run

I go through these phases where I’ll settle into a hyperproductive period of working out. These phases could be triggered by anything, but more likely than not, and I’m a little ashamed to admit this, it’s usually triggered when I see my shadow on the sidewalk or wall. My head will be this little blip of a thing, and then below it, this ballooning blimp of a body that feels wholly out of proportion to the size of my head, and the spiral begins. Sounds crazy, no? But here, in my brain, in one of these phases, there will undoubtedly come a time when I ignore every impulse and honored habit that exists inside of me, and I take up running again. 

We have entered this portion of the phase. 

Welcome. 

Now, if I look at my body and compare it to, say, the laws of inertia, it doesn’t make sense. Or rather, society would tell me that it doesn’t make sense. Because if you are fat, you are likely to be at rest most of the time, right? And therefore are likely to stay at rest. Newton and all of those men predetermined that hundreds of years ago, and that must be respected. Still, like a cicada trapped in its underground cocoon for a decade, I will eventually emerge, stretch my legs, and take to the streets of New York City, and, not unlike a cicada, my time there is usually brief. A brilliant, blundering flash of light where I try to remember how to put one foot in front of the other, going at what some might call a pace, albeit a slow one, until I either get bored or tired or book a gig or just decide that Newton was fucking right and perhaps this body was in fact meant to stay at rest. 

It’s a funny thing when I tell my friends that I’m going to start running again. Running, as a brilliant friend called it, “the cilantro of working out,” is an incredibly polarizing form of exercise. People either love it with their whole being, or it makes their mouth taste like soap, and they curse the day it was born. And then there are some, like me, who move with blissful fluidity between the two, though never fully committing to either camp. I always have an aching foot and leg planted somewhere in the middle where I’m, like, fine one way or the other. This past weekend, I mentioned to a friend who has been a long-time runner that I was dabbling in this arena again. They looked at me as we were stuck in traffic in a tunnel under the east river and tapped the steering wheel excitedly with their fingertips. “You’re running?!” they said, with a gleam in their eye that was undeniable and hungry, like I was some sort of plump piggie brought to the altar of this beautiful idol we call Running. And then, an hour later, when I texted my soap-mouthed friend that I was sore from a run, she sent back the 🙄emoji with the ever-poignant text attached, “ugh, why running though?”

Another friend sent me a message after I posted something vaguely self-deprecating, albeit funny, on Instagram about this decision to run, and it stated, “Please tell me you’re not doing this just to get thin.”

And, like, I don’t have an answer. 

Ok, that’s not entirely true. I guess I do. Because it comes down to weight, right? And down to the shadow blob that is me and every feeling I have about my body and the weight attached to it. The ever elusive losing of it and the lengths I will go to never find it again. Only I do find it. Constantly. If I could find winning lottery tickets with the same fervor that I find random pounds, I would be putting a downpayment on the beautiful new highrise that went up down my block. But no, the only winning numbers this bish collects comes in the form of cellulite and cholesterol. The pounds find me. They flock to my hips and chin and underarms, and even if I manage to lose them, they are never gone for long. 

And then, there is this incredible phenomenon that happens when I, a plus-sized 5’9” woman, tell people that I’m running. It may not happen every time, but it’s happened enough that I’ve clocked it. And in that clocking, it has left me feeling a lot of things. The first is abject confusion, the second is in having this awful wave of recognition and understanding as to why this is their reaction, then there is anger, denial, and eventual, I don’t know, acceptance? They look at me, eyes wide and gleaming, there is an intake of breath, and they say with the earnestness of a singing chipmunk in a Disney movie, “Oh my god, so you’ve seen Brittany Runs A Marathon?!” 

The first time this happened to me, I wasn’t entirely sure what they were talking about. I had a vague memory of this movie existing, but I knew I hadn’t seen it. I let it go and went on with my day, but then the next time it came up, I was in conversation with people talking about working out and the dregs of it and things that were hard for us, and I mentioned that I ran on and off and that I was thinking of picking it up again. “OH!” one of them shrieked, “So you’ve seen Brittany runs a marathon?!?!?!” I looked at this person, bewildered, and said that I hadn’t, and then excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I took out my phone to see what the fuck this movie was exactly and why everyone had assumed I’d watched it. 

My screen opened to the cover for the movie, and I felt my face get hot as I read the logline: 

“A hard-partying woman receives a startling wake-up call when a visit to the doctor reveals how unhealthy she is. Motivated to lose weight¹, she soon takes up running to help her prepare for her ultimate goal of competing in the New York City Marathon.”

Sure. Ok. Tale as old as fat people being exploited in the media. 

