Heavy Silences
[This article originally appeared as a part of The Yale Herald Audio Issue on Soundcloud.]
Transcription:
What are you doing right now? Maybe you’re walking to class or going for a jog. But I’d bet that many of you are sitting down, and if you’re sitting, you’re probably in a chair. Think about all the time you spend in classrooms and libraries and coffeeshops, sitting in chairs. What does your chair feel like? Is it comfortable for you? Does it fit you?
I’ve been studying at Yale for two years now, and in all that time, I have found exactly one chair on campus that fits me. I came across this chair in the Hall of Graduate Studies near the end of my freshman year. By that time, I had almost forgotten what it felt like for my body to be given the space it deserves.
Hi, my name is T.C. Martin, and I’m a sophomore here at Yale. I want to talk with you about what it means to be a person of size at our university. A note on terminology: I use the phrase “person of size” in public forums because I appreciate the way it emphasizes my humanity. But among other people of size, I’m perfectly comfortable referring to myself as “fat.” “Fat” is just an adjective, after all. But so many fit people have used this word as a weapon that I am careful deciding where and when I choose to reclaim it.
For people of size, a comfortable chair is hard to find. A chair is not just something that literally supports your weight. It means much more than that. When I found that chair in HGS, it told me instantly, without words, that there was room for me here at this school. It is difficult for fit people to understand how validating this voiceless affirmation felt. In many aspects, our university’s dedication to inclusion is resolute. It’s one of the many reasons I chose to study here. But I’ve found Yale — both the campus and the culture — to be unexpectedly inhospitable to people of size. The fact that it took me two years at Yale to find that chair should be unbelievable, especially considering our promise of inclusiveness. The disappointing reality is that Yale, in both its physical architecture and its body culture, gives little thought to people of size like me.
I know what you’re probably thinking, that Yale is not unique in its lack of consideration for large bodies. This is certainly true. Many public spaces are not designed to accommodate people like me, and as a result, people of size are often excluded from many aspects of public life — from schools, workplaces, movie theaters, sporting events, concert halls, even from the simple act of sitting on a park bench. Yale is unique, however, in the reason behind its physical exclusion of people of size: Yale is really old. The buildings, the classrooms, and the dorms are all nice to look at, but they’re outdated. And the thing about old places like Yale is that they are usually anathema to the comfort of people of size. And I don’t use the word “comfort” to mean “swaddle,” or “pamper.” By comfort, I mean the sense of being at ease in your surroundings, the sense that there is room enough for you. For people of size, comfort is as simple and as elusive as finding the right chair.
You might also think that American culture is just fatphobic in general, which is true, too. The American media has a long history of trying to convince people of size that they must change themselves in order to live fuller lives. Yale’s body culture, on the other hand, is not as directly hostile to people of size; it’s more subtle than that. I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it were it not for how I grew up.
I come from a small suburban town in southern Maryland, just southeast of Washington, DC. In my county, about seven out of every ten people are classified as overweight or obese. Like most people of size, I faced bullying, harassment, and public scrutiny of what I ate and how I looked. I did not feel out of place, however. I grew up surrounded by family members, many of whom are also people of size, and aside from a brief and painful stint in Weight Watchers when I was in middle school, my size never made me stand out at home. Public spaces there are generally equipped to accommodate people like me, and the culture, at its core, is accepting of different body sizes. I wish that I could say the same for Yale.
When I arrived on campus in the fall of 2016, I knew immediately that my weight would set me apart from other students. I was assigned to Trumbull College, which meant I’d be living in Bingham Hall on Old Campus. As far as first-year dorms went, Bingham wasn’t terrible. I had my own bedroom, which relieved me of the anxiety of exposing my body to a total stranger. I wasn’t ashamed of my body, or so I told myself. People of size are really good at rationalizing our feelings away — we have to be. The truth was that I needed somewhere on campus that I could call my own, a space where I could retreat to collect myself. A space where I could be fat without judgment from strangers, and when you first arrive on campus, practically everyone is a stranger.
