We’ve been loving the Aidy Bryant show, Shrill, and in one pivotal episode, Aidy’s character posts an unauthorized article on her paper’s web site, titled “Hello, I’m Fat,” where she tears into our body-shaming culture, confronts her boss, and even rebukes her mother. The story is super-popular, but she ends up quitting over it, when her boss refuses to respect her point of view.
(The episode is based on a real incident in the life of Lindy West, and you can read her original post here.)
I know it’s different for guys, but, Hello, I’m fat. I won’t launch into paragraphs describing body-shaming for men, because it’s nothing compared to what women go through. But I wanted to talk more generally about self-acceptance.
The journey that Aidy’s character, Annie, goes through in the first season of Shrill is one I recognize from my own life. When our insides tell us that our outsides are shameful, we cower, we accept that we are less-than, and some of us adopt a pleaser personality as a defense against expected criticism. When the season begins, Annie lets her boyfriend treat her really badly, she accepts her mother’s constant boundary crossings, and she stagnates at work. But over the course of a few episodes, Annie finds her voice through writing, gains some self-confidence from the praise she receives, and builds on that success to transform her life.
The turning point for Annie comes when she attends a pool party for “fat babes” as an observer, but finds herself so drawn to the women enjoying themselves and their bodies that she begins to break out of her old self-hatred. Here’s a scene just after she’s discovered her new attitude.
Annie’s eventual take-no-shit persona is wondrous to behold, and she inspires me to fight my own inner shaming voices. As I said, men have it a lot easier than women, in this as in so many things. But before I was a man I was a boy, a boy with boobs and a belly, who couldn’t shimmy up the rope at gym, and was too afraid to swing the bat in Little League. A boy so petrified of being tagged a sissy that I practiced how to walk, how to hold my arms when I stood, how to stop smiling like a girl. A boy so shy and passive that I would spend the afternoon bicycling in front of the house of the girl I liked instead of knocking on her door. A boy so anxious about other boys invading the stall in the bathroom at school that I would get stomachaches and have to go home for the day. A boy who’d hide in the attic when guests would come over, because guests want you to talk, and when I talked, I couldn’t hide. A boy who never took off his shirt at a pool or the beach, and eventually avoided pools and beaches and locker rooms and anywhere else I couldn’t camouflage my body. Who stopped wearing polo shirts because they showed my unwanted curves. A boy who developed a lifelong sugar addiction because that was the only thing that made me feel less anxious, for a few minutes. A boy who became a loner rather than risk criticism about my body, or my ability to fight, or my other manly shortcomings, from another boy. A boy who knew he wasn’t normal, and tried to bury everything that made him stick out, and only figured out decades later that what he’d buried was in fact his own beautiful self.
I’ve got a long way to go. I still don’t like taking my shirt off in public, and I never will. My lifelong sweet tooth is a killer. And part of me wants to delete this post because it’s too revealing. But with role models like Aidy Bryant and Shrill, how can I keep hiding? Writing posts like these is still very new to me, and it’s hard to know when I’ve crossed a line into oversharing, but I’m learning to follow my gut, like Duke Ellington did for music: When it sounds good, it is good.
