She laughs as she tells me she almost died five years ago. She put her affairs in order and had a custom coffin made, after all they don’t make coffins big enough for her fat body. She grins as she tells me her beautiful coffin is now sitting in a garage, gathering dust. She wanted to use it as a trunk in her nursing home, but it wouldn’t fit. I want to talk about sexuality, how the fat power movement she started has changed over the years. She wants to talk about the medical industry. Today I yield to her wishes and think seriously about health, what it means and how I struggle to locate myself within its discourse.
Health in not about healthy bodies. It is an industry turning a five billion dollar profit a year- producing pills and shakes in an effort to create superhuman bodies. Bodies without defect. Bodies that might glow in the dark they are so artificial- articficially healthy and vitamined out. Bodies that are so morphed they might survive nuclear fallout.
Health is a store full of color coordinated jogging suites- tight on the body and made for people who are already in shape…who would wear all that spandex on their saggy baggy body? Health is narrow running shoes designed by Nike…cute but not made to support over 150 pounds of woman. Health is a gym full of mirrors because who wouldn’t want to watch themselves push their bodies. Health sweats prettily. Health has time to devote to a ritual of daily workout in a gym of cold metal machines designed for small bodies. Health is an industry. I resist the health industry. I once gird myself in the spandex and sports bra combo so popular with health junkies wrestling with machines at the local school gym. Grinning I whirled maniacly through the workout space, leaping and bounding, spinning and singing to myself, a Disney-esque pink spandex clad elephant in the room. While the skinnies looked on from their lonely and cold machines I whirled through the gym. I huffed and puffed as I sambad, salsad, two stepped, cabbage patched through the somber sanctuary where health resides. Huffing and puffing I collapsed into a chair. I sat eating a candy bar and giggled as the healthies looked on in horror over the lid of their giant fruit smoothies full of added B vitamin complex. I swigged my soda, delighting in the fact it left no powdery aftertaste. I wonder if the horror in their eyes was at the disruption of order and ritual in the gym space. I wonder if at the audacity of this fat woman to dress herself in their clothes- nike symbol stretched tightly across her flesh, to move in their space- or if it is simply that my weight is a visual reminder of all their fears. IF they don’t run hard enough, move fast enough they may end up like me- a beautiful g elephant moving gracefully and forcefully through life.
Health tried to control me…to dictate how I should live and the choices I should make. Health tried to discipline my body, to suggest without him I would feel shame. I needed him. But I fooled health. I resisted his metallic, chalky promise of the perfect body. He is the Hitler of moral rhetoric…promising to deliver the pinnacle of humanity without mentioning the messiness of mass extermination. Health argues I don’t know my body…that the sweat I work up cleaning my house, the tension I feel in my legs as I move my body up and down while painting my room, the slow walk to school where I arrive a bit out of breath…these are not exercise. Health calls to me to worship at his temple. To give my soul to a scale, to a machine. But a machine doesn’t know how to think, how to feel. Health wants me to think wellness is only about the body. He is jealous I have a body and he is just a thought, an idea. Health wants me to spend my energy running nowhere, climbing nowhere, feeling nothing…but I am in the streets running with the crowd, climbing steps where I shout from a rooftop with no pink spandex to regulate my body. I am free…my body moves with the wind and I am well.
