Bodies

an excerpt from Carefree Black Girls, plus some thoughts on self love

For the past few days I’ve been thinking a lot about beauty, self image, confidence, self-esteem, self-care, self-love — all these words we bandy about to discuss the intricate relationships we have with ourselves, society, and others. I’ve been thinking, particularly after the passing of bell hooks, about how self-love is not a destination but a constant practice and process of self-discovery — more a zigzag than a straight line.

The other day I posted a picture of myself with the caption “bae took these pics of me for the new year, the old insecurities came up and I posted and deleted before but now I’m posting again 🙃. everyday I get closer to who I am.” Amongst many lovely comments I received this one: “Why is your vibe so wack all the time? It’s like you talk down to yourself and then try to fish for compliments. Love yourself.” Aside from the comment being straight up rude, I was struck by its lack of nuance or understanding, by the fact that, presented in this way, the words “Love yourself,” couldn’t have been any less loving.

For me, pushing through my insecurities (which, ultimately, have nothing to do with how I look but with how I feel), is a self-loving act. Creating space for myself to be uplifted by community is a self-loving act. Admitting on my own platform that I don’t always feel good about myself but still choose to exist in a world largely designed to make us all feel like shit is a self-loving act. But I think a lot of people see vulnerability (in themselves, in others) as a weakness, and thus they unknowingly become agents of a system designed to make us question our worth whilst simultaneously refusing to give us the space and grace to grapple with this question honestly and openly. Because if we did that, we might actually heal, and if we healed, we might dismantle these systems of oppression.

This year, I’m going to be unabashedly confident in talking openly and honestly about my insecurities. I personally don’t believe in faking it till I make it. I want to feel my feelings so I can work through them truthfully. I’m going to ask my partner and my friends to tenderly acknowledge the beautiful and worthy things about me (both physical and spiritual). I’m going to use this tenderness not as validation (I’ve honestly never felt validated by any compliment ever, lol) but as affirmation, a reminder of what I intrinsically know but sometimes struggle to remember because I am in pain. I’m not going to cling to and celebrate the things about me that some people may find weak, because I know I know I know that this so-called weakness is the most beautiful thing about me.

Anyway, below, I’ve included an excerpt from the first essay in my book Carefree Black Girls, titled “Bodies” (a version of this essay was actually first published on this here newsletter ). Yesterday I returned to the essay and remembered how heavy I felt when I was writing it, and how much lighter and enlightened I feel now. I really am getting closer to who I am, and I’m grateful to me for having compassion for myself during this journey, even if no one else does. 🙃

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I’m thinking about Black women’s bodies and the disrespect that seems to come with existing in one. The disrespect that seeps into our souls and makes us accomplices to our own demise. The disrespect that implicitly encourages us to hate ourselves, that coaxes us into settling for less than we deserve in every facet of our lives. The disrespect that ultimately breeds the kind of self-neglect that you don’t even realize is self-neglect until it’s too late. I’m thinking about how to fight that.

Around 2018 I got fat. Depressed and binge eating to the point of physical pain, I rapidly went from 165 lbs to 200 lbs, then 220, then 240. All this in a year. I hadn’t even realized I was gaining weight until it was all there, and the only clothes that would fit my form were leggings, big t-shirts, and long, shapeless dresses. Quite suddenly, I had to reckon with everything that I had ever internalized and externalized about my body. I had always thought of myself as “fat,” in the dysmorphic way that so many femmes whose bodies do not strictly conform to the thin ideal think of themselves as “fat.” But now I was a different kind of fat, the kind of fat that other people could perceive, the kind of fat that was objectively recognizable.

I’ve always regarded my body as a benevolent stranger, so confronting this new version of my body intimately was the absolute last thing I wanted to do. Gaining that amount of weight in such a short period of time was traumatic and disorienting in ways I simply hadn’t been pre- pared for. And so I dealt with my new body by pretending that it did not exist. I like to dress up. Before the weight gain, I would post weekly outfit pics on my Instagram. This came to an abrupt stop. It wasn’t even so much what people would think of me as it was what I would think of myself, acknowledging this new change, broadcasting myself clumsily trying to figure out how to dress this new body.

You find other ways to avoid the body: by never leaving the house, by disappearing into sleep in the middle of the day so as to feel weightless. I’d go through cycles of binge-eating, a ritual that was equal parts self-punishment and self-soothing, a way to numb myself with the good, uncomplicated feeling that food gave me. I would spend hours on end lying very still in my bed or on my sofa, dis- appearing into movies and YouTube videos long enough to forget myself entirely. I’d scroll through Instagram and come across photos of beautiful fat Black women like Stephanie Yeboah, like Kellie Brown, like Lizzo—and wonder, fleetingly, why I could see beauty in their bodies but not my own.

Then I’d hit “like” and keep scrolling.

