The Year of Becoming Comfortable

Hello, readers! Herein you will find an essay about a revelation I had this year about bodies and life and what it means to be happy and comfortable. I’ll cover fatphobia and talk about weight loss and plastic surgery and diet shit, so if that’s not your bag, skip this one. (And if you’d like to modify your subscription settings overall so that, for example, you get my weekly abortion news roundups but not essays and fiction and suchlike, you can do all that in your Substack profile.)

» a bad conversation

“You need to cut out all flour, doesn’t matter what kind,” advised my new doctor, several sentences into a monologue on the “obesity crisis” and liver health as I sat fat and pantsless on an examination table a couple of weeks ago, concerned about an allergic skin reaction to antibiotics.

Her dietary advice, though bad, was not entirely out of left field. I’d brought up the subject of liver health because the emergency CT scan that had revealed my primary problem — diverticulitis, hence the antibiotics — had also shown a mildly enlarged liver. The ER physician hadn’t expressed concern, but I wanted to follow up with my PCP to rule out (or in) the many and various terrifying WebMD searches I’d been obsessing over. 

Dr. K reviewed the CT report and droned in the same exasperated monotone you might use to chide a child who’d forgotten her mittens again: “Lose the weight, lose the fatty liver.”

Because she hadn’t bothered to ask me about my diet or my exercise routine or even my alcohol intake, I responded the way fat people often have to respond in these situations – with assurances that I am a good fat. I told Dr. K that I always ate my vegetables, walked the dog, rode my Peloton. I told her I’d been keeping a stable (fat) weight for years after a debilitating knee injury and a self-destructive yo-yo diet and exercise phase that had made me miserable. Weight loss was not an endeavor I wished to embark upon unless absolutely necessary. I wanted to know: If I maintained my current weight, was I in danger? Was I about to become cirrhotic? Did I need blood tests, or a specialist?   

“Are you doing a full hour every day of strength training and cardio?” Dr. K asked, as if she hadn’t even heard me, before launching into the no-flour lecture. “You should talk to a nutritionist. There are so many in town!”

Realizing this was going nowhere, I assured Dr. K I would think about our conversation. And I will. I will think about it while I find another new doctor, one who takes my concerns seriously. And if weight loss ends up being part of my treatment plan, I’ll go on that journey with someone who knows that “never eat flour” is unlikely to be a successful long-term weight loss solution. If anyone in that exam room needed to talk to a nutritionist, I thought as I removed my mask in the parking lot, it was Dr. K.

This was my second bout with diverticulitis, but my first time experiencing it as a fat woman. Eighteen years ago, when I turned up at a Dallas hospital with a bizarre set of symptoms for a 21-year-old, my doctors were not at all concerned about whether I was eating flour or working out for an hour every day. I was, at the time, very thin. If I’d been asked, I would have reported that my diet consisted of Hot Pockets, instant ramen, Chef Boyardee, and Lean Cuisines. I had recently encountered a whole, fresh avocado for the first time in my life and had to ask my roommate how to “open” it. I was working 60 hours a week for an editor who terrified me, and drinking most nights after work and every weekend. But I looked healthy on the outside, and as I recovered from that first infection, my sprawling medical team dug hard to find out what had wreaked havoc on my insides – Crohn’s? Something adjacent, but masquerading or misleading, like cancer? It was a scary time, but nothing dire turned up. I was eventually sent on my way with a shrugging diagnosis of IBS, told to “reduce stress,” and drink Benefiber.

When I was skinny, doctors couldn’t fathom why I might be sick. Now that I am fat, there can be only one explanation. 

And yet, I feel better than I ever have, both in body and mind. In the years between these bouts of diverticulitis, I have changed significantly. I exercise regularly. I cook most of what I eat. I sleep eight hours or more almost every night. I have stopped wearing high heels and started wearing crop tops. I discovered the concept of boundaries in both my professional and personal life. I no longer prioritize peace-keeping and obedience. And, of course, I am fat.   

