Only Fat Girls Can Dance

That’s a pretty exclusive headline, Isn’t it?

Doesn’t feel right to leave everyone else out of the dance.

But it’s just an inverted metaphor for the exclusion us fat girls feel every single day.

Reality says ‘Only Fat Girls Not Invited to the Dance.’

I was born to dance, I loved it and danced for hours everyday.

But I wasn’t welcome to dance in public or as part of shows.

Even though they always said I was an excellent dancer.

It was my body.

I was told no one wants to see fat people dance.

Some of us are born heavy.

For me it was both genetics and a spinal cord injury that made it almost impossible to change that without anorexia nervosa. Which was heartily encouraged, even by Mom, who was a fucking nutritionist.

My mother was violent and despised my body, much like hers. She pummeled me in 4th grade because she didn’t believe that I wasn’t drinking the chocolate milk at school. I wasn’t, but she couldn’t bear with the fat on my body. It was like a personal insult to her; my appearance. Her highly nutritious meals should’ve slimmed me down, so in her mind it had to be me sneaking food. But I wasn’t. I wanted desperately to be accepted and hardly ever ate at school. I was teased mercilessly if kids saw me eating. Teachers looked the other way. I was the only overweight kid in elementary school.

Ironically it was her violent attacks that caused the rare spinal cord injury that prevented my body from working to it’s full potential. By the time it was diagnosed my system was already shot, I lost the ability to dance, to run, to live.

In this catastrophe I discovered how much I hadn’t learned to love myself. It was in becoming completely debilitated that I really grasped self-love, self-esteem, self-forgiveness.

I shut out my family who had assisted in my mother’s program of fat-unacceptance. Removing people like that from my life has been like shackles thrown off. I highly suggest dumping anyone who has the nerve to criticize your looks to your face, like it defines your value.

Those are toxic people. Bye, fam.

When I starved myself, I was complimented. But even not eating for years didn’t make me small enough, didn’t shrink my giant tits for dance auditions. I went years, despising myself, believing what my family and society told me everyday: My overweight body made me VALUE-LESS.

But it was only a matter of years that I discovered my rounded, fit heavy body was the ideal. Even as I lost fitness to disability, pregnancy, I realized my body was gorgeous! Why couldn’t I have seen this before?

There was something sinister in how we expected women to shave and minimize our sumptuous curves.

We’ve been brainwashed into thinking the sickly, bone thin female is ideal, when, in fact, it is a presentation of the female as weak, sick, controllable, malleable, vulnerable and without defense against attack.

I found this collection of work while I was archiving.

No one else has ever seen it.

I think I was too ashamed.

Too embarrassed.

Here is my body, here is how I felt as a younger woman.

It’s very intimate and sometimes sad.

But I think you can handle it.

I don’t feel this way anymore.

I got to a self-loving place on my own.

But if just one other person had expressed these sentiments, I wouldn’t have felt so alone.

Being fat is just sometimes what people are.

The stigma that comes with it is so oppressive it causes profound depression and even suicide. If you think that’s good, then you need to fuck right off. If you constantly tell your kid that they’re too fat and ugly like my mom did then you are what’s wrong with society.

This post is for all of my sisters who haven’t figured out yet that they are PERFECT. No matter what our families or the world wants to box us into. All those boxes are illusory shit and we just need to break out and shine while there’s still time!

Much Love To You.

Alexandria

More info: alexandriaheather.weebly.com

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