The Pandemic is Not What’s Keeping My Fat Body at Home

Finding sanctuary among the noise. (Created by the wonderful South Carolina-based artist Demetria. @thingsbydemetria on instagram)

A few weeks ago, I received a time-sensitive email from the administrative folks at my university. They kindly asked for my best guess with respect to whether I’d need a cubicle space for the fall. As a second year doctoral student, I would have moved up from the designated office space for first-years on the second floor of the School of Public Health to the student space nestled within my department on the fourth floor.

Without an extra second of pause, I responded: “I will not be on campus in the fall.”

That would have been unthinkable a year ago when I was preparing to start my doctoral program. Even during a pandemic, I would have guessed that I’d be part of a non-negligible number of students at Brown preparing for a partially-in-person semester. After all, I’d spent hours during application season in the depths of daydreams.Sometimes I was getting my degree, but most times I was just walking through the department offices to my own desk space with my own desk things and my own desk chair. Nothing, I would have thought, could stop me from reaping the full benefits of years of hard work, trauma, and leaving my family behind in our tiny public housing apartment in the Bronx.

But then came orientation week.

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Around this time last year, I walked into a lecture space on Brown’s main campus for a “welcome” prepared by the University. Dozens of other students were making their way in, greeting and sitting next to familiar faces from any of many pre-orientation events. The light from the early fall morning streamed in from the windows, casting long patterns on the ceiling and walls. The feeling of having arrived, in some vague but significant sense, washed over me. I quickly grabbed a seat near friends in the third row.

Most fat people, I think, know what I felt next. The metal of the armrests dug sharply into the sides of my thighs. I could not utilize the back of the seat. To keep my arms from falling over my friends on either side of me, I crossed them over my chest uncomfortably. When my breasts rebelled, I tucked my hands into the space between my legs. I shifted discreetly every few minutes for the first half hour in an attempt to calm the pain I felt at my sides.

For the second half hour, I scooted all the way up to the edge of my seat and did an awkward sitting pointe technique where I put my weight on the pointed toes of my sneakers while squeezing my legs together. The metal armrests dug into my behind, but I still felt comparative relief.

For the last hour, I held this pose and did anything to distract myself from the pain in my lower half and the anxiety crawling up my throat. Through speeches by Associate Deans and Chaplains and Coordinators, I held that pose. When my phone slipped out of my hand and clattered onto the floor, I held that pose. I laughed when others laughed while holding that pose. I applauded when others applauded while holding that pose. I looked attentively at speakers as they spoke, I nodded along to their words. I held that pose.

I thought about getting up and walking silently out of the room only once before immediately tossing the idea. If you ask my mom about my propensity for suffering in silence, she will sigh and gesture vaguely at the air like its an exhibit of all the times she realized I was suffering only after the damage was already done. She may bring up a pair of pink shoes that I wore regularly as a younger girl without complaint, even though they made my achilles peel and bleed.

After the talks, I was washing my hands in a bathroom when I realized I was crying and hyperventilating. My face was red and swollen. My clothes were askew. I willed myself to a state of emotional disconnect as I straightened out the sleeves of my shirt, re-centered the crotch of my pants. I scrapped my plans to join a grad-student led conversation and slipped into a finances info-session in a dimmed room with desk chairs.

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That was not the first time I didn’t fit into a seat, but it was the first time I’d felt that much pain while trying to sit among that many people for that long. Orientation week will forever be marked by that pain, the stomach-souring shame, the blanket of red over indented skin. For weeks after, the same panic bubbled up as I dried off after showers or in the darkness of night when my husband wrapped his arms around my waist to cradle my softness. I felt it during crowded elevator rides at the School of Public Health or when the only open seat I could find was in the middle of a row. I constantly thought about whether anyone could see how I was struggling that day, how I was still struggling at any given moment. I desperately looked around classrooms and conference tables for other fat people and usually found I was the only one. When my back gave out on me in the middle of my first semester and I was stuck at home, I let myself sink under the pool of the pain. When “obesity” was one of the conditions written on my academic accommodations form, I burned with the same red.

The University shifted to remote work a few months ago, but my world was shrouded in chaos. I was worried about making sure my family back home had food. I was worried about friends who were alone in new cities. I was worried about the protests. I was worried about my husband’s older parents getting sick. I was worried about a thousand more things that happened directly before and directly after we went online. I didn’t have time to think about the way my thighs didn’t hurt after classes on Zoom. I didn’t have time to relish in the limitations of the tiny box that held my head, the way school vanished when I closed my laptop, how I could let my voice and mind and ideas take up the space that was usually allotted to my body. I could speak. I could connect. I could do it without pain.

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“I am a garden.” (@thingsbydemetria on instragram)

It started with a new chair for the living room. Then a secondhand one for the corner of our bedroom. Next came the cabinet for the office that we built across a few days. The new desk sits across from it, covered in post-its and pens. We hung long velvet curtains in our room, nailed holes in the walls for pictures. We even got four tiny succulents that I am trying to keep alive.

I’ve grown in tandem with our collection of things. My breasts are rounder now, my hips are too. The hair I lost from the stress of my first year is growing back. My nails are stronger. I am closer to being whole.

Providence is not my home, although I’ve come to like its short buildings and quirky traditions. Brown is not my home, although I’ve tried to will it to be. But this apartment, with its big windows and stacks of video games and a chair in the corner of our bedroom, is home. And home always has space for more, for growth, for me.

First published on Medium. Curated by Medium Editors in Society, Mental Health, Accessibility, and Equality and Featured on the Medium Homepage.