I do not feel good despite being fat, but in many ways because of it. It was not until I became fat and decided to remain fat — when I stopped hoping to discover a thin person looking back at me in the mirror or a photograph — that I finally gave myself permission to ask a life-changing question: Am I comfortable?

Becoming and being fat has invited me to be with and in and around and of my body, to experience all of myself in real time, all the time. Of course the sociocultural background noise wants me never to forget that fat is bad, that fat is ugly, that fat is a fight – that it is a state of fighting, of being in battle, constantly, with an opponent I can never outrun (have I tried running?). It has not been easy to tune that shit out; I don’t know that it’s even possible to do so entirely. But the Health at Every Size, fat acceptance, and body neutrality movements have offered me radical new ways of thinking about authority, obligation, capitalism, and the body industrial complex, freeing me from years of deeply ingrained shame and self-loathing — awful feelings that seemed to be sewn into the very fabric of my psyche even as a thin person. Even as a child.  

Fat needn’t be a fight. Fat can just be a fact — something I know and never forget in the same way I know and never forget that I am a woman, or that I have brown eyes, or that I am married. 

» a revelation

There was something about the competing existential terrors of the last few years — the pandemic and political crises, of course, but also my quiet, personal panic at the realization that Millennials had ceded our role as generation scapegoat to Gen Z — that inspired this obvious truth to dawn upon me at last. For all the heartache I was visiting upon myself in a world that was already cruel and fucked up, a world I would only know for a few short decades out of untold millennia anyway, for all the shame I felt for being a bad Feminist™ who didn’t love every inch of her body all day every day, for all the self-loathing self-examinations, for all the ever-shifting expectations — none of it had ever helped me lose a single pound, and neither did any of it make me feel satisfied with the body I had, or make my days more joyful, or my relationships more fulfilling.

When I turned fat into a fact instead of a fight, I started noticing all the other battles I’d been waging. While I was on the front lines with fat, I didn’t believe I had the time, energy, or the right to take care of myself unless I was losing weight, or trying to. As long as I was at war with my own size, I couldn’t see my whole self as deserving of relief, gentleness, and beautification. Many days, I was fighting as much with my own literal body politic — fighting to feel positive, celebratory, liberated — as I was with my physical form. It was exhausting. I had been doing this my entire life, long before I actually was fat. I worried about becoming fat. I worried about being perceived as fat. I mean, fuck. I’d been picking apart my body in every other mirror I encountered since my dance teacher instituted weigh-ins for our competitive troupe of fifth graders.

Fighting fat had demanded my discomfort for decades. I did not want to spend the next fifty or sixty years having this fight.

It was not like ripping off a bandaid. Very slowly, even gingerly, I began trying to shift the way I talked to and about myself, and even the way I thought about myself. I stopped trying to cheerlead myself into feelings I didn’t have, and stopped berating myself for feelings I did have. I acknowledged critical thoughts without trying to logic out of them or catastrophize into them. It was hard work and not always or even usually successful; I sometimes wondered if this was just another manifestation of fighting fat. But as my self-narrative became kinder and more natural over many weeks and months, I noticed that one question surfacing again and again: Am I comfortable? 

In 2022, I decided I wasn’t waiting any longer to answer it. 

» interventions large and small

The first time I took the question seriously, I ended up pumping my “Lake Jams” playlist through a sterilized bluetooth speaker while a cosmetic dermatologist siphoned adipose tissue out of my neck, bopping along to a cheerful combination of Prince, George Michael, and Jimmy Buffett. I know that essays about body acceptance are not supposed to include testimonials about liposuction, but like I said: I’m not really fucking with supposed to any more. I’d been deeply self-conscious about the shape of my neck, jaw, and chin since I was a teenager. It was an eternal source of stress, requiring all kinds of preparation and negotiation every time I posed for a photo, agreed to an on-camera interview, or, after the advent of smartphones, accidentally unlocked my iPhone with the front-facing lens on. 

