Fat Women Writing Themselves 2

So if you are a fat woman and you are finally starting to write yourself, what do you write? Or, perhaps more accurately, who do you write?

If you are anything like me, before you started writing yourself, you were writing some reflection of other people's expectations of you. Or you were writing your own fantasy of yourself. In short, you were writing a hologram of yourself. In your poems, you were acting very consciously like women who were not fat. And you were writing another body. Or perhaps, not even a body. No body. Nobody.

I don't mean that if you are a fat woman who begins writing herself, you are automatically going to start writing about your body. That may not come for a while. Maybe it won't arrive in your writing at all. The difference is that you may stop writing about yourself as another body. Or especially another person.

You start to write about yourself in your own skin, in your own life. This means exchanging the dream of someone you used to write about, and perhaps someone you used to try to be, or even thought you were, for the reality of what and who you are. I don't know. Perhaps for some women it may not be as fulfilling at first, to write about yourself and the way you go through your days in this body, in this reality, wearing a red top and not worrying so much about how other people like you or see you or don't like you. That was the irony, for me. Writing myself as a fat woman meant almost instantly that I didn't feel I had to compare myself to other women, or the way they looked or thought or were. I felt that I didn't have to be gentle, sweet or cute or, worse, helpless. Or clueless. Suddenly not only did I get back my body but I also got back my personality and my mind.

What I wrote about changed materially and thoroughly. I stopped writing about imaginary or even real past romances in the accepted tones of conventionality and started to write about  romances with the ocean and the wind. And not just for or with me, but of others, as well.

It was a joy to write about other fat women (and occasionally men), as well.