On Fat Girl Summer, Vacation Anxiety, and The Kardashians
Yellow Brick Road
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A bitch is VACCINATED!!!! Years of negligence and disregard by medical professionals for being fat now feel like a villain origin story of a post-apocalyptic world conquered by fully-vaccinated fatties running around with their coochie cutters on and tiddies out! It’s not easy being the worst nightmare of the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world, but I sure make it look like a breeze.
In celebration of my freshly vaccinated life, I booked the first vacation in nearly 6 years last week, and I feel really proud. Less about the prospect of going on a vacation which is, of course, such a privilege and so exciting after all of this *gestures widely*, but more about what I pushed beyond in order to let myself book it.
When I was in my early twenties, I was simply broke and thought vacation was for rich folks and general frivolousness. Once I got a lil’ coin, it all went to paying off debt I accrued in a manic episode at 22 and therapy - the best money ever spent. Only recently have I become relieved enough from both financial restriction and scarcity (one very real, and one psychospiritual) to let myself imagine sun on my skin, a pool, and maybe some white sand between my toes. The personal challenge is now accepting that a cute few days away from my job, which is entirely dependent on being physically present because I am my job, will be okay. I’d imagine I’m not alone in this particular anxiety, especially within the creative space. Needless to say, leisure is not my default setting. I place a high value on it in theory and would literally scream at anyone I love to “Rest, bitch.” I’m a lot better at giving advice than taking it, I’ll admit.
Growing up, vacation was almost sinful. Raised extremely blue collar and a disciple of delayed gratification, my overworked, single mother didn’t exactly prioritize rest. If it wasn’t money, time, or the sheer brain power required to plan beyond child-rearing preventing us from having some R&R, it was not feeling thin enough to go. In our house, dieting and thinness was always the rainbow leading to the pot of life’s wonders. If there wasn’t enough time to snap into impossible shape before doing something, we didn’t do it. So we didn’t do it.
Healing from this in adulthood tends to feel like fighting the impulse to serve delayed gratification above my own needs and desires each day. No Kendra, you do not need to finish that email to have lunch! I’m still operating via silly rewards system in which I have to earn respite from daily life and responsibility because it costs money, time, and in a former life, sacrificing certain foods and other forms of hedonistic joy in order to feel deserving. That last part - the bit about dieting - was not something I was aware laid dormant beneath the surface, and would be awakened with a fury the second I booked my first vacation since recovering.
Triggered by having arrived as a financially independent woman with zero mouths to feed other than my own, and freedom to play as hard as I work - I was getting flashbacks of my mom’s pilates DVD’s, egg whites, and cottage cheese with pineapples. Nastasha Bedingfield playing faintly in the background, I was back in a department store with lighting that somehow exposes every nook and cranny of one’s body, and on the verge of tears trying to squeeze into teen size bathing suits. Talk about regression. It’s been over 4 years since I stopped dieting, and two years since recovering from binge eating disorder. I’m considering filing a class action lawsuit against MyFitnessPal for damages, and I truly believe one should have dessert as much as humanly possible. Hedonism is actually an ongoing goal for me, so this spiral came as a huge shock.
What ensued over the next few days was a gradual build up - friction between an old self and a reborn self - into a full-blown breakdown. Every outfit I put on clung to all the wrong places, and I’d abandon real human clothes for my loose tee instead. Nobody was gonna see me anyway. I’d be on my morning walk and intrusive thoughts, reminding me the clock was ticking before I was going to be on a trip as the exact same person, were on loop. To avoid looking in the mirror, I ran past my reflection out of the shower. The straw that broke the camel’s back was The Sweatpants. I put on a pair of sweatpants, which are typically my baggy pants, and they felt a little more snug than usual. In retrospect, they were not; just freshly washed and dried, but in that moment I was searching for a reason to shame myself and took it.