I was sold the idea of neck lipo while waiting to get a mole removed. (Getting scary moles removed is an okay thing to do for yourself in the fat fight; you have to stay alive to do the most important thing you can possibly do, which is lose weight.) The ad in the Westlake Dermatology waiting room pushed a 20 percent discount that month, so I scrolled through their website and TikTok and a million Google results, barely believing I was allowing myself to contemplate plastic fucking surgery. The idea that I could simply do something to free myself from a particularly vicious cycle of self-loathing did not square with my fat-fighting obligation to lightly punish myself all the time, especially if I wasn’t going to be dropping dress sizes, the only worthwhile thing a fat person can do. 

I realize that getting liposuction as a means of accepting my fat body, rather than fighting it, sounds fully counterintuitive. But that’s what happened. In May, I forked over $4,000, got my neck blown up and then deflated like a balloon, and in a matter of weeks, I had the jawline that I’d wanted for approximately 25 years. To everyone else, the aesthetic change is extremely subtle; my own parents haven’t noticed. But to me? I haven’t given a single solitary second thought to how my head looks in a photograph in months. I am free from the constant vigilance required to manage this little vanity. 

I am still fat, but I am a little more comfortable.

This summer, I prioritized little ways of making my day-to-day life more pleasurable. I defaulted to the breezy ease of crop tops instead of trying to disguise my stomach. I took time to apply bright and glittery decals to my nails. I stopped forcing myself to journal every day (#selfcare) and instead wrote only when I felt I had something to put on the page. I set up an automatic watering apparatus for my tomato garden so I didn’t have to blast myself with 90-degree Texas heat first thing every morning. I abandoned a writing workshop that didn’t work for me, and put down books I didn’t enjoy. I turned on lamps instead of overhead lighting, made sure to always play music while I worked, and burned candles and incense.

It was burning the incense that led me to the next major investment in my comfort. When I realized setting a heavenly mood by setting things on fire at home was actually hell on my eyes, I despaired. Maybe I could, or should, just put up with it. After all, I’d been suffering from dry eyes for years. Things had gotten so bad that I could barely stand to wear my contact lenses for more than a few hours. My ophthalmologist recommended drops, but I was practically mainlining ampules of Systane PF, even when I went weeks wearing glasses. And I hated fucking with glasses, which hurt my nose no matter what style I wore. I hated swapping them out for prescription sunnies every time I went outdoors, or forgetting them at home and squinting my way from one stop to the next. I spent an incredible amount of time and energy planning for what I would need to bring if I went to this or that place, if an emergency popped up and I didn’t have my drops or a lens case, if I needed a spare-spare set of contacts or glasses or sunglasses in my carry-on, or if there was anywhere nearby that sold Opti-Free in case I ran out while traveling.

And then it clicked: here was another proxy fat fight. Putting up with endless ocular irritation was another way I had found to punish myself. When I let myself explore real solutions to this day-in, day-out discomfort, I landed on LASIK. There was a risk it wouldn’t alleviate my dry eye — it might even exacerbate it — but I wouldn’t be much worse off than I already was, and I’d at least be free of the constant fuckery of juggling eyeball accouterments.

They zapped my corneas with lasers in October. It smelled awful, but took only seconds to correct thirty years of nearsightedness. The up-front cost was an appropriately eye-watering $5,000, but I’ll likely make it up over the next few years by not paying for eye exams, glasses, or contacts. Now, I haven’t relied on drops in months. I don’t have to pack every purse with pricey prescription sunglasses, contacts cases, and extra lenses. I can fall asleep reading a book without worrying I’ll wake up bloodshot and bawling. I am presently enjoying the warm aroma of sandalwood wafting in from the next room.

I am still fat, but I am a little more comfortable.

The ripple effects of prioritizing my own comfort continued to surprise me. I pierced my nose for the first time since college and started wearing fun, flashy jewelry. After years of defaulting to leggings and baggy t-shirts, I began embracing my affinity for loud patterns and statement denim. This Halloween, I chose a costume I would never before in my life have dared to wear — as a favorite Peloton instructor, wearing a sports bra and workout leggings, as comfy as it was cute. I finally started using toe-stretchers and gentle yoga to manage the chronic foot and knee pain I’d endured since my days in ballet school, instead of powering through high-impact workouts that hurt more than they helped, or resigning myself to years of agony as part of the fat-fight body tax.

