There are two tropes you hear often in the sphere of body positivity.
The first is:
“Wear what makes you feel good”
The second is:
“Wear whatever the f*** you want”
Now, it could be assumed that there would be quite a bit of overlap in the venn diagram of those two statements. Society tells fat people that they should wear clothes that are slimming — black, vertical stripes, illusion panels, spanx — so it should (and can) be freeing to stop following those arbitrary rules and just wear what you want.
But because society has so ingrained in us that we only look good in clothes that make us look smaller, as one ventures out into the bright colors and the more fitted silhouettes, the voice saying “wear the damn thing” is often met with the voice saying “that dress really accentuates how big your stomach is”. And how can you feel good with that voice in your head?
I am a person who gets immense pleasure from clothing — wearing it, shopping for it, just looking at it. I am also a fat person, so my love for fashion was often relegated to wistful flips through Vogue, imagining what I might look like in outfits that don’t come in my size.
In the last decade, however, there has been some serious movement in the world of fat fashion. Anthropologie — a place I wouldn’t even look at because it made me so sad knowing the clothes wouldn’t fit — now has a plus line. Curves are so much more celebrated, and sustainable fashion often coincides with inclusive fashion.
So now that I have options — and people like Katie Sturino telling me to “just wear it”— I should be thrilled. But as I put on my hot pink Anthropologie pants this morning and prepared to hop across the street for a latte I paused for a moment in front of my mirror. My belly was featured heavily in the plot-line of this outfit. And the fabric of my pants was just thin enough that you could see a subtle bulge where my underwear line went.
In that moment I wanted so badly to be smooth. To be flat.
Not just that, but when I had visualized the outfit in my head, I had visualized a thinner version of myself, a version that my disordered voice says is better than what I am now.
But I have learned — through therapy and science — that there is no legitimate upside to being flat-stomached. Having a large fupa has no inherent impact on my health or on my ability to do the things that I want. Yet it is burned into my head as a bad thing, as something I should not display. And that is infuriating.
I want to wear the clothes that make me feel good. I also want to wear the clothes that I want. And it kills me that the clothes that I want, the outfits I love, the pants I want to wear, don’t make me feel good. Not always.
It’s also infuriating that I then feel obligated to wear the pants — in defiance of society's arbitrary and fatphobic expectations. And even then, I am not wearing the pants because they bring me pleasure, I’m wearing them to prove a point.
But I know that the road to recovery is long. That undoing decades of disordered thinking, all while working against the mainstream narrative, takes an extraordinary amount of work. I have been in therapy for about a year now and it amazes me how often I have to remind myself that things take time. A year of recovery work, compared to 29 years of disorder, isn’t even a drop in the fucking bucket.
So maybe wearing the pants in defiance is the first step to actually wearing them, in this body, and feeling the same kind of pleasure my poor misguided brain thinks I’d feel if I were skinny. Maybe I am defying not just the world telling me my tummy shouldn't stick out, but also my brain, who told me for years that the best outfits were saved for the skinny girls.
I suppose body positivity is inherently defiant, when we live in a country that says there is only one way to be beautiful. And as a lifelong contrarian I suppose I can find a little joy in the rebellion.
P.S. I wore the damn outfit.
