Bare by Marie Southard Ospina

I recently took my clothes off in front of 40 people. Maybe more, actually.

Until the moment it happened, I wasn’t sure I was actually going to go through with it. Maybe I’d wear a peekaboo one-piece swimsuit instead. Like that cotton candy blue one that makes me feel like Hilda, the plus-size pinup illustrated by Duance Bryers from the ‘50s through to the ‘80s. Or maybe I’d opt for a Gabifresh x Playful Promises lingerie set as a little nod to the blogger who first opened my eyes to the possibility of a different kind of life I’d ever imagined fat people being able to lead.

As I hopped onto the Zoom event, a collaboration between Fat Life Drawing and The Fat Zine, however, I was met with dozens of faces not unlike my own. I saw chubby cheeks and double chins and so much softness. Not everyone was fat, nor do you have to be in order to sit in on Fat Life Drawing events. Still, enough folks had bodies like mine that the thought of unwrapping myself in front of them suddenly felt safer, somehow.

It probably helped that Fat Life Drawing centres fat, queer, non-binary, and disabled models for its live drawing sessions, so I suspected it would attract likeminded souls. It also probably helped that this whole thing happened virtually — my laptop screen creating a physical barrier between myself and the visages staring back at me.

In the lead-up to that moment, though, I had been nothing short of petrified. I didn’t know who would be at the event. Amidst the people genuinely there to create art, there could be doxxers, trolls, or fat-callers with ruinous motivations. Some people — thinner people — might think me paranoid. I’ve been through all this before, though.

I have been doxxed because someone took such offense at my fatness (and the fact that I write about it openly and often positively on the internet) that they hacked my bank accounts, my emails, my social media, my phone. They posted my address and my mother’s address and my partner’s address on their hateful website, so that their followers might send us threats or dog shit in the post. People DM me things that have made me feel sick. They have wished harm upon my daughters. They have wished me dead. They have wished me worse than dead. My image is routinely stolen and manipulated. Sometimes I’ll be Photoshopped to look thinner. Someone once took a photo of me from the present day and aligned it with a photo of me from when I was at my thinnest (in the deepest depths of my anorexia) and created a “before and after” composite to sell laxative tea. Strangers on the street sometimes moo at me as I walk by, particularly on the days I haven’t “made an effort.” Old paramours covered me up; ensuring they never actually had to look at my big, scary stomach, or big, floppy boobs with their innocent eyes. Every day, individuals and the government alike tell me that I am a beast and a burden.

So, yes, I was worried about taking off my clothes in front of dozens of strangers online. Nearly a week later, there’s still a niggling voice. What if just one of the individuals on Zoom that evening was a troll? What if they took screenshots of my body? Where will those photos end up? How will my heart and mind fare this time?

That’s just one voice, though. When I push through it, there is a much stronger one. A voice of affirmation. The one that I have been feeling every time I click open a new drawing of my body; another interpretation of all the things my figure is.

The participants drew the peaks and valleys of my backside. They drew the width and strength of my shoulders; the immensity and softness of my belly; the way my hair falls on my face; the plumpness of my lips that pairs with the plumpness of the rest of me. In some illustrations, I look older. In some, I look younger. In some, I look bigger. In some, I look smaller. In all of them, I can catch glimpses of what other people see when they look at me.

As fats, we are taught from such a young age that all others will ever see when they look upon us is monstrosity; brokenness. In these drawings, however, I see nothing of the sort.

They are beautiful. They are not emblematic of the kind of “beauty” that we are bought and sold and told to aspire to, but the kind of “beauty” that becomes visible when we value our bodies; when we treat our bodies and those of others with kindness and grace.

Quite simply, these drawings reminded me that not everyone thinks of fat bodies in the way we are conditioned to think of them. And, surely, that if some people can push beyond those prejudices, maybe a future in which more people can do the same isn’t just a pipe dream but an actual possibility.

I laid myself bare, and what I received in turn was hope.

Words by Marie Southard Ospina, follow her Instagram here.

Life drawing sessions by Fat Life Drawing, follow their Instagram here.