Internalized fatphobia is all about a rejection of the self, scrolling past our insecurities instead of facing them head on. I’ve analyzed and scrutinized and picked myself apart so much over the course of my life that now when I see an image of myself—a picture, a video, my reflection in a mirror—I do not see me. Instead I see a soft pile of neuroses and insecurities, and I can’t tell which parts of this pile are actually me and which parts are products of the negative things I’ve been implicitly encouraged by the world to believe about myself.

I remember shopping for new clothes the winter after I gained weight (for a function that I had desperately tried to but couldn’t get out of), standing before a large dress- ing room mirror, stripping off my clothes slowly and hesitantly, and staring at what my body was, for what it was. I remember I felt afraid. I couldn’t understand why I felt afraid, what exactly I was afraid of, but I knew it was not simply the sight of my body, the stripes and dimples and rolls in new places, the latticework of fresh stretch marks on my ass. Perhaps it was a fear of not really being able to see myself, the fear that I never really would.

In Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Dr. Sabrina Strings writes: “The fear of the imagined ‘fat black woman’ was created by racial and religious ideologies that have been used to both degrade black women and discipline white women.” It’s this imagined fat Black woman I was looking at, this figure and form.

created to terrorize, control, and restrain all of us, to teach us that fatness is synonymous with laziness is synonymous with sickness is synonymous with Blackness.

Fear is a key ingredient in the formation of race. Fear and shame go hand in hand. The modern-day obsession with being skinny, or being “acceptably” fat (pear shaped, with a smaller waist, a thick ass, and rolls tucked away), links all the way back to the very roots of slavery, of anti- Blackness. The shaming of fat Black women, of fat people in general, has never been about our beauty or even our health. It has always been about power.

That power, I’m finding, delegates so much about how we live our lives, the things we feel we’re allowed to indulge in. I’ve been so scared of existing in my body, in documenting my body as it is now, that I’ve denied my- self things that make me feel good about myself and felt guilty in instances where I’ve actually allowed myself to feel pleasure. It happens when I eat a delicious meal and go back for seconds. It happens when I have sex. It hap- pens when I rest. A rush of something like shame washes over me, and I quietly admonish myself for overindulging. Why? Fat Black bodies in states of pleasure, that aren’t used as punchlines or for shock value, are few and far between in the larger culture. So this signals that fat Black bodies are not deserving of pleasure or joy of any kind. So then I feel like my body isn’t deserving of plea- sure, except, maybe, for the pleasure of eating, but even that becomes fraught.

Black women are in a precarious placement, attacked from all sides. One could produce charts and studies and percentages about the unique discrimination fat Black women experience in the job market, the medical racism that is systemically killing fat Black women at alarming rates. We battle for self-esteem and self-worth in a world that believes many of us are imbued with some sort of innate, supernatural self-esteem that magically shields us from the bullshit. Never mind that the acceptance of fat Black women is usually contingent on what emotional or physical labor can be performed: to nurture, to make you laugh, to inspire you.

Everything that I’ve internalized about fat bodies has made me less inclined to show my body care. Sometimes I look at old pictures of myself and cannot believe how much pain that body held, and continues to hold, and how much that pain distorted what I see when I look in the mirror. The body positivity movement has been difficult for me to fully embrace. I think the emphasis on the body is at least part of my problem. But it feels far more radical to attempt to see myself as beautiful, my body as worthy, rather than to feel neutral about it. To feel neutral about my body is to say that it does not matter, and part of my survival means embracing/emphasizing that it does.

White supremacy terrorizes oppressed people by forcing them to be complicit in their own oppression. This is because white supremacy, from which I believe all of the fuckery of this life ultimately springs, lacks imagination. The goal of white supremacy is to kill your sense of imagination, too. White supremacy cannot make sense of Black bodies, fat bodies, disabled bodies, dark-skinned bodies, trans bodies, gender non-conforming bodies— indeed any body that does not conform—without placing them within a hierarchy of value. White supremacy is the opposite of empathy. White supremacy says empathy, care, tenderness, joy, pleasure, opportunity, freedom, should only be available to a finite group of people. White supremacy says that empathy should be totally incumbent on the way you look, and the way you look, always, should be beautiful.

Empathy should not be incumbent on beauty or desirability. Desirability should not be the only criterion for being valued. Your desirability should not be a matter of life and death. Beauty and desirability are subjective and, in many cases, totally irrelevant. Certainly in the case of empathy. In any case, so-called undesirable people de- serve empathy, love, and care.

This notion of desirability, of who gets to be given a fuck about, is inextricably linked with white supremacy. And it always boils down to white supremacy, doesn’t it? White supremacy focuses keenly on the body as a metric for worth. White supremacy is mired in the trap of the body. Even body positivity, put forth as a good thing but now co-opted by the mainstream and increasingly de- politicized, falls into this trap, placing more importance on how we feel about our bodies as opposed to how we feel about our souls.

