you genuinely enjoy, and developing a unique sense of self is a valuable and important thing.

But as I lay there, I realized I was completely failing to apply that philosophy to society's broader expectations.  I would never judge myself by someone else's arbitrary standards, but I was in agony because I wasn't meeting the equally arbitrary standards of society as a whole.  I was trying to meet a set of standards that had little to do with me or my life, and feeling worthless because I was "failing".

The other thing I thought about was art, and what it fundamentally means to be an artist.  I remembered that not all art is about the finished product sitting on the wall, or on a pedestal, or playing on a screen.  A whole movement of art is defined by the process of making it; the meaning is in the act of creation itself, not the result.

Those two things circled around in my mind, along with the idea of transcendence, and I realized that I'd been looking at things the wrong way.  My life is not a piece of art whose value is in the completed product or the number of eyes that look at it; it's process art.  My life is valuable because I am living it, and doing all I can to live it beautifully with honesty and integrity, creativity and love, and sometimes chocolate.

My art has worth not because of who sees what I create, but because I create incredible things that I am passionate about.  My advocacy has value because of the people it touches; the fact that there are people who touch more is irrelevant to the good I am trying with all my heart to do.  My degree has meaning because of the profound education I received while acquiring it, and because of the intellectual curiosity and value of learning it represents.  My life's value is not determined by society's criteria for success; it is determined by the joy and effort and pain and blood and hope and misery I have put into living it.

And that is transcendence, for me.  Looking at the world and saying "I can't control your standards, but I can look beyond them".  I understand that, in the eyes of the world, it changes nothing.  I understand that there will be many days when I will fail to see it, when I will again judge myself harshly against society's unreachable standards, which tell us to win or go home.  But right now I can see it.  Right now I can see that, as Cohen said:

There's a blaze of light in every word/
It doesn't matter which you heard/
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
  
I am broken, but come what may, I am full of light, and my life, my process art, is beautiful.

No, Miss Hopkins, You Haven't Proved Anything.

While I was going about my business today (that business being wasting time on Facebook), I came across an article on Mic about Kate Hopkins, a British celebrity who apparently decided that she would prove that it's not possible to be fat and happy by gaining fifty pounds and being unhappy.

No, seriously.

Hopkins, who's tweeted such memorable phrases as "Fat shaming isn't a thing. There is just being fat - and someone letting you know.", apparently decided to try this "experiment" after being called out on her behavior during an appearance on the Late Late Show.  She gained (and is now working on losing) 50 pounds, decided she didn't like being fat, and declared the case closed.

I almost don't know where to begin.

First off, she hasn't been a fat person.  She's been a thin person who put on some weight to prove a point. To understand what life is like as a fat person, and to actually come to terms with her body, she would need to live in that skin for a hell of a lot longer.  Further, she'd need to live in a body whose metabolism was fighting losing weight every step of the way.  Being fat and happy isn't a cop-out, it's an epiphany; a realization that you don't have to wait to be thin before you can live your life in a joyous, meaningful fashion.  It takes most of us years to get there.  Her claiming it's impossible after she's briefly been "fat" (by which I mean moderately heavier than she initially was) is like a francophobe visiting Paris for a week and then claiming that no one could possibly be happy living there.

It's also obvious to anyone who's opened a basic science text that an experiment based on the subjective experience of someone who started out with a bias is about as likely to produce valid results as my cat is to start singing Thriller.  Hopkins went into this little "experiment" convinced that it was impossible to be fat and happy.  Of course her experience matched her expectation.  To quote my teenage self, duh.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, her experiment misses the point.  Yes, in a lot of ways being fat is a miserable experience.  Most of that misery, however, is not a direct result of your body being bigger; rather it's a result of the discrimination and prejudice you face on a day to day basis.

I don't get to gain some weight to prove a point and then lose it again, regaining my considerable thin privilege as I go.  I have to live here.  I have to live with people looking at me like I'm disgusting, treating me like I'm stupid, assuming I'm lazy and worthless.  When you live with that on a day to day basis, not for a few days, but for all of your life, finding the courage to love your body, to be happy, is a revolutionary act.  It's an act of revolt that more and more fat women are embracing.  Being happy in my skin, happy in my life, is one of the hardest things I do every day.  I don't always succeed.  Sometimes the voices all around me telling me how worthless and hideous and useless I am win.  On the days that they don't, I am fat and I am happy, and that is the bravest thing I ever am.    

