My Body Positivity Was Bullshit Until Lizzo Pt.1
Context: a chance encounter wakes me up
I started making content about fat empowerment in 2017.
My initial goal was to at least get people to love themselves where they were at physically. To teach that their body’s appearance was not their worth and who they were as a person had such a greater impact on the world around them. I wanted people to stop putting amazing things in their life on hold for a different body.
So I spoke about Plus Size Boudoir and Traveling While Fat. For awhile I talked around the reality of our bodies, and spoke of external fat shaming and bullying, it was a non-fat person’s disease, ignoring the disease of internalized fatphobia, that was consuming so many of us from within. I was screaming what I thought was empowerment with my whole heart, but I wasn’t entirely feeling it for myself. While I didn’t let the societal perceptions of my body stop me from what I wanted, I also wasn’t entirely walking around like I deserved the same respect every human is due on the simple basis that they are human. Instead of commanding it, I was simply grateful when I found it in nature.
I look at the photos from 2017- 2019 and I see someone who comes off as confident as a defense more than as defiance. I had to love myself because I knew the majority of others wouldn’t.
Not looking at the camera felt like a projection of confidence
But it also means the audience doesn’t know exactly what you’re feeling
And then I lost my furry best friend, and my mental health fell apart.
(If you’ve lost a furry friend, please read my post about pet grief.)
I lost myself completely and found some new pounds instead.
Thankfully I had started therapy fairly quickly after his passing and could understand and accept the bodily changes that occurred while I worked to reconcile the universal changes I couldn’t.
I was given the space to be a shattered, numb version of myself who leaned on everyone else for once.
I didn’t recognize myself in photos, smiles stopped reaching my eyes.
I didn’t know how to smile pretty anymore. I spent the next 8 months working on a smoldering glare and a smirk.
In February of 2019, I had to cut off a ton of my hair after damaging it from my technicolor wanderlust.
My hair was the first thing people started complimenting me on when I was a teenager. Too much of my self-worth was wrapped in the concept of being the fat girl with pretty hair. And I found myself stuck being the fatter girl with ok-to-me hair.
I didn’t know how to love her.
March of 2019
On March 4, 2019 the blogger Megan Crabbe, known as @bodyposipanda , posted a video of herself dancing to “Juice” by Lizzo.
I envied Megan’s rhythm and the empowerment she felt dancing in her underwear for just herself. I’d never heard the song she was dancing to, but I couldn’t believe the joyful defiance of the song lyrics. Actively singing about being the big girl? A “Bootylicious” for the big girls, what?!
And so I discovered @lizzobeeating on Instagram (I was today minus two months years old when I realized her username is Lizzo Be Eating and not Lizzo Beeating [whatever I thought that meant]).
I consumed her entire discography and not much else for months. Finally a plus size singer who wasn’t trying to prove her worth despite her body. She was actively singing about her body, in praise of it. How much she loved it. How sexy it was. How much she wanted others to feel the same way about themselves too. I was stunned, and angry it took so long to find her when she has been on the scene for so long.
By that summer, my best friend Cora invited me to an Urban Decay party in LA for the launch of their new foundation, of which Lizzo was one of the faces. We sat in her living room like two teenage girls, spinning wild fantasies that maybe we could meet Lizzo (and of course immediately become close personal friends). It was eventually announced that she would be performing at the event and we thought then that the night couldn’t get more amazing.
A week before the party, Lizzo’s NPR Tiny Desk performance debuted. On top of proving what a phenomenal multi-talented artist she is, Lizzo tripled down on her commitment to radical fat empowerment. At the end of her set where she talks to her tiny desk audience, and to the world at large, she explicitly states “you came out for big ass ol’ me. I just want everyone to remember if you can love me you can love yourself. Every single day. If you can love my big Black ass at this tiny tiny little desk, you can love yourself.”
And deeply love Lizzo I did. So why could I love this stranger so wholeheartedly, but not give myself, the person I knew best in the world, the same love as easily or as fervently.
Lizzo is unlike so many plus size artists who have had the cause of fat liberation thrust upon them, instead Lizzo proudly holds that mantle. She has enthusiasm for redefining what big bodies can do and be.
Lizzo’s fat empowerment was a revolution compared to the body positivity/fat acceptance I had cultivated. I then couldn’t help but think about the British singer that so many of us thought of for so long as a win for the big girls.
I do not wish to assume that singer’s personal feelings or motivations, but instead to speak to how the silences on subjects, and redirections impacted what I developed as my idea of fat acceptance. Notice I’ve switched from speaking of fat empowerment instead to fat acceptance.
She always seemed to be a disembodied voice that occasionally appeared to come from a body that disappointed much of society. Her songs never spoke of her relationship with her body or her personal feelings of fat empowerment, instead she sang of heartbreak in a soul crushing voice that even the critics of her body could not deny. Her voice and song writing were placed before anything else. Her story appeared to be that of an incredible skill triumphing over an unconventional package, and for awhile that was my personal concept of fat acceptance: my body would not detract from who I was and what I could achieve. It was a slight bug and not a feature.
But when she separated herself so clearly from her body, her persona became more of being a potty mouthed beauty with a killer voice, than anything that truly shakes the status quo. Because she was not an outspoken fat empowerment advocate, the media felt encouraged to interpret her body’s changes as a concession to their concept of “health”. They felt vindicated in their concern trolling narrative, speaking to her plus sized fans in the tone of “where is your god now,” as if we ever had a clue how she felt about herself.
With silence, any narration becomes feasible. She was never going to be the type of plus size celebrity who put in an appearance at Curvy Con or cannonballed at a Fat Swim Party. She never put herself out into the world as a phenomenal plus-sized diva; she was an incredible singer who happened to be plus size for a time, and the mistake of conflating the two was ours.
The Party
After her tiny desk performance, to say I was even more excited to see Lizzo in person was a deep understatement.
Most people have those idols they look up to where just the thought of being in the same room as them feels like accomplishing a life long goal. I’ve done meet & greets with such folks, and those moments are greatly cherished. But those were moments that I manufactured, I paid for the meet & greet ticket or got there early to be first in line for a free event.
I had never been in a situation where interacting with someone who meant so much to me was purely up to chance. I wish I could bottle that electric feeling.
If you’re interested in a full recap of the experience, I think you’d enjoy the video on my Youtube channel.
Nothing could have ever quite prepared me for the emotional impact of an artist who meant the world to me, picking me out of a sea of people. A sea that included the top names in the beauty guru sphere. But 99.9% of them aren’t plus sized. And Lizzo’s message isn’t exactly for them. She wanted to share her stage with the, as she called us, “BBWs”, and she spotted me. I’ve never been so literally seen in my whole damn life. Lizzo gave me her attention and a slice of her spotlight.
Among a sea