Another Way to Starve
By Kimberly Dark
When you’re a fat kid, sometimes you go hungry.
Here’s something weird.
It’s when your family has enough money to buy plenty of food,
even fancy food sometimes, like a steak dinner. They stop whenever
they want and pick up a little something because who has time for
cooking all three meals every day? But somehow, you’re the person
in your family who shouldn’t eat.
It’s not like they withhold food, but they make you feel bad for
eating it. They want you to say no to food. They want you to want to
deprive yourself and why would they want that, if you were actually
just as good as everyone else? I mean, why would they? You
wonder this because you’re a kid. And you don’t have any answers.
“When you’re a fat kid, sometimes you go hungry.” — Tweet this.
But hang on. Sometimes they don’t feed you because you’re being
virtuous and they’re being supportive. You’re on a diet. They don’t
feed you even though you’re hungry. They tell you this is your
choice and they’re proud of you for it.
They know you’re hungry and that you feel left out when others
are eating because how could you not feel left out from the
deliciousness and kindness and collaboration and community and
belonging and satisfaction involved in eating? And they look at
you with pity and tell you how good you are when you’re starving.
They tell you how great you’re going to look because clearly
there’s something wrong with the way you look now. They know
it. You know it. Everyone who has ever seen you knows it. It
goes without saying. And yet, they say it often enough anyway,
just to remind you. The only way to not be insulted for looking
how you look is to actively, and in full view, be starving.
“The only way to not be insulted for looking how you look is to
actively, and in full view, be starving.” — Tweet this.
Everyone you know says you’ll look great if you only eat very
little and they encourage you to say it too. It’ll make you feel better
about starving. It’ll make them feel better about encouraging you
not to eat when they know you must be hungry or hurt or left out
of loving interactions that happen around food. You’re not just
reminded once in a while either. People eat three times a day.
Well, that’s officially how often they eat, but lots of people eat
more often than that. Not you. That’s snacking and snacking
is bad. You’re bad. Your body is bad. That’s what you learn.
People who want to live have to eat. But eating is the one thing
that seems to prove that you shouldn’t exist at all.
“Snacking is bad. You’re bad. Your body is bad. That’s what
children learn.” — Tweet this.
Everyone tells you how gluttonous you are, how overstuffed-
privileged-lazy you are. They may not say it directly to you
(or they may). They say it about you and about people who look
like you. They say awful things as though you aren’t standing
right there, or you don’t matter and really are awful.
You are not allowed to eat in a relaxed way. Sometimes you’re
not allowed to eat at all. What does that mean? You’re a kid,
so you’re still working out all of the strange things adults do,
and learning who you are in the process. You hear about people
starving for lack of food but you have food — loads of it — in the
house where you live, in the stores where you shop, yet you too
experience hunger. (And sometimes you over-stuff yourself,
like on a holiday, when those around give you permission to eat.
Or like when you get angry and can’t stand all that being
precious around food, so you eat. And then, you figure out what
to do with the shame of having eaten so much.) You know you
don’t deserve to claim hardship and yet you live being hungry
or rebelling against hunger. What does this mean? You wonder
because you’re a child and no one can make sense of it for you
even though they’re adults and they seem so sure about the rules.
They seem so sure about who you are. It seems like they would
understand what all this means but they won’t tell you.
“What do you say to yourself and the children in your life?”
— Tweet this.
That’s weird, right? To grow up totally middle class and able to
eat, only not able to eat and be love-worthy at the same time. And
the shame. Oh, the shame of being wrong, all the time wrong,
impossible to erase the wrong-bodied-ness that you express
everywhere you go. Hide yourself. Don’t move. Don’t dress flashy.
Don’t be loud. No one wants to hear you. No one respects you. No
one will ever respect you. Do something about yourself,
for godsakegoddamnit.
As a kid, how would you even talk about something like that?
As an adult, how do you make sense of it?
And now that you know how diet culture works on children and
against children, on adults and against adults making it seem like
it’s fine for a person’s life purpose to be diminishing one’s body,
what do you say? What do you say to yourself and the children
in your life?
How will you fix this?
--Kimberly Dark is a writer, sociologist and raconteur working to
reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life, one clever story,
poem and essay at a time.
Learn more at www.kimberlydark.com.
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