Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(15)

For that reason, we simply must talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities, and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, always an impossible decision. Well, we’re not, and it’s not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex, and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine.

Paradoxically, one of the primary reasons I am so determined to tell my abortion story is that my abortion simply wasn’t that interesting. If it weren’t for the zealous high school youth-groupers and repulsive, birth-obsessed pastors flooding the public discourse with mangled fetus photos and crocodile tears—and, more significantly, trying to strip reproductive rights away from our country’s most vulnerable communities—I would never think about my abortion at all. It was, more than anything else, mundane: a medical procedure that made my life better, like the time I had oral surgery because my wisdom tooth went evil-dead and murdered the tooth next to it. Or when a sinus infection left me with a buildup of earwax so I had to pour stool softener into my ear and have an otolaryngologist suck it out with a tiny vacuum, during which he told me that I had “slender ear canals,” which I found flattering. (Call me, Dr. Yang!)

It was like those, but also not like those. It was a big deal, and it wasn’t. My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.





You’re So Brave for Wearing Clothes and Not Hating Yourself!


Probably the question I get most often (aside from “Why won’t you go on Joe Rogan’s podcast to debate why rape is bad with five amateur MMA fighters in a small closet?”) is “Where do you get your confidence?”

“Where do you get your confidence?” is a complex, dangerous question. First of all, if you are a thin person, please do not go around asking fat people where they got their confidence in the same tone you’d ask a shark how it learned to breathe air and manage an Orange Julius.

As a woman, my body is scrutinized, policed, and treated as a public commodity. As a fat woman, my body is also lampooned, openly reviled, and associated with moral and intellectual failure. My body limits my job prospects, access to medical care and fair trials, and—the one thing Hollywood movies and Internet trolls most agree on—my ability to be loved. So the subtext, when a thin person asks a fat person, “Where do you get your confidence?” is, “You must be some sort of alien because if I looked like you, I would definitely throw myself into the sea.” I’m not saying there’s no graceful way to commiserate about self-image and body hate across size-privilege lines—solidarity with other women is one of my drugs of choice—but please tread lightly.

Second of all, to actually answer the question, my relationship with my own confidence has always been strange. I am profoundly grateful to say that I have never felt inherently worthless. Any self-esteem issues I’ve had were externally applied—people told me I was ugly, revolting, shameful, unacceptably large. The world around me simply insisted on it, no matter what my gut said. I used to describe it as “reverse body dysmorphia”: When I looked in the mirror, I could never understand what was supposedly so disgusting. I knew I was smart, funny, talented, social, kind—why wasn’t that enough? By all the metrics I cared about, I was a home run.

So my reaction to my own fatness manifested outwardly instead of inwardly—as resentment, anger, a feeling of deep injustice, of being cheated. I wasn’t intrinsically without value, I was just doomed to live in a culture that hated me. For me, the process of embodying confidence was less about convincing myself of my own worth and more about rejecting and unlearning what society had hammered into me.

Honestly, this “Where do you get your confidence?” chapter could be sixteen words long. Because there was really only one step to my body acceptance: Look at pictures of fat women on the Internet until they don’t make you uncomfortable anymore. That was the entire process. (Optional step two: Wear a crop top until you forget you’re wearing a crop top. Suddenly, a crop top is just a top. Repeat.)


It took me a while to put my foot on that step, though. So let me back up.

The first time I ever called myself fat, in conversation with another person, was in my sophomore year of college. My roommate, Beth—with whom I had that kind of platonically infatuated, resplendent, despairing, borderline codependent friendship unique to young women—had finally convinced me to tell her who I had a crush on, and didn’t understand why the admission came with a Nile of tears. I couldn’t bear to answer her out loud, so we IMed in silence from opposite corners of our dorm room. “You don’t understand,” I wrote, gulping. “You count.”

Beth is one of those bright, brilliant lodestones who pulls people into her orbit with a seemingly supernatural inevitability. She wore high heels to class, she was a salsa dancer and a soprano, she could change the oil in a truck and field dress a deer, she got Distinction on our English comps even though she and I only started studying two days before (I merely passed), and she could take your hands and stare into your face and make you feel like you were the only person in the world. It seems like I spent half my college life wrangling the queue of desperate, weeping suitors who’d “never felt like this before,” who were convinced (with zero input from her) that Beth was the one.