Kate Hopkins gained some weight.  She may have, for a few days, experienced some fraction of the prejudice that is my day to day life.  Instead of letting it teach her about what it's like to struggle with prejudice, she willfully chose to believe that her own bigotry was justified.  Of course she didn't experience the radical self-love it takes to be fat and happy; she can't even manage basic empathy.    

The Perfect Victim

The latest news out of the NFL is that Ray Rice is appealing his suspension, the one that he got on the grounds that he publicly, egregiously abused his wife Janay Rice.  The news about this is news about him, not her; her part of the news cycle is over, and she is now stricken from the conversation, her name mentioned only as a detail in his story. 

I don't know her story, and won't presume to tell it, but I can say with confidence that she, like most victims of domestic abuse, like most of us, was not a perfect victim.

The perfect victim is a white, cisgender, straight woman.  She's smaller than her abuser, who is a man.  She never says anything cruel or unfair that might "provoke" him.  She's supportive and loving, meek and gentle.  Her abuser is violently physical, and she finally leaves when he hurts her so badly that it opens her eyes.  She has to protect her children.  Or maybe just herself; that might be okay.

She certainly never, ever hits back.

She is as rare as a unicorn, and the rest of us, we imperfect victims, are deemed unworthy of compassion and support by comparison.      

My brother and I saying goodbye before
freshman orientation at Hopkins.  I'm
on the right.

When I met my ex, I was a fat, shy, bisexual nineteen year old, a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University.  Although I'd had a short, torrid fling with my roommate at boarding school, I hadn't dated a boy since the brief period when I was thirteen and the size of my newly formed breasts was enough to distract from the size of the rest of me.  I was many of the bad stereotypes about young girls of a certain size; lonely, desperate for affection, a bit boy crazy.  I smoked hand rolled cigarettes, wrote a lot of poetry, and had a long string of crushes, none of which I really expected to pan out.  Already, I wasn't a perfect victim.  

Max was a short, skinny guy who still wore clothing off the boy's rack.  He was maybe an inch taller than I was barefoot, and about a hundred pounds lighter.  He wasn't really my type, but he was fairly nice to me, and his friend Mic* was dating my friend Zoe*.  We hung out together constantly, and I was more than ready to fall in love.

(*names changed out of respect for privacy)

There were warning signs from the first.  He was willing to "mess around" with me, and we spent all our time together, but he wouldn't call it dating.  He slept with someone else when he went away for Christmas break (I rationalized that it was okay because we weren't "really" dating.)  When he came back, Zoe, Mic and I were moving into a new rental house.  He came in to help and got so mad at me for a joke I made about not wanting to move more stuff that he didn't speak to me for a week. Those should have been red flags, but I was horribly lonely, and the attention he paid me the rest of the time made it easy to dismiss those things as aberrations.

At one point, he went away for a week and I didn't call him once.  I hung out with my friend Samir*, who was actually nice to me.  I did other things.  I felt like myself, and like maybe I could be okay without him.  That's when he finally said he loved me.  At the time, I thought it was because he missed me; now I think he felt me slipping away.

I might very well have slipped away eventually, if my father hadn't died that spring.  It was sudden; a heart attack.  He was there one minute, gone the next.

To understand what that meant to me, you have to understand that my father was the parent I lived with.  While I loved my mother, I also fiercely resented her.  She was a strong, successful, capable woman, driven and focused, compulsively neat.  I was a disorganized, creative, fractured girl who had a great deal of trouble with focus and despised the tedious work involved in neatness.  I was loud and passionate, while she was reserved and found displays of emotion uncomfortable.  We got on like oil and water, so when I was fourteen I went to live with my dad, who despite his faults (many of which I share), was a very good parent for me.  Losing him was losing my home, my sense of place in the world, the only safe place I had to go back to.

