Rage

There will come a time when you won't even be ashamed if you are fat - Frank Zappa

I was sixteen in 1969. My family had moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Wheaton, Maryland. There were hippies in my school. Major culture shock.
I heard all the early hippie, revolution, feminist movement, ideals with an open and excited heart and I believed. I stopped shaving my armpits and legs, I stopped spending a hour every morning putting on make up and I stopped dieting. I cast off the patriarchy and the establishment and I believed in the Woodstock Nation. My early decisions to accept my body were political and hopeful.
The mechanics of living in a world not quite keeping up with those ideals were awkward. As a fat person, I can feel invisible walking through the world. At the same time I can feel like a target who can, at any time, inadvertently walk into a shooting range. I learned how to move through the streets ignoring stares and jeers. I lived clenched.
Strange people on the street shooting slurs at me seemed inevitable in the culture. I experienced them with as much distance as I could sustain. But people, whose politics or spiritual pursuits I respected, asked me well intended, inept questions about - when I was going to lose the weight - or didn't I think it would be easier for me to find true love if I lost the weight - or although they loved me for who I was and didn't mind if I was fat they often worried about my health -didn't I want to be healthy? Never getting that being fat was a part of who I am. Not separate from everything else that influenced my awareness or experience and not necessarily a bad thing. The dismissive quality of  these conversations escaped these friends, since they so unconsciously accept the paradigm of fat is ugly, fat is bad, fat is wrong, all the while trying to expand their awareness, lose their preconceptions, grow into authentic, original minded big souls.

I was in a new age, hippie, self help group once, charming them with my humor. A man decided to confront me about my weight. His confront was in the form of telling me that he was not attracted to me. Suddenly, I felt like I was in a sports bar. I went from affable, entertaining, sweet, loving, earnest, into flame. I could feel myself become a torch. I was contempt, murderous, enraged. I was completely uncomfortable with the feeling. It seemed out of context with the proposed spiritual demeanor of the day.
My intention about losing the weight was that it only happen as a natural function of my quest for wholeness. I have lost and gained weight relative to changes in lifestyle but I have never been thin. This is my body. To live in this body requires a posture. I have to stand firm in my self acceptance. Sometimes it is a peaceful stance but more often I burn. I use the outrage that I feel over anybody's disapproval of any thing I am to fuel me energetically, especially in those conversations when I think I can have my guard down and am taken by surprise.
I reject the idea that being thin is the body of  realization or awareness or beauty. It is an active rejection not because I need to put energy into it but because I live in a culture so hell bent on selling me into the slavery of compliance. To have to fight to accept something  as elemental as the size of your ass is crazy making. The thought of it makes me explode. I want to stand naked in the streets screaming. I want to scream - take this shame that you try to feed me and swallow it back into where you created the misbegotten notion of  what a body is for.
My preference would be grace. My effort is toward a posture of dominion, of owning all of who I am. I am no longer uncomfortable with my rage but I occasionally grow weary of it. I hear the joke by the late night talk show host, I see the advertisement for the weight loss program, presented with evangelical zeal. I sit uncomfortable in the too small seat in the public place. I hear the giggling jokes of teenagers on a corner.
I rage.