Max by Chloe Sheppard

Sep 2

On some level all my writing is born out of rage. Though what I write today is inherently infused with anger, and upset, from having to justify my existence constantly. From having to deal with people on the internet making flippant remarks about my weight without thinking about the impact it potentially makes on my mind. I am so tired of living in this body, that for at least the last seventeen years I have consistently tried to shrink without success. I see pictures of my thirteen year old self, who was so unhappy and possessed by the thought of living a better life once I lost weight, and just want to give her a hug, to tell her to start living properly then and not wait for that thin body she aches for, because it isn’t going to come and all that happens is years of her life are wasted.

I woke up to a message today from a stranger online called Max, telling me, and I quote, ‘if you jump on a fitness program you would be movie star quality’. A seemingly innocent comment, and perhaps even a compliment, but one that has stirred something inside of me so dark that I am nothing short of furious. I am unbelievably fucking tired of people, who haven’t met me or know anything about me, feeling like they have the right to pass judgement on my body and tell me how to make it better. As if I don’t sit thinking about that constantly every fucking day anyway. As if when I go to the shops and see food I’d like to buy, I try and resist as much as I can for fear of gaining even more weight, that when I see my friends tirelessly posting about their ‘step count’ on their stories or talking about their workouts, it does nothing except make me feel like a fat, miserable failure. Because they are doing everything they can not to look like me. It is so strange living inside a body that ignites such fear in people. I do not know how to exist in this body fully because I can never sit comfortably with something pretty much the whole world finds revolting.

I see polls online where people say they’d rather lose a limb than get fat. That they’d rather lose a loved one. That they’d rather be in a serious car accident. Because to them, thin = success, happiness, it means you are deserving of everything fat people are not. You have a right to live a beautiful life, to be loved by people who treat you with care, to be taken seriously by medical professionals because you have worked so hard for that body. Not just because you were born and are a kind, considerate human being.

I am trying to think of a way to express my anger in a not so public way but figure what’s the point, when people feel like they have a right to dictate what I should do with my body online, why should I hide my response? It’s as if these people think we are walking around totally oblivious to the fact we are fat. Like we are just going about our day to day, thinking we’re inhabiting a thin body, until a Max comes along, thinking they’re doing God’s work, to tell us we’d be much better human beings if we just lost the weight.

I wonder if Max realises that my entire fucking life, ever since I can remember, I have heard from every single one of my family members how I have such a pretty face, and I’d be so much happier and beautiful if I just got thin.

I wonder if Max realises that I spent my entire teenage life obsessing over how to get thin, whether it was replacing my lunch at school with cigarettes, making myself sick for years, following thinspo blogs on twitter and tumblr where some of us would text each other each time we wanted to eat to encourage the other to ‘not give in’, that I spent hours crying on the scales and promising myself that if I ever reached a certain weight I would kill myself, hoping that would stop me from gaining weight but it never did, that in 2012 I spent weeks watching reruns of ‘I Used To Be Fat’ on MTV while walking for hours on a treadmill, with my own countdown of the days until I went on a school trip to New York (where I’d have lost so much weight by that point I’d have such a great time there). But I didn’t lose the weight. And spent the whole of my New York trip feeling like a failure because of it. Instead of enjoying the time I was having with my friends in an incredible city at 15 years old, I felt horrible inside because of things like all my thin friends buying clothes in Abercrombie & Fitch whilst nothing fit me.

“I wonder if Max realises the severity being fat has had on my mental health, that everything that goes wrong in my life I blame on that.”

I wonder if Max either does want to fuck me and is just ashamed to fully admit it because I’m fat and that attraction embarrasses him, or if he sees potential in me and is thinks he’s just doing me a solid by telling me to join a fitness program and get my body to a conventional standard he’d find fuckable.

I wonder if Max knows that I have spent the last eight months fucking someone who treats me like an actual piece of shit and could not care any less about my feelings if he tried, but I stay letting it happen because I’m convinced I don’t deserve any better. That someone with a body like mine won’t be able to find someone better, or anyone else at all.

I wonder if Max has ever felt the elation I have when seeing another fat person online living their best life, doing things all the thin people do, that that tiny possibility that I could do that too is enough to suffice for a while. Until another comment is inevitably made by another Max, and my skin isn’t thick enough to not let it get to me anymore.

I wonder if Max has thought about how fucked up my self worth is from being a child constantly incentivised to lose weight - by a family that wanted nothing but the best for me, but didn’t realise they’d end up severing any chance of me valuing myself, when I never lost the weight and never got the rewards, branding myself forever a failure.

I wonder if Max understands how exhausting it is to be a fat person on the internet. Seeing a tweet that has 110k retweets along the lines of ‘sometimes I think I’m pretty then I look in the mirror and realise I’m just fat’, then clicking on the original poster’s profile picture and seeing someone who’s a size 8. Fat is not a feeling. How once when a picture of me got shared to a “feminist” account with a million followers, pretty much every single comment below was about how I am imminently going to die!!! Whether it’s from a heart attack or diabetes, or maybe it’s from me getting so fat that I eventually suffocate myself as my fat has grown to such an extent it’s covering any space I’d be able to breathe through. Because all I do is sit on the sofa, staring at the tv whilst binge eating excessively and don’t move at all, not even to piss or go to the shops, isn’t that right Max?

I wonder if Max is aware how during this pandemic, besides it being a crisis on a global scale, my mental health is once again deteriorating because all I constantly hear is jokes about how everyone is terrified of gaining weight from having to stay inside all the time. How they’re going to come out of quarantine with a body like mine and not know how to cope. How all I am seeing right now is my thin friends uploading workout videos to their stories, proving their worthiness because if they’re not thin and beautiful by society’s standards! What! Are! They!

I wonder if Max has ever considered the reason these people are so scared of getting fat, is because they’ve seen how I and millions of others get treated by people like him. By doctors. By friends. By family. By strangers.

All I am asking, during a time when thousands of people are dying from something not controlled by weight, is that Max, and the rest of the population that feel like fat people are lesser than them, kindly shut the fuck up. And realise that you are not doing us favours by telling us to lose weight, we already know that we should be doing that, whether it’s from the tv shows we watch, the articles advertised to us online, the comments our friends and family are always making, the celebrities pushing “flat tummy tea” or whatever bullshit that’s dangerous and definitely isn’t what they’re using, believe me - we know.