The Way We Talk About Our Bodies Is Deeply Flawed
Words like ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ ignore a vast spectrum of size and experience
I made a mistake.
A friend recently asked me what I was writing about next. I told her I was planning an essay on medical neglect: the way that doctors think of and treat patients who are very fat — patients who, like me, are classified as “super morbidly obese.” In the process, I referred to this friend, a size eight, as thin, and realized my mistake immediately as I watched her bristle and hiss.
“I’ve been quite heavy,” she snapped, voice thick with condescension and sharp with defensiveness and something else — fear? “You just didn’t know me then. I was fat.”
Surprised, and more than a little ashamed of myself for making such a basic mistake, I asked after her experiences as a fat person.
She feels that I have erased her experience; I feel that she has appropriated mine.
“I was almost plus-size,” she tells me. “I was wearing a size 12, and people started telling me to diet.” I feel myself bristle before quickly repressing my own hiss. I feel stalagmites rise up from my floor, hard as rock, jagged and unforgiving. She is, of course, referring to the time…