For the first few weeks, I ate in the Trumbull dining hall. I soon realized that eating at Yale is defined by its own set of cultural expectations. Lunch and dinner often feel less like meals and more like networking events. Part of this culture is the feeling that people are watching what you eat, even if they don’t notice they’re doing it. We unconsciously monitor the way others nourish their bodies, as if a scoop of chocolate ice cream were a character flaw. There’s a reason we feel the need to say “Treat yourself!” when we get dessert: sugar feels almost sinful. Eating in public began to feel shameful for me, so I stopped having meals in the dining hall and started eating out. My dorm was on Chapel Street, New Haven’s nexus for college student takeout. I would order food every night and take it back to my single to eat alone.
People of size can withdraw ourselves from dining halls and other public spaces, but we still have to walk to class. Prospect Street is an especially taxing route during the peak hours of student foot traffic. I wait patiently at the intersection in front of Woolsey as fit people sprint by me to cross the street before the light changes. I am always baffled by how comfortable these people feel in their bodies. What is it like to not feel as though every movement you make creates a wave that disrupts those around you? Walking while fat is a complex balancing act, one I have both practiced and been witness to. When someone approaches you from behind, you move out of their way and walk slowly so they pass around you. When someone is walking towards you, you wait for them to pick which side of the street they’re going to walk on — then you take the opposite side to avoid bumping into them. Sometimes, they still bump into you. You do all of this while carefully monitoring your breath, holding it when someone comes near and releasing it in a well-practiced yawn when they pass by. We follow these unspoken rules because revealing the the exertion of our bodies is a bold statement: it announces our presence unapologetically, and the only time others seem to accept the presence of people of size is when we feel sorry about it.
There’s something else in the psyche of Yale students that was harmful for me that first year, more so than the atmosphere of the dining halls. Let’s return to that miraculous chair for a moment.
Generally speaking, when I am on campus and neither in my dorm nor sitting in that one chair, I am physically uncomfortable. Some days are worse than others. For example, I once had to choose different classes than the ones I bluebooked for simply because I could not withstand sitting in the old lecture hall in LC for an entire hour. I just couldn’t bear it. The origin of this particular problem is historical. Don’t get me wrong — like many students, when I first visited Yale’s campus, I was in awe of its long history. I fell in love with the stained glass windows, the dusty stacks in Sterling, the crumbling tomes in the Beinecke. But as enticing as that history is, it also means that much of Yale’s furniture is outdated and too small to accommodate people of size.
The admirable course of action when society realizes it has been systematically denying a group of people equal access to public resources is to rectify that imbalance. I’d like to believe that Yale students have arrived at this realization, which means something is preventing us from making the necessary changes to ensure our campus is accessible. That something holding us back is our adoration for our own history, and it has fueled the misguided belief that accessibility and tradition are mutually exclusive.
By the time my first year ended, I had truly isolated myself, demoralized by both structural and cultural dismissals of people of size. I could hardly wait for my finals to be over, to return to the safety net of home, where at least I wouldn’t feel terrible for not starving myself. I imagine other students of size here feel a similar relief at leaving the fishbowl of Yale behind. This isn’t to say that the pressure to discipline our bodies is not present at home — for some of us, our families can be the most exacting judges of our physical forms. But as we grow into adulthood, it is not uncommon to reach a détente with our relatives about our bodily autonomy.
Simply put, coming home offers the chance for escape, whatever form that escape may take. I found mine by reading. That summer, I devoured book after book, and I eventually came across a memoir titled Hunger by Roxane Gay. In this book, Dr. Gay confronted her past with a bravery I didn’t know was humanly possible. She wrote about her life, her weight, and her trauma. She wrote about the time she spent at Yale as an undergrad, about the food in New Haven which seemed to be everywhere, and about her difficulty connecting socially with her peers. It was almost too true to read. I felt comprehended. I realized that I was not the first person to feel this way at Yale. This book exposed for me one of the biggest lies of fatphobia, which is the illusion that somehow, in a country with millions of people of size in it, you are alone. It was a balm to not feel alone at Yale anymore.
