Happy Fat. Sofie Hagen

      I fully lived in that world for twenty-three years of my life and every single person in my life did as well. Like we were all part of a cult where the main mantra was ‘fat people should be ashamed’ and we all hummed in agreement whenever it was being insinuated or said.

      What it took was for someone to say to me, ‘What if it’s all a lie?’

      Throughout writing about my childhood, my teens and all of the self-loathing that surrounded it, I have had to take brief pauses where I held my stomach in my hands and said to myself, ‘I love you, stomach. I love you, child-me. We are good, we are safe,’ because the past is overwhelming. Maybe this is time for you to do the same. Place your hands on your body, the bits that you’ve struggled with the most and say, ‘We are good, we are safe.’

      The biggest misunderstanding in the body-positivity movement that we see on social media is that you have to be ‘confident’ and ‘brave’. I have spoken to fat women who dismissed the entire idea of self-love by saying, ‘I am just not that confident.’

      I am not a confident person. I always feel like I should be working harder or managing adult life better. But I can honestly say that most days, when I look in the mirror, I smile. I stare admiringly at my big thighs and I turn sideways to look at my butt and my stomach and I think, ‘Hello hot stuff!’ I am sometimes absolutely overwhelmed with how cute and beautiful my body is. But then sometimes I catch a glimpse of myself in a shop window and think, ‘Ew.’ I still receive compliments from people and smile and say ‘thank you’ but on the inside scoff and think ‘what’s wrong with you?’ I still sometimes instinctively take positions that make me look thinner for photographs and I would hesitate before doing jumping jacks naked in front of a person I was about to have sex with. I don’t always love my body. I love it more, way more, light years more, than I did a decade ago. When I go up a size in clothing, I don’t cheer. My first feeling is, ‘Oh …’ and my second feeling is, ‘Oh well.’ I have to repeat to myself, ‘I was a beautiful child,’ moving the emphasis from word to word in each repetition, because I need to remind myself. That I am attractive, worthy, deserving to be alive, is never something that comes easy. It is not something I just instinctively believe. It is hard work, telling myself that I am good enough every single day.

      When I write down every memory related to my weight from my childhood, it is not to figure out the source of why I became fat. People are fat for a variety of reasons. It can be biological, psychological, socioeconomic, genetic or a choice. Some people just have those bodies. When I talk about the reasons for my own fatness, I am not apologising for it and nor am I explaining it to you so that you feel more comfortable with it. Usually, when the reasons for a person’s fatness are looked into, it is in order to find a solution to a problem. But being fat is not a problem. The reason I share my childhood with you is to remind myself that I was not brought up loving my body. I was not brought up confident. Every little thread of confidence was crushed under the heavy foot of societal pressure to be thin. Every sense of autonomy evaporated in the presence of my abusive grandfather. Bullying shattered my sense of self-worth, sadistic teachers confirmed that I was lesser. I did not start this journey as a confident person. If I had to go back and look at who I was before I started loving my body, I would say that there seemed to be nothing left to salvage.

      The only thing that had never been touched – the only thing that they forget to destroy – is our sense of logic. Our intelligence. Our minds. If anything, our minds are strengthened because we spend most of our lives inside of our heads, as we are trying to escape our bodies. This means that we have an out. I believe we can use this sense of logic to our advantage. If we can grasp – deep down inside – that all the things we have been taught about how our bodies are wrong, are lies – then we can beat it. All we need to do is unlearn.

      But now, even when I have a self-hating day, I still fundamentally believe that fat bodies are worthy. Even when I wear large shirts to cover my stomach, I know in my heart that I am allowed to take up space. It sometimes feels contradictory, sure, that at the same time as I have words like ‘ugly’ and ‘gross’ in my head I can think, ‘I am as deserving of being here as everyone else,’ and, ‘Fat bodies are as beautiful as other bodies because beauty is subjective and there are no rules.’^fn9

      But to me, that was the way in. Talking with Andrea allowed me to sidestep my feelings about myself and reach the centre of my brain where I understood that systematic oppression and discrimination can make a person internalise a lot of hatred.

      When fat people say to me, ‘Oh, I could never love myself, I don’t have that confidence,’ I tell them this. ‘You don’t have to have confidence, you just have to be able to understand the basic principle of maths. The more we hate our bodies, the richer these companies get. Ergo, they make us feel bad, in order to make money. Ergo, you do not hate your body because your body is wrong. You hate your body because someone lied to you.’

      We believe that the objective truth is that it is a bad thing to be fat. When you realise that it is not an objective truth, but rather, someone’s capitalist and very subjective stance, you can begin to let go of the self-hatred.

      Your confidence grows from believing this and creating your own subjectivity. If you truly believe that your body is not the enemy, then you can begin to treat it with the love it deserves. I have bad days where I am without confidence. But the good days are incredible – where I look at my stomach and feel nothing but genuine awe. Where I observe my thighs in the mirror and feel absolutely blessed and lucky to have such sexy, plump thighs. Where I think I look amazing in every single photo I take of myself, regardless of the angles. Where I strut down the street in a crop top and tiny shorts with no make-up and enough self-esteem to blow the roof off a straight-sized clothing store.^fn10 Where I actually live the life that Instagram claims I do.

      I started from the lowest point possible. The confidence came with time – and it all started when I realised that fat people are worthy. Fat people are deserving of happiness and entitled to take up space. Fat people are not lesser humans.

      You can be happy and fat, you deserve to be happy and fat, being happy and fat is an option.

      All you need to do is believe that and then we can begin.