In true Capricorn Rising fashion, I scheduled myself an hour to lose my mind. And I cried and cried, and pinched and pulled at my arms and thighs like I was 12 again. Forcing myself to stand in front of the mirror naked, I completely unraveled and let out a wail. As my shoulders relaxed forward, I bowed my head, and sank into my disappointment.
I reminded myself that I have been taking care of me, and I haven’t been unkind to my body or my mind. I reminded myself that taking care of me doesn’t always look the same, that this is one physical version of a happy Kendra.
No affirmations could take me out of this shame spiral. I had to move through it completely, and witness myself in this moment, and that was perhaps the most heartbreaking of it all. I was sad to still be carrying what felt like a juvenile “fat kid too scared to be in bikini” trope on my back, and I was angry at myself. I know better than to let changes in my very human body take my joy. I know better than to listen to the mind playing tricks when I go off script, and do something that feels unsafe, but is actually everything I need, want, and deserve.
Over the years, I’ve been in a bikini on the beach, completely naked on set shooting national campaigns, and in lingerie on the internet countless times. I would’ve never predicted that this would be the thing to send me back to a place of helplessness, when my body was my worst enemy and the only thing standing in the way between me and fulfillment. But I guess it makes sense. I have no problem being vulnerable with my body - it’s abandoning control over what I think is holding me back from deservedness in order to simply receive what I deserve (usually so much more) that I have a problem with. It made me realize I wasn’t actually bothered by picturing myself in a bikini, or probably ever had a true desire to lose weight, or anything strictly associated with my body at all. It was about control, deservedness, and my silly little reward system.
We treat our bodies like an animal, expecting full obedience of an inherently wild and deeply intuitive creature that knows exactly what it needs to survive. Building trust in this body has been a rollercoaster ride, constantly reminded there is no single reason why we keep ourselves in shame. The way I have hoarded and restricted enjoying my body, I have hoarded and restricted my own desire to embody who I am - abundance, joy, and leisure.
This is what happens I think. Just before you fly, you look back. Just when you think you’ve out-witted and intellectualized yourself, just when you think you “know better,” you’re reminded you don’t actually feel better. You just avoid confronting moments that could make you feel the grating sensation of challenging old wounds, until you couldn’t avoid anymore. Sometimes it requires getting everything you’ve ever wanted to realize how scary that shit is, having to leave behind the trauma you identify with most to become introduced to who you are.
It seems stupid to cry over a vacation. To cry over being able to go on a vacation. But I guess I was crying for the kid who didn’t think she deserved to go on vacation finally finding deservedness and that does feel worthy of a tear or two.
Fat Girl Summer!!!!
Summer 2021 has been officially declared Fat Girl Summer, which is a relief as I will not be showing up in any other form or energy. Never have, never will. Despite the anxiety that I’m sure many feel to kind of “debut” back into the post-COVID world as a better, hotter, smarter and more accomplished version of themselves, I personally need to see everyone in unadulterated bliss, letting it all hang out.
Naturally, this has some Parade panties in a bunch. The status quo from youth - the one in which “mean” is like….way below “fat” on the list of worst things you can be - has been uprooted and the girlies are bent outta SHAPE! Most literally! I suspect many were counting on riding their proximity to thinness as a personality and talent until the wheels fell off. Of course, systemic violence against fat bodies persists, but fat folks are empowered to advocate for themselves and stand a little wider and taller than they previously have. We’re applying pressure, and it’s working.
None for you, Khloe!!!
Any time I make a post suggesting fat women should not hate themselves and just enjoy their lives - ya know, real simple stuff - there’s always a few comments doing the whole “All Bodies Matter” thing. At any rate, thinness is having an identity crisis. If not used as a weapon to assert superiority, then what is thinness but a lifeless descriptor? If fat folks now accept the term fat as nothing but a lifeless descriptor, then how can we be used as a scapegoat for the world’s insecurities? How can a fatphobic media, workplace, medical field, and social norm persist? The answer is what the answer alway is: The Kardashian in all of us.
The same week Fat Black women declare Fat Girl Summer, Khloe Kardashian charges into body politics like the fucking Kool-Aid man! Will we ever know peace???