But then, just to really drive it home, I watched the trailer and felt something hot boil up inside of me. In the two minutes it took to watch that, I told myself I would never watch this movie, a sort of instantaneous boycott, and for many reasons. 

The first being that I have an uncanny ability to immediately spot a fat suit. Padding, prosthetics, a jiggle that doesn’t jiggle the right way, it catches my eye like a nugget of gold in a river, and I become fixated on it. I imagine it’s a hard thing to get right, probably because there is no one model to go off of. My kind of fat is different from your kind of fat is different from her kind of fat is different from their kind of fat and so on and so forth until we’re all singing, “It’s a fat world, after all.” But there are always dead giveaways. Most recently, in the HBO series Love and Death, they padded one of my favorite actresses, Lily Rabe, because her character was “in crisis,” so, naturally, that relates to her being fat, right? But the thing is, you could almost see the band of padding they put around her middle, especially since she was wearing tight-fitting short sleeves, sometimes a wide strapped tank top, and very short shorts that showed her legs and arms as these beautiful and svelt things. These are the giveaways. When you can see the actors’ inherent thinness under whatever kind of styrofoam and poly blend belt they have built around them. Or the way the makeup cakes and buckles around the joints where their skin meets the silicone. And then there’s the way they move inside the fat suit. It’s just so unrealistic. There is a learned behavior inside of me, taught to me from years and years of glances and comments, of clothing I wish I could wear, of not seeing myself represented in entertainment, and that behavior is to make myself as small as possible. For a long time, I would walk toe-to-heel because I thought it looked more dainty if I used a lighter touch and that my heel making contact with the ground would be too much, cause too much noise, or, god forbid, make the floor shake. Minimize is the name of the game. Take up as little space as possible because maybe, if I could take up such a small amount of space, I could trick people into thinking I was small, right? Yeah. Not really. But this is a thing I see in a lot of fat people. And something that, again, when you have a cis-sized actor inside of a fat suit, that need for minimization isn’t there. They’re not conscious about hitting the chair behind them at the restaurant or if the table will be too tight when they sit down. They don’t inherently eye their surroundings and literally size the world around them up because they have physically always been able to fit into it. They are not burdened by the weight they are supposedly carrying, and at the end of the day, they slip out of it and back into their size 2’s. 

It is fucking maddening. 

When I watched the trailer for BRAM, as I will call it moving forward, I saw this same kind of padding right around the middle of the actor playing Brittany. It’s why I went into boycott mode. And then, of course, there’s the issue I have with it all, which is if you are trying to depict a fat person in media, USE A FAT PERSON TO DEPICT IT. And apparently, the actor playing Brittany started off a little overweight, but then because of the amount of training she did for the film, she lost weight, so they had to pad her, but that almost makes me madder? In a way that I can’t really and fully explain why? I know so many talented, beautiful, capable fat actors (raises hand slightly) who are continually sidelined by the size of our bodies and who have had to sit by and watch the Fat Body become this thing that is vilified and fetishized and trendy one day and then out the next. It’s exhausting. And I try very hard to ignore it when I see it because, again, I am just so exhausted and frustrated by it, and the calling out of it takes a fucking toll, and sometimes, I just want to ignore it for a minute before I get back up on my little footnote soapbox. 

But it kept. Coming. Up. 

Fat girl running = BRAM? 

Infuriating. 

Why is this the comparison? 

Why is this movie the only possible reason I would choose to take up running? As if it were the shining beacon of hope and inspiration for “unhealthy” “fat” people to get motivated. 

Now, maybe it is. Again, I have 👏 not 👏seen👏 it 👏, so I don’t know. It might be super inspirational and uplifting, but fuck it all if it doesn’t annoy the absolute hell out of me that this is what keeps being thrown at me. 

And look, I think it’s based on a true story, and I’m happy for the real-life Brittany, I really am. But wow, I would love for it not to be the first or second thing people associate me with when I talk about my running. 

And why is that? Therapy tells us that if there is a thing that’s bothering us, there’s likely more going on underneath, right? I wonder if perhaps my resistance comes from the fact that their observation is so on the nose. That these people, my friends, actually see me and know that I want to lose weight. I always say that the weight doesn’t matter, and there is a certain truth in that statement, but it’s complicated and nuanced, and it can be incredibly confusing at times to be inside of my brain because where the weight may not matter to me, what does matter is how I am perceived by the world at large. And we have been taught that being fat in the world has never been great.

