I am not even sure you know how horrible it is being a teenager before you’re an adult. When you are a teenager, your hormones take full control of your every move. When I was a teenager and I fell in love, I loved more than anyone had ever loved before in the history of the world and I would die, simply die a violent death for a person with whom I had never even spoken. It’s truly a matter of swaying between all the extreme versions of every emotion to the sound of a hundred adults asking you to figure out who you are and what you want to be. And you are both scared and at the same time, convinced that you definitely know better than these adults. Your teen years are also full of warnings. All the monsters that you thought were under your bed when you were a child are suddenly real – and they are not under your bed where you can see and contain them. They are the reason you are asked to never leave your drink out of sight, the reason you don’t walk home alone, and the reason you have to learn how to say no if there is something you don’t want to do. Yet, fairly often, we are not warned about the monsters that we can see – the people controlling everything that we consume. The people targeting marketing campaigns at teenagers’ fragile self-esteem, confirming their worst fears: that they are not okay, that they should be prettier and thinner and better. Basically shaking the groundwork for the person they are to become. You don’t know who you are or who to be? We will tell you. Be thin and pretty. How? By using our products. Daddy, is there a monster under my bed? Yes, actually, and he is holding a Slimming World brochure.
One day, when I was single and in my late teens, in the first week of my new job, I met a man who openly declared that he liked fat women. It was not directed at me, it was not to get me into bed, so I trusted it, weirdly. He told us, after a shift when we were getting drunk in the pub next to the office, that his father used to say to him: ‘Get yourself a woman with curves. They’re the best ones.’
He told me this with pride. I disregarded the problematic nature of that sentence because suddenly, I wanted to be the woman that he ‘got himself’. Hey, fuck feminism, this guy with sandy blond hair and wide shoulders who smokes a pipe despite being only twenty-one just told me he might fancy my fat stomach. Feminism can wait. Sure, Emily Davison threw herself under a horse to get me the vote, but I was not willing to challenge this man now – because there was the faint shadow of a promise of a kiss within his charming anecdote.
A year later, I found myself wishing that his father had told him, ‘Son, go get yourself a woman who is wilfully obsessed with you and who will write and send you poetry and always be so close to you that you can smell her breath,’ because then maybe, I would have had a chance. Instead he moved to the Danish island furthest away from Denmark. I take no responsibility for that.
Some people have fathers who do positive PR for fat women from an early age. I remember falling in love with him for just this reason. It was hard to believe that other people like that existed. Most people will have parents who tell them to ‘never get fat’, who will pinch their own stomach fat and say ‘eww’ and who will point at fat people in the shops and say words like ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’ or ‘gross’. The negative attitude towards weight is so all-encompassing that the chances are that whoever you meet has been taught to hate fatness, long before they even had a chance to make up their own minds about what it is they like and don’t like.
So I spent all of my teenage years hating myself, hating fatness and hating women and hating thin women, hating people who loved me and hating myself. I wasted so much time. I wasted so much money on attempting to make my body smaller.
When I was seventeen, I applied for part-time jobs. There was a plus-size clothing store selling everything from tent-like ponchos for fat people, to tent-like ponchos for fat people – with tassels. I had circled the shop a few times before I gathered the courage to go inside and apply. A large, older woman with a smile on her face took my application, looked me up and down and led me into her office. After a bit of chit-chat, she told me that she’d love to hire me. I said, as confidently as I could manage, ‘Just so you know, I am going to lose this weight soon.’
The woman’s face burst into a huge grin as she laughed and said, ‘Oh, sure!’
Today, I like her. Back then, I detested her and the shop and I never, ever wanted to work there. I stormed out, furious that she did not believe me because I would lose the weight, I would lose all the weight and I would be thin. The alternative did not even bear thinking of.
Sometimes you need to meet the right people at the right time. She was the right person at the wrong time. It wasn’t till years later that I met another person like her – and this time, the time was right. Let me tell you about Andrea.
Early twenties
I found stand-up comedy a few years after I finished school. Comedy was an amazing way of turning the self-hatred into a strength. I would stand on stage and tell the fat jokes that I had heard my whole life, but suddenly, I was controlling the laughter. It was liberating, standing on stage, saying: Hey! I am so fat and so lazy! And I am aware of it!
And hearing people laugh.
There is an annual comedy gala party in Denmark. All the comedians get drunk, horrifically drunk, and lose their already virtually non-existent inhibitions. A comic once got so upset that he lost an award that he threw his shoes into the harbour. And someone once gave a blowjob to another comedian who stopped her halfway through and said, ‘Let’s just be colleagues.’
That was me. Hello.
That evening, I was wearing a beautiful gala dress. I had come from a television set, so I was wearing television make-up – which is like normal make-up but with extra layers and done by a person tutting over the state of your skin. (Or like that one make-up artist who tried to wrap me in a giant scarf because my chest was ‘so ugly’.)
So I fell asleep with the grim taste of ‘just a colleague’ in my mouth, in full gala dress, fake eyelashes draped down my cheek, next to a mediocre comedian. I woke up and realised that I had forgotten to set my alarm. I had twenty minutes before I had to get to Copenhagen University for the first day of what was going to be three years of Russian Studies. I was about to miss first day of uni. I jumped out of bed, half-heartedly brushed my teeth, pulled the fake eyelashes all the way off and got up on my bike. I became aware that I was still drunk when I was sitting amongst the rest of the new students in my gala dress, reeking of alcohol, realising that I had not locked my bike outside. The other students were dressed, well, the way you should be dressed when attending university on the first day. They had showered and everything. I was wearing one earring and torn tights. Eyeliner was everywhere apart from along my eyelids. I am not sure if I looked like someone who took university too seriously or not seriously enough. Then I saw Andrea.
Meeting Andrea changed everything. She had unapologetically hairy armpits, a mullet and an obvious disdain for the entire system. If anyone was to ever ‘stick it to the man’, it was Andrea, and she was going to stick it to him hard. I am not sure if she saw me before she smelled me, but either way, we got talking.
Это дома. That’s all the Russian I picked up from my year at University of Copenhagen. It means ‘he is home’. Or ‘they are home’. Maybe it means ‘someone is home’ or ‘is someone home?’. Either way, I can almost pronounce it perfectly.
I failed the first exam because I put a question mark after each answer. What was the main import in the thirteenth century? Um … Corn? Potatoes?
The professor