But the fight I am most glad to have given up on is the one I’ve been having with my brain since I was a little girl. It’s not been so much a fight as a crusade, and it took making peace with my body to realize just how much I’d been worn down by years of conflict with my own mind.

The source of my strife? ADHD, which is famously under-diagnosed in women. Because I was smart, successful, and (I thought) self-aware, I had never seriously considered that the hallmark ADHD behaviors I had experienced since childhood could actually … be symptoms of ADHD. Wasn’t everyone impulsive, easily bored, and perpetually multitasking? Didn’t everyone experience obsessive periods of hyper-focus, only to jump ship the moment a new job or task or hobby lost its novelty, and it always did? Weren’t we all on a constant quest for dopamine hits, unsure whether a load of laundry might take twenty minutes or two hours, and terrified of tackling projects that we couldn’t guarantee would turn out exactly perfect, the very first time?

Turns out: no. Somehow, my TikTok algorithm knew I needed to hear it. The more #ADHD content I was served, the less able I was to ignore my suspicions. Then, a couple of women friends — writers, both — began talking about their recent ADHD diagnoses. And as I sat in front of my computer screen day after day, making zero progress on the novel I’d started in July and written no more than three full chapters of by the first week of NaNoWriMo, I became just desperate and pissed-off enough to see if I could do something about it. Worst case scenario? I’d get confirmation that I was really just the bad, lazy asshole I’d always considered myself to be. As I ran that calculus in my head, it occurred to me that here again was the fat fight telling me I was worthless, that I deserved to be miserable and scatterbrained. That whether I was unwilling or unable, I had no potential and certainly no real value anyway, and the best I could hope for would be to spend my life tricking my brain into doing the bare minimum.

Recognizing this at last for the bullshit it was, I scheduled a series of screenings at a local therapy center. It was boring and embarrassing and grueling and $500 — with insurance — but my diagnosis was priceless. I am finally learning to understand how my brain works, like literally how the chemicals spinning around in my head affect my ability to work and play and relax. I am letting go of those long- and closely held ideas about being a bad, lazy asshole. I am taking medication that allows me to approach everything from emptying the dishwasher to finishing my novel with clarity and purpose.

I am still fat, but I am a little more comfortable.

» escape versus embrace

Last night I piled up with my cats and the dog and my husband for our annual family viewing of A Christmas Carol (the correct version, which is to say, the George C. Scott version). The price of happiness is very much on my mind. I spent nearly $10,000 on myself in the last twelve months, on frivolous shit that saved neither life nor limb, and didn’t put a roof over my head or food in my mouth. Of course, lots of people spend much more than $10,000 never learning a thing about what makes them feel happy and comfortable and safe. (We just finished White Lotus, too.) But it would be bullshit not to acknowledge that my year of becoming comfortable was an expensive one. Not everything required a high-dollar investment, but I won’t deny that the big-ticket items made a proportional difference. I am immensely privileged to have earned and saved enough to be able to fund this journey. I would never have been able to pursue any of these things without my family’s white, middle-class safety net. It is the best money I have ever spent, and it will be many years before I am able to do things like this for myself again.

I could have gotten here without the price tag; of course, lots of people do. But I couldn’t have gotten here without being fat. Accepting that I will always take this body and this brain with me wherever I go, whoever I am, whatever I do, has enabled me to surrender the fat fight. Which means I get to experience the joy of moving for movement’s sake, and the satisfaction of becoming better at dancing or curling or cycling and having it “count,” even if it doesn’t make me smaller. I can eat for nourishment and pleasure. I can rid myself of irritants both large and small, protect my time and emotional health, and do something about suffering besides believe I am obligated to endure it. 

Before I stopped fighting fat, I used pain and punishment as escapes — as if being vaguely or not-so-vaguely miserable was its own kind of fucked-up vacation or spa day. Always hoping to take myself away from the here and now, trying to wake up in some other place, in some other state of mind.

I now know how to tell the difference between escaping myself and embracing myself. Or, I at least know the right question to ask if I’m not sure: Am I comfortable?

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