Instead, you choose a standing-height table with the barstool version of the same chair, switching between sitting and standing every few minutes. It's not very efficient or comfortable, but it's better than sitting on the floor.
After several hours of this, though, your entire body aches and you're sick of it. You return to the gate area, where you discover two things:
- Your flight has been delayed for two hours, bringing your layover up to eight hours
- Each gate has one or two seats on the end of a row marked with the handicapped symbol and no armrest on the outside
All the accessible seats are taken by thin abled people at your gate and nearby gates, so you hover until one comes free and then dash to take it. Your legs are spread awkwardly wide as you sit, since the chair itself was still designed to exclude butts like yours, and you have to brace yourself to keep from falling off since there's no armrest.
You spend another two hours braced in the chair, afraid to leave to go to the bathroom and lose the chair entirely, dejectedly playing games on your phone instead of the more intense reading you'd intended.
By this point, you have no mental energy left. The few other very fat people you see braving the airport all look as exhausted as you do.
When your plane finally arrives, you step into the pre-boarding line. An older man standing in the first "regular" boarding line murmurs uneasily to his wife as you step forward with your boarding passes.
This flight isn't full, so no one gives you any hassle over your second seat, but half an hour into the flight a different issue becomes clear: you need to pee.
Often, you deliberately dehydrate yourself before flights, because airplane bathrooms are definitely designed to exclude you. Not only did the designers decide that people like you didn't deserve to have a comfortable experience, they designed the bathroom so that you can't turn around or wipe yourself.
You've worn leak-resistant panties all day as a backup strategy, but you dared to have a normal meal during that eight hours at the last airport, and you can feel your insides sloshing with the motion of the plane. Though you started the day off feeling neutral about your body, more and more you feel like existing in it is a curse.
Once again, you turn to groggy game-playing on your phone, desperately wishing the flight were over.
This is the cognitive load of fatness. Everywhere we go, everyone we interact with, we're carrying a heavy burden that thin and thinner people simply don't have to bear, and can't even see.
We can't opt out, and we can't fix it. And that's energy that thin(ner) people can spend on other things, that we can't.
What would it look like if you, in the situation above, had had all your energy to support your family at the funeral, instead of only a little?
How would it feel if you always appeared in public flushed, sweaty, disheveled, spacey and embarrassed -- because the environment was designed to make you appear that way?
Sometimes we can mitigate a certain amount of poor treatment, for instance, by playing the "good fatty" -- performatively atoning for our fatness and loudly investing our resources into diet culture. But that only goes so far, and it won't make thin people stop making decisions that exclude us. It won't give us a literal seat at the table.
Something I want you to go back and look at is how, through the entire story (which is a real, non-exaggerated depiction of my flights to North Carolina last week after a death in my family), I avoided blaming my body, instead placing the blame where it belongs -- on the people who built the physical environment of our lives to exclude us.
Even after all the years I've been doing this work, it still took real intention and effort to consistently connect the real cause and effect.
Not "My body didn't fit into the seat because it's too big," but "My body didn't fit into the seat because someone designed the seat not to fit."
Moving through a world that wishes you didn't exist, and tries to enforce your disappearance through its very physical structure, requires again and again relocating the anger and frustration to its appropriate target -- the people who exclude us, not our bodies. It has to be an intentional practice, but it's so hard when we've been taught out entire lives that it's us, we're the problem, with our unruly non-compliant bodies.
You go to your grandmother's funeral, quietly grateful that your makeshift outfit isn't too out of place.
Afterward, your mother remarks, "Aunt Jane just had gastric bypass surgery nine days ago. Didn't she look great?"