I avoid Kardashian discourse at all costs, but that family has planted themselves firmly at the cross street where every enemy of my personal peace reside, so discourse prevails. We can (and do) tweet for days about how they’ve collectively made several billion dollars off proximity to the black body, while serving us our own insecurities on platter. I seldom hear people hold themselves accountable for hypersexualizing, exploiting, and discarding the black image with the weekly news cycle, and then expecting the Kardashians to do anything different when their careers are dependent on our consumption.
So basically homegirl was posted by her own grandma in a bikini entirely unedited for once. Instead of admitting it was unedited, instead of claiming that as a moment of humanness and allowing us to enjoy in a second of vulnerability with her - Khloe dug her heels in, hopping on video to prove how she is, in fact, perfect at every angle, fully contorted and sucking in, because she “works hard.” Then, she makes a word post about her dysphoria, about being a subject of body-shaming in media, about being the fat sister, etc. Following this, her family starts hitting people with legal to scrub the entire internet of the image.
Khloe has very clearly been traumatized under the weight of impossible beauty standards as a woman who has spent thousands of dollars to look unlike herself and still refuses to be seen. She was once a young girl, and then was thrust into hypervisibility where there is simply no right way to be a woman and have a body. I’m certain there is no way to relate to that experience.
As a woman who shares herself very openly and sometimes scantily clad on the internet - who has been told I would enter an early grave, accused of eating 8 burgers a day (which sounds dreamy tbh) and never working out, accused of low self-esteem and poor self-control, accused of promoting unsafe lifestyles by simply existing without shame, without filters, and without edited images - I can certainly understand in my own microscopic way how this would affect a person. I am also a fat, Black woman, and the reason I receive massive amounts of public shame is a standard largely upheld by the Kardashians. Everyone expects that I want to look like them, while they try to look like me. What a mindfuck.
It would be so easy to remove the Kardashians from a cultural landscape without solving any problems at all. It was once desirable to be curvy until white folks encountered black bodies, and labeled it savage. It was hot to be Kate Moss, until it was hot to be Jennifer Aniston, and now it’s hot to be any white woman who looks like a black woman. Soon it may not be, and we will hate ourselves in another way that will promote consumerism in service of something white and wealthy.
Fatphobia is a function of white supremacy, and will morph into whatever it must to sustain power, even something - or someone - imitating blackness, and that is truly what makes the Kardashians so frightening. For Black women sharing their bodies at every angle, entirely unfiltered and without cosmetic alteration every single day on the internet, acceptance of our bodies is our liberation, and exploiting our bodies is the Kardashians’ cash cow.
The white, thin body has a long history of being weaponized against Black folks, which is why body positivity is not for everyone even if everyone benefits, why body liberation cannot be reduced to an issue of desirability when it is an undoing of systemic oppression, and why we have to interrogate our own internalized fatphobe every single day.
If it’s beyond comprehension why someone would go to such lengths to not have a single unedited image floating around the internet, then let’s bring it back into full context: her entire existence requires our internalized self-hate. She has bypassed a chance at reflection of her body image, because it would require relinquishing everything she has.
Everyone wants Khloe Kardashian to be either victim or a perpetrator of impossible beauty standards/fatphobia, when in fact she is both (though far more one than the other) and will always be both as long as we are. She and her family are not creating our values, but reflecting them back to us. That doesn’t excuse them from reckoning with the immense amount of harm they’ve caused, and this week miss Khloe got a taste of that.
In the end, a lot of us probably cried over our bodies this week, and that’s a damn shame. To digging deeper in the week ahead <3
This sent me. White women who look like Black women... This is the mf ONE. Diet culture was very real in our household...and phentermine...and "you have a pretty face." We didn't have much, so of course we weren't vacationing... But we weren't just going out and enjoying ourselves either. It's like... We didn't deserve to exist and show up in the world unless we had accomplished a weight goal or until we had enough money. You and I have SO much in common. Thank you for sharing.