All of this may be surprising to some of you. That I’m so worried about how people see me and that to be seen as fat, which I am, really bothers me. Because on the outside, I am quick to jump into body positivity while consciously never toeing the line of it becoming toxic. I think toxic body positivity is actually incredibly harmful to all who are touched by it, hence the toxicity of it all. No, my kind of body positivity is rooted in reality and realistic expectations, and I try to put out this worldview of self-love and radical acceptance of where you are right now. Which I do believe. I do. I wouldn’t scream about it as much as I do if I didn’t. But there’s also this other side of me that checks to see if my insurance will cover the cost of Ozempic, you know? And that is the part that I have worked so hard to hide because it makes me feel like a fucking hypocrite. The part of me that looks up plastic surgeons late at night when my insomnia is at its worst to see how much micro-liposuction under my chin would cost or what the process is for removing the fat under my arms. The part of me that would fucking LOVE a quick fix, right? The part that would love to take a little shot of something that would give me hollowed-out cheekbones and the ability to play my ribcage like a xylophone. What beautiful music that would make, that part of my brain shouts at me. 

So to tell someone that I’m starting to run, and for their immediate response is to ask if I’ve seen BRAM, it, I don’t know, for lack of a better millennial word, triggers me? And it feels a little lazy. And also annoying that the only reason anyone would run would be to lose weight. And annoying because, again, they’re not fucking wrong about my intentions.  

And, look, I know they don’t mean for it to come off that way. I know they don’t see the harm in it or maybe understand why I would find it harmful. It doesn’t feel like fat shaming necessarily, coded or otherwise. I think they’re just trying to connect with me over a thing that seems weird for me to be doing. And it does. Like I said earlier, running and I do not add up. But still, it’s that correlation between me and a woman they had to put in a fat suit to make a movie about how running changes you for the better that just leaves me with a sour taste in my mouth. 

And, I mean, I don’t know, is that what I’m trying to do? Maybe? On some subconscious level, did the point of that movie seep through the layers of adipose fat and touch something inside of me to be like, “See?! It is possible! Someone’s done it before!! And they made a movie about it!!” Probably not. Science shows us that if you move your body, there will likely be a change, so again, I have to ask, what is this? 

And the truth is this. 

I have no fucking idea. 

I think, for a long time, I’ve been so good at suppressing these thoughts and feelings and worries and fears. I hide behind humor and quick-witted quips. I hide behind how fast my brain works and how agile I am at changing the subject. I hide under the pounds and pounds of fat that I wear like a suit of armor that, on some primordial lizard brain level, keeps me safe and also causes me so much harm. 

I also worry that no one will care. In the world of running, I feel like a 5k is the measliest of the runs, and there is likely a chorus of people screaming, “You stupid idiot, it’s just a 5k. Anyone can do that”, to which I reply, you’re probably right. Which fills me with a kind of guilt for somehow not falling into that group of “anyone,” even though we know that when people use those broad terms, the actual group they’re referring to is never actually that broad. It’s the sociality accepted group that the world thinks we **should** fit into. And then there’s the fact that if you were to ask me what my fatal flaw as an artist is, I would say that I sensor myself a lot, and I mean, a LOT, because I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. Mine or yours. And as such, I stop myself from seeing certain things through because of the one question that has plagued artists through the millennia – who will even read this? Who will even care? Which is stupid because if TikTok has taught us anything, it’s that there is a market for everything. 

The point is, on the surface, I don’t entirely know why I’ve started writing this, really, which, I know, is a great hook to get you to continue reading, right? “Deliver on the promise of the thing” is what a writing teacher once said, so, in some ways, I’m already failing you because I don’t know what the thing is necessarily. But they also say to write what you know. 

I know what it means to be fat. 

I know what it’s like to move through the world in this big body. 

I know that health should not be defined by the size of your body, and I know that even though I know that I have work to do in dismantling that falsehood that has taken root in my brain. 

I know that me writing this has something to do with that gut reaction I had seeing that actor in a fat suit training to run a marathon. 

I know that I want to be healthier – fuck it, I’m not going to lie to you – I would like to lose some weight. That’s hard to admit, but it is true, and that has to be ok. 

I know that by the end of this, I will have run a mother fucking 5K. 

Because let’s also not forget Newton’s first law: An object will not change its motion unless a force acts on it. 

So here I am—a force in action.

This is Run, or, The Time A Fat Girl Tried To Run A 5k. 

May the gods help us all. 

1. Hi, I’m going to step on a soap box for a second here and remind you that weight and health do not necessarily go hand in hand. If you are overweight, it does not necessarily mean that you are unhealthy, and vice-versa, I know PLENTY of unhealthy people who are unbelievably thin. This is just another in a long line of fat-phobic rhetoric and misinformation swimming around out there to keep us all scared and starving and suckling at the teat of harmful diet culture. Yeah, that’s right. Suckling. At. The. TEAT. ↩︎