In my family Fat It’s never an adjective; it’s a verb. It is a crime for women to treat male gaze positively and maliciously. All their achievements, personality traits, and even actual crimes will be second only to their appearance.
So when I was a plus size player in Cycle 9 The next top model in the United StatesNo one in my family knows how to react. On the one hand, I celebrate the highest achievement that women hope for: attractive. On the other hand, it is…a large size contestant.
“You look…slim, don’t you?” my father said when he came home. I Once was Very thin. But I just returned from filming a show where the respected judge had a heavy debate on my weight that my body deformed was an angry demon who controlled every thought.
My dad said, “When they call you, I want to lie to them.”
“It really messed me up when they called you,” my mom said back. “You’re not a big size.”
I’ve heard a lot, but I never know how to respond. Intellectually, I know this shouldn’t be a compliment – large size is not a bad thing. But my stupid heart is still desperate to punish myself as small as possible.
My dad has three brothers and if they and my grandfather were discussing a woman, her appearance was at the forefront of the conversation anyway. I saw the greatest, worst minds of their generations – Jane Goodall, Ingrid Bergman, Serena Williams, Margaret Thatcher, all suffered from great equalizers, whether my grandfather found them attractive. He is the standard for ruling these conversations, and the result is my internal monologue.
I am not the only one in the family who is affected by this obsession with thinness. My grandmother stayed slim all her life until she had a fast-moving case of dementia. Suddenly, her caregiver had to hide food from her because, she was unsupervised, she would eat until she became ill.
“You want cookies, Sally?” I asked her one day at lunch. She looked at me with the child’s face.
“Sarah, I always want a cookie. I haven’t eaten any cookies in a long time.” Each of us ate two, more like sisters than our grandmother and granddaughter.
