I'm the Fattest Person at the Pool
"If you eat garbage, you'll look like garbage." Or so I've heard.
This summer break has been a strange one for me. For the first time in more than 25 years, I own swimwear, and I've started going to the pool to exercise.
I never learned how to swim as a child because my mother said lessons were too expensive, and our family didn't do recreational outings. If I ever visited a pool, it was something I did with friends, say for their birthday parties, or on a school-type field trip.
I don't have many memories of those trips, however—I simply recall feeling terribly uncomfortable and utterly out of my element. I wasn't a swimmer, I didn't have trusted adults there with me, and I didn't feel good in a bathing suit. Somewhere around eight years old, I had noticed that my thighs seemed much bigger than the other girls around me. I thought I was fat, and that made me feel ashamed of myself. Like I had to cover up my (bad) body to be "okay."
To be acceptable.
For me, feeling "too fat" was always wrapped up in this notion that I was lazy, that I ate too much food, and that I was "weak" anytime I wasn't starving myself. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, assimilation was everything. I didn't want to be radically different. I didn't want to stand out…
