sorry, i'm not supposed to look like this

weight! let's talk about mine! (trigger warning for discussions of weight gain, diets, and general self-loathing)

Over the past six years or so, I have put on a significant amount of weight. My body has expanded, there are new soft pouches, clothes can no longer be pulled past my thighs. Underwear digs into my stomach. Sometimes I’ll give this transformation a name to explain it, but each reason has become less convincing as time goes on. It’s relationship weight! Lockdown weight! An antidepressant side effect? The real explanations are much simpler but feel more shameful: I have aged and the unhealthy habits I used to get away with now cause pockets of fat to gather on my back, I stopped going to the gym, I walk less and sit more, I refuse to deny myself any food whenever a desire crosses my path, I love sugar and dairy and carbs.

I started having what I describe as ‘fainting issues’ before I hit my teens. If I didn’t eat with enough frequency, I would feel sick, then dizzy, then my vision would blur, and then if I still didn’t manage to eat something sharpish, I would pass out. The first time I went to the doctor about this, with my mum in tow, the GP bluntly questioned whether I had an eating disorder (nope). I had blood tests and everything came back normal. I started carrying snacks with me and, apart from a few times when I overslept and then fainted when I tried to get out of bed, this mostly seemed to work as a protective measure. Sometimes in my teens when I was out doing things I wasn’t supposed to be doing, men would mix sugar into a glass of milk for me to sip. That did the trick too.

But in my twenties, I fainted in the toilets while out on a date with a guy I had met online. I hit my head on the cubicle door on the way down. A few months before that, I had got drunk at some work drinks, thrown up, and then fainted in a very expensive car ride home because I hadn’t had any dinner. I thought I should probably bring this up with a doctor again. When I did, the doctor said: “you should try eating more”. So I did that, in part just to prove a point - I hoped that the fainting issue would persist so I could go back to the doctor and say see?

I now eat a lot. My stomach has grown to accomodate the increase in consumption and now my hunger is voracious. I have made excuses for not exercising to make up for this; I don’t want to risk fainting (I’ve never fainted from exercise, so this is indeed an excuse), I get out of breath too quickly, it’s hard, it’s embarrassing, I don’t have time, and the thing about not exercising is that if you don’t do it for long enough, your body changes in a way that adds even more reason not to exercise - I now become extremely out of breath from the slightest uphill climb, my body is heavy and requires additional effort to move, the gym kit I bought years ago doesn’t fit, etc etc etc.

My weight gain has been distressing. I look at my face and my body and detest myself with such intensity it’s scary. On video calls I observe sagging plumpness where I used to have a sharp jawline. I wonder how I can angle the camera to hide just how much of my face now exists - it feels like there is simply too much of the bit below my eyes, an excess of width, far more flesh than there needs to be. I press my knuckles into where by jaw meets my neck in an attempt to massage away what was never there before. When I pull on my tights I try to look away from my legs because I know seeing them will ruin my morning. I try to exclusively wear oversized dresses so I don’t have to confront the C-shape of my belly. Sleeves to hide the pudge of my upper arms.

I often think about how my fatphobia applies only to myself. I look at other people larger than me and think god, they look fucking great. And it’s not remotely in a trying-to-be-nice-or-woke-or-whatever way; I often think that actually, some of the people I think are very attractive would be less so if they lost weight. Their faces are supposed to be softer and rounder. They’re beautiful not in spite of their size but in part because of it. Their bodies suit the weight.

I think that’s where things jar when it comes to myself. I fundamentally don’t think I’m supposed to be as large as I am. I was never a chubby child. I was never ‘big-boned’. My mum was always on diets when I was growing up; a poster about ‘low-GI’ ingredients was stuck to the inside of the kitchen cupboards, but when she complained about being too big she was only ever a maximum of a size 12. Now I would kill to be a 12. I don’t suit being overweight. The things I previously thought were somewhat attractive about me - the structure of my face, the distinction between my waist and hips - are, I now realise, in part dependent on being slimmer.

So now I have a mad urge to hide away until I somehow, magically, look how I’m supposed to in my mind. I tell myself my personality suits being thinner, too, although this is clearly ridiculous. I don’t want people to see me as I am right now because it doesn’t feel like an accurate representation of who I am. I’ve always been someone who dodges having my photo taken, but now the sight of a phone camera strikes genuine terror. Whenever I meet someone new, I get an itch to pull out my Instagram and scroll back, to hold up a photo of myself at 26 and say ‘sorry, what you’re seeing now isn’t really me, this photo is what I’m supposed to look like. Just pretend this is who you’re talking to’. When I daydream about glamorous book launches and interviews with newspapers, the version of myself I watch discussing how much of my fiction is pulled from real life is a size 10.

It is a strange thing to be existing in the world in a body for which you feel apologetic. My body isn’t correct. It’s not what it’s fated to be. I used to have the powerful currency of being both young and slim, and I enjoyed knowing that a decent portion of people would find me attractive (though what did I do with that knowledge? Fuck all. What a waste!). These days I feel powerless. What do I have that I can use to get what I want? How do I get the high of approval? I’ve never liked myself, but I could ignore that if strangers at least thought I was fuckable. Now what? I simply don’t have the winning humour and charm to make up for the lack of physical attractiveness, I’m afraid!

The best I can do is offer up apologies. Sorry for my body! Sorry I’m not good enough! Excuse my appearance! Excuse me in general! Sorry but I can’t come to your party, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Sorry, bear with, I should look better soon, more like myself.

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Apologies if this is a deeply depressing read, I wrote it in my head on a bike ride home the other day and it just so happened that a friend had said they wanted a new edition of guess i’ll die on the same day, so HERE YOU GO! Blame that friend. Thanks bye I’ll try to make the next bit of writing I share less miserable.