When my father died, I was already struggling.  I was taking a mandatory semester off from school because I'd spent the semester before everywhere but in class.  I couldn't find a job, and felt that I was failing my friends.  Max, for all his issues, was the only bright spot in my life, and he was graduating. When I found out he was moving to Hawaii to work with his uncle (a pediatrician) and try to get into med school, I decided to go with him.  It was by far the worst mistake I've ever made.

What followed was a slow transition from behavior that was simply occasionally dismissive or erratic into outright abuse.  What had seemed like a fondness for binge drinking (a standard social activity in our crowd) became, when it was just the two of us, more and more obviously a drinking problem.  He was a mean drunk, and sometimes a violent one.  At first, he just threatened to hit, balling up a fist, even pulling back his arm, but not striking.  I told myself he wasn't actually violent.  I told myself that I was bigger than he was, so he couldn't actually hurt me anyway, so it wasn't abusive.  I wasn't a perfect victim.

Later, when we were living in New Jersey, Max did hit me, over and over again.  He bit me, leaving tooth shaped bruises on my breasts.  Those were the only marks he left on me; he was too weak to actually bruise me with his fists.  I told myself again, he can't hurt me, so its not abuse.  When he tried to rape me one night in the middle of a particularly bitter argument, I told myself it didn't matter because he didn't succeed.  Meanwhile, he was telling me I was worthless, that no one else would want me.  He was encouraging me to gain weight because he got off on the control, and on the idea that my size kept me with him.  He sabotaged my diets.  Much later, he threatened to leave me when I considered surgery.  

At one point I almost left him, but I had nowhere safe to go, not for more than a few days.  I went back.  My friends thought what he did was wrong, but also that I was "difficult", that I should be easier to live with.  I wasn't meek or submissive.  I argued with him.  I didn't let him win.  I wasn't a perfect victim.

We had a restaurant in New Jersey that we went to regularly.  We'd have a nice dinner, Max would get drunk on Guinness, and he'd drive home (I wasn't allowed to drive our only car).  On the way home, he often turned violent.  We'd argue, and he'd hit me.  He knew he could hit me in the car; when he hit me elsewhere, I could sometimes catch his arm and (as gently as possible) stop him.  In the car, if I caught his arm, he couldn't drive.  He had free reign, and he made use of it.  One night in particular, he was doing this after threatening to crash the car and end it all for both of us.  I was terrified and panicked and angry.  I was angry.  Perfect victims don't get angry.  I wasn't a perfect victim.  

When we got home, he hit me again and I lost control.  I hit him back, again and again.  I hit him hard against a banister.  I could have really hurt him.  While I hit him, I said over and over "You're never going to hit me again".

There are very few things I've done in my life that I'm more ashamed of than that.  What I'm more ashamed of yet, is that there is some part of me that's still there, still angry, still pounding at him, trying to get him to stop hurting me, and that part of me just wants to keep going until he can't hurt me ever again.  Violence is not a solution to violence.  I know that, but I didn't that night.  That night, the years of torment, of physical harm, and emotional abuse, pushed me to the breaking point, and I made a very, very bad choice.  

I'm not a perfect victim.        

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, I believed Max when he said no one else would ever want me. I believed that this was what love looked like.  After seven years of abuse, I still agreed to marry him. I didn't leave then, nor for another five years after.  When I did leave, it was because I realized I'd be happier without him, not because of some violent incident that finally let me see the light.  It took me several more years to come to terms with what he'd done to me, to admit and understand the full scope of the abuse, in part because I wasn't the perfect victim.

The perfect victim never hits back.  The perfect victim says "no" and struggles.  The perfect victim is flawless and blameless, and has never done anything that can be used against her in the court of public opinion.

I am not a perfect victim, but I am a victim.  The fact that I did something very wrong once in my relationship with Max does not negate the years of violence and abuse that occurred before and after that incident.  The fact that I was larger than him did not prevent him from hurting me, from hitting me, from threatening me with a knife, or using my body without my consent, or likening me to a barnyard animal.  The fact that I called him out on his behavior and demanded change did not justify the names he called me, the gaslighting, the insults to my intelligence, my integrity, by body, and my spirit.