My relationship to my own body, as I’ve mentioned before, has always been incredibly fraught. Gaining a significant amount of weight only heightened that. That tense relationship is tangled up with the terror of being a Black woman, of feeling as though my body is not only disposable to society at large, but also in some sense not my own. In this umpteenth reckoning America seems to be having with the reality of Black death, I’ve realized that so much of the anxiety I feel around being seen is not arbitrary. All my life, I’ve wanted proximity to beauty because I implicitly understood that, as a dark-skinned Black woman, my survival depended on how I look in every sense of the word.

This is what I’ve been doing all my life, I now realize: striving for perfection as a means to access safety, care, empathy. But a life spent striving for perfection as a means to access safety is not a life at all. If my teens and twenties were about conforming and contorting, my thirties have been about figuring out a technology of self-making that has nothing to do with desirability or, if it does, a personal desirability, an exploration of how I desire myself.

I believe that our personal relationship with our bodies has implications on society as a whole. Fatphobia guides us all in not having empathy for bodies that do not conform, but it also guides us in not having empathy for ourselves. Me gaining weight was never the problem, the problem was the punishment I wrought on my body for failing to conform and the lack of empathy I had for myself in this struggle.

And so I’m trying to push against that. I’m trying to imagine a new world for myself and thus a new world entirely. One in which I can honor my body while acknowledging the specter of violence—both physical and psychological violence—that seems to haunt it constantly. Realizing that the body is constantly deteriorating, changing, stretching, shrinking, sagging, wrinkling—the self- hatred that makes looking in a mirror while I’m naked is its own kind of body horror. But what about re-creating myself, refashioning my body without necessarily changing the way it looks? But by rejecting all that is projected upon it? Is that even possible?

I’m imagining a world where I can leave my apartment in torn flip-flops and a stained muumuu with my hair looking wild and unkempt and not feel self-conscious about (a) feeling ugly, “unpresentable,” and (b) fearing that because I don’t look “put together” I’ll be more susceptible to harm. And I’m imagining, perhaps most fervently, a world where I can have empathy for myself even when no one else does.

Some time ago I filmed some content for a popular beauty brand. I had recently cut off all my hair, and there was nowhere for my double chin to hide. Someone saw me in the ad on Instagram, excitedly tagged me. I went to look at the video and cringed. Then I saw the comments— mostly very sweet and positive, but of course my mind and heart zeroed in on the few comments where people were making fun of my appearance, leaning on fatphobic

and transphobic language to do so. One person called me “Precious,” and another commented, simply, “This is a man.”

When I was younger, something like this would have resulted in me shutting down for the rest of the day. But, that day, it stung but not for so long. This is hard to al- ways remember, but it is true: being genuinely kind to yourself means learning to not internalize how people who don’t know you and/or don’t care for you feel about you. A concept.

It is amazing to exist in a Black body, to exist in a body at all. There is an undeniable beauty in it. To be alive in this body when so many other Black women are not, to remember that and hold on to that, is humbling. But it can also be terrifying, because to exist in a Black body is to exist in a persistent state of precarity, to be in constant anticipation of some form of violence. And so, at least for me, so much of the process of learning to love this body has been in learning to find safety in this body, no matter its form. I want the way I exist in this body (the way you, reader, exist in your body), to be more than an act of defiance.

I want my existence to be affirming, celebratory, com- plicated, beautiful, real. As a Black woman, my relation- ship to my body has larger implications. Shifting the way I feel about my fatness compels me to confront the way I feel about other Black women’s bodies and think critically about the things I project onto bodies that are not my bodies that do and do not look like mine. I’m trying. Stepping fully into a place where you want to demand the right to exist from the only authority on the matter that matters, yourself, is a process that progresses by degrees, that’s complicated by the machine constantly working to grind us down. It doesn’t happen all at once, but gradually. It is an accumulation of little wins mixed with little losses. It’s a process that we see Lizzo navigating publicly, but a process so many of us privately share.

I am still working through it. I give myself permission to struggle. I grant myself the grace to struggle. I’m allowing myself to mourn the body I thought I needed to feel whole, to feel seen. That body never existed, and if it ever did, its existence was always meant to be fleeting. Something that has become clear to me in the process of processing is that bodies are transient, miraculous, ephemeral, and precious. The beauty in bodies is that they change. This seems basic, but it’s a concept so difficult to hold on to sometimes. I may lose weight or gain weight, have a baby, cut my hair, whatever, but what that means for me is what it means for me.

And so, a declaration:

I reject the harmful meanings, narratives, responsibilities, and violences that have been placed on my body, by myself and others. I reject whatever harmful narratives I’ve knowingly and unknowingly placed on the bodies of others. I reject every image of a fat Black woman I have ever seen that has suggested, either implicitly or explicitly, that she is undeserving of visibility, rest, pleasure, joy, care, empathy. I embrace the fact that the struggle is real, and always will be. I embrace, always, the knowledge that my body is my own.