That summer, I also reconnected with old friends I hadn’t seen in months. One week in August, we drove down to Greenville, South Carolina, to watch the solar eclipse in totality. My friends and I chose a spot along the bank of the canal that runs through the city and waited impatiently as the sun slowly vanished. We stared upwards through our protective glasses as the moon consumed daytime. Strangely, it wasn’t as dark as I expected it to be, and just two minutes and thirteen seconds later, we cheered as the sun regained its body, large and fierce and blinding.
That summer made me realize the sense of safety and inclusion that was lacking on campus. I returned to Yale this past fall determined to make better use of my time here. I want to stress that nothing about the culture at Yale changed besides my perception of it—but this is not to say that the problem of fatphobia exists purely within our minds. It still begins with the petty insults, the assumptions about our education and skill level, the institutional problems of inaccessibility and exclusivity. These messages, spoken and unspoken, seep into our minds and cause lasting harm to our self-esteem, harm that we then perpetuate for ourselves.
I realized when I came back just how damaging the campus culture had been for me. Both our vigilance over what others eat and our fierce attachment to our history were harmful in their own ways. Perhaps most harmful, however, was the ingrained belief among Yale students that movement is synonymous with achievement. Body positivity, at its core, requires an acceptance of your physical form as it is; it asks you to be still within your own body, and Yalies are terrible at standing still, because it makes us feel like we are falling behind.
Perhaps this mentality explains the troubling dearth of body positivity organizations on campus. One of the few campus groups I could find that discussed body issues was the School of Medicine’s Program for Obesity, Weight, and Eating Research, also known unironically by the acronym POWER. Dr. Carlos Grilo, the director of the program, did not respond to a request to participate in this podcast. The program’s website invites fat people to participate in weight-loss studies. “Help is just a phone call away,” the site promises me. This program is one of the lone voices discussing fatness on campus, and it only reinforces the message that fat people’s bodies are problems to be solved. We are so often seen as puzzles, not as people.
I wouldn’t be writing this piece if I didn’t think Yale could change for the better. In many ways, reforming Yale’s physical environment will be easier than changing its culture. Some people would interrupt me here and ask, what would I have them do? Replace all the chairs at Yale with bigger ones so that I can fit? Can’t I see how selfish that is? Why should I deserve special treatment?
The assumption behind these questions is that the cost of enlarging some, not all, of Yale’s furniture inherently outweighs the alternative cost: that students of size are not able to fully participate in the opportunities our school offers. We as a society tend to put the burden of finding accommodations on fat people themselves. We seem to think that, if fat people are allowed any measure of comfort in public spaces, they’ll never realize that they should lose weight. But if you’re a fit person who’s ever sat in a chair that was too small for you, did you think, “damn, I need to lose a few pounds”? Or did you think, “this chair is too small, let me get another one”? I’m not asking for special treatment: I’m asking for there to be another chair for me.
The cultural shift will be harder, but it’s already beginning. Last month, fat activist Virgie Tovar came to campus to speak about body image and fat discrimination, and I applaud the inclusion of her voice as an expert in this emerging field. Also in 2018, the inaugural meeting of the Yale Women’s Athletic Council was held. This new organization promotes discussions of body image and other related topics among female athletes, and will hopefully spur similar groups to be established on campus.
When we think about body positivity, we must step outside of the perception that our surroundings have coaxed us into. We have to pop open the hood, so to speak, in order to examine the social and institutional engines that drive our campus’ body culture. At Yale, those engines are not only the lack of accommodations for people of size, but also our refusal to accept ourselves as we are, and the relative silence surrounding body issues here.
I am still popping open my hood, and I have only just begun to understand how Yale’s physical spaces and its cultural expectations have impacted my relationship with my own body. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I have at least one of them: this should be a campus-wide discussion. I’ll do my part to be one of the many voices working to start that discussion, and I hope now that you have heard my story, you’ll be ready to sit down, listen, and engage. So go ahead, grab a chair and get comfortable — I’ll wait.