There are women in prison because of this, because they weren't perfect victims, because they killed their abuser rather than let him kill them.  We don't have great statistics, but the numbers we do have, as referenced here by Victoria Law of BitchMedia are staggering; in CA, 93% of women in jail for killing their partner were abused by him first.  In NY, the number is 67%.  Of these women, most sought help in the system repeatedly before defending themselves when the law wouldn't.  I have to wonder how many of these women were arrested, tried, and convicted because they weren't perfect victims?

Requiring victims to be perfect is a way of assuring that we won't be believed, that our abusers won't be prosecuted, that we will be deemed unworthy of the law's protection and the empathy of those around us.  After all, how many of us truly fit the bill? It's easy to claim that we were combative, or that the abuse didn't leave enough marks, so it doesn't count; people can say that we hit back once so we're the same as our abuser, or that we're crazy so we obviously imagined the whole thing.  Discounting abuse is simple, as long as the victim needs to stay high up on a pedestal to be believed.

We are none of us perfect, victims included.  If we demand perfection of victims, what we're really doing is giving leave to abusers to abuse, and refusing care and protection to those who need it most.

Bad Medicine

"Do you have an endocrine problem, or do you just have an enormous appetite?"
I'm at the doctor's office.  I hate new doctors for just this reason.
I'm seeing a nurse practitioner; they apparently didn't have a doctor free or something, although I made an appointment to see a doctor.  Not that it matters.
She's already talked with me about my medication. She knows I have a serious thyroid issue.  Knows how high the dosage is.  She knows I'm also treated for depression, anxiety, PTSD.
"Do you just have an enormous appetite".  Fuck you.  You know better; it's on the damn chart.
"No" I say, "and most people don't get my size that way".
I'm almost in tears, and the fury is streaming off of me like steam or sweat.
She backs off a little bit, though not much.  We were talking about gastric bypass.  I'm not opposed to the idea, but I hate the fact that most people support it as a knee-jerk, want me to do it so they can be more comfortable, so they don't have to look at me.  It makes it hard for me to be okay with losing weight for health, as much as I want to. I hate making bigots feel better.  Even more, I hate the part of me that hates my fat body because I've seen the same bigoted crap about fat people they have.  It hurts.
I don't really listen to her next few sentences.  She can feel my rage, and she's not comfortable with it.  She's sitting back slightly, is winding up the conversation, when she says something about all the harm that my weight has done to my body.
I say "You know what?  For all the harm that's done, I've been harmed much more by the way people treat me because I'm fat.  That's why I'm fighting to change it."
She says "Oh no, don't do that.  Just work on yourself".

Work on yourself.
"Do you work on yourself when someone treats you like you're stupid or useless or worthless because of how you look?" She blanches a bit; she's Asian, and she's no doubt gotten something like that.
"Their bigotry is the problem.  Oh, I'll work on myself too, don't get me wrong, but I'm going to work on them.  They need to change."
She doesn't have anything to say to that really, not that I process.  I leave without the simple blood test I came for.

I don't start crying until I'm in the waiting room, quiet tears, the kind that stream down a bit at a time.  My best friend is there, waiting for her appointment.  She goes in, and I have a panic attack while I wait for her.  Someone offers me a tissue.  Not everyone is awful. I hold on to that as best I can.
Just work on yourself.
Because she thinks my body is what's wrong.  Because she thinks people have a right to treat me like crap as long as I'm fat, and that the reasonable solution is to try to make me thin.  Like I'd never tried that in my fucking thirty-seven years.  Like my body is the problem, and not their prejudice.
I manage to keep the tears somewhat tamped down until I get to the car; then the crying is hysterical, helpless.  My friend understands.  He gives me a hug, listens, watches True Blood with me.  When he gets home, my fiance understands.  He holds me for a long time.  We order in; I'm not up to making dinner.

It helps until it's time to sleep, and then my head runs around in circles, hurt, angry, helpless.  Another panic attack.  Not the last.
I have to find a new doctor..