How Soon We Forget

This morning I was walking to the local subway station with my husband and mentioning to him that two and a half years ago, such a thing was impossible for me to do without excruciating back pain and frequent stops to rest. This walk is approximately 8 minutes long at a reasonable pace, but I couldn't have managed it in 2009. Even in 2010, there were doubts about my long-term ability to walk without the threat of pain and I still had backaches in the morning when I woke up.

Though I spent about 20 years in great distress with my back which limited or eliminated my ability to walk, I now take for granted that I have back-pain-free mobility. The strange thing is that I've been in this condition for a short time, but have already blocked out the longer reality of my life. While I don't believe that it's useful to dwell on the difficulties of my past, I believe it is important not to forget what it is like to be so fat that basic locomotion is fraught with pain and difficulty. This isn't important to stop me from regaining the weight I lost as the psychological issues will prevent that from happening. It is, however, essential if I'm to retain empathy for those who still live in shoes very much like those I once dwelt in.

Recently my husband had his own experience with "forgetting" or at least failing to apply empathy to someone overweight when he has had ample experience to draw upon. Despite years of living without going to restaurants, being unable to shop with me, and having to do things in a particular way to accommodate my size, he failed to consider the problems of an overweight colleague at his volunteer work and may have inadvertently contributed to some stress for her. 

A somewhat large group of these volunteers were pondering how to get from point A to point B and a suggestion was made that they split a couple of cabs. There were 8 of them, so they could split two quite cheaply between them by piling 3 in the back and one up front with the driver in each of two cabs. My husband did the math and said taking a taxi sounded like a good idea rather than hiking the distance in the cold weather. The overweight colleague, who he reckons may be in the 300-lb. weight range, said that a walk sounded good. In the end, they all walked, but my husband was metaphorically kicking himself for not "getting it" as he believed he "should have known better".

This situation illustrated the inner turmoil and strife of the fat person very well. It also showed how hard it is for people who have never been that large to conceptualize the world in the same manner as a very overweight person. While this woman would have probably been fine in the cab as long as she could sit in the front with the driver, the situation is still rife with uncertainty and potential embarrassment. I'm sure she was nervously pondering the potential outcomes as the situation played itself out.

If one boisterous person playfully calls "shotgun", she is put in a position of competing for the front seat without drawing overt attention to her actual  need for that space or cramming into the back seat with two other people. Having to do either of these is humiliating because either would reveal her status as the person too big to fit and therefore either requiring the special accommodation or making others potentially uncomfortable with her size. There's also the possibility that, even if she sat up front, the seat position would have been too far up and then she would have to cram in or adjust the seat such that she obviously took away leg room for her compatriots behind her. And finally, even if the others recognized her need for the front seat, knowing they were acknowledging her weight (or guessing that that was the case) is still embarrassing. 

I felt for this woman when my husband told me this story because I've lived in that headspace nearly all of my adult life. I also felt for my husband who kicked himself a bit for not being more sensitive to her needs despite his years of experience with me. If I have already allowed the limits of my primarily limited life due to my weight to slip away, how could he be expected to keep them front and center?

Insensitive Teachers

You'd think that adults would display a certain amount of sensitivity with kids and try not to intentionally do anything to humiliate them. These days, I'm guessing that a teacher who did anything which had a pretty good chance of publicly embarrassing a kid might get in trouble, but it wasn't the case when I was a child. In fact, teachers did things which I find it hard to believe that they'd get away with now.

When I was in 4th or 5th grade, one of my teachers was talking about some topic or another and decided she would make every kid in the class announce his or her weight aloud so she could note it for whatever nonsense she was doing. In a class of about 20 kids, I was the only fat kid. I believe I weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 130 lbs. at that point in time in a class which was full of kids who weighed 70 lbs. or less.

I remember the teacher going down each row and each kid saying his or her weight while I was furiously thinking about how I could deal with this situation without utterly feeling humiliated. I figured that I would pick a weight which was higher than everyone else's but nowhere near the embarrassing truth. When the teacher reached me, she didn't hesitate, but you could tell every kid in the class was just waiting to hear what I said. Once more, I was the focus of negative attention because of my body size and this time every single person in the room was waiting to react to what I said. My lie was, "85 lbs." I didn't fool anyone and my reply elicited a bunch of stage whispers disbelieving my obvious lie.

In retrospect, I wonder if the teacher did this on purpose. Teachers are, after all, no more enlightened than others and I witnessed more than one occasion where a teacher went out of his or her way to be cruel to a kid for one reason or another. For example, one of my fellow students had a bad habit of talking out of turn and not raising his hand. If he wanted permission to do something, he'd just blurt it out and this annoyed the teacher. One day he blurted out a request to go to the bathroom and she chastised him and said he had to raise his hand and wait to be recognized. He then raised his hand to comply with her request and she ignored him for a long time. As he sat there, he started to squirm in discomfort. By the time she finally agreed to recognize his raised hand, he was practically dancing in his seat trying to hold it in and fighting tears. Teachers do not necessarily have to be advanced humanistic beings, even those who work with children and should be more patient and understanding.

In my case, I wonder if the teacher may have tried to embarrass me as a way of exacting more pressure on me to lose weight. It would have been very easy for her to simply ask everyone to write their weight on a piece of paper and then collect them in a hat. It would have served the same purpose as making each of us announce aloud what our weights were as she was simply marking them down in a notebook of some sort. If she was trying to "help" me, it didn't work. In fact, the suffering and isolation I felt only made it all the more likely that I'd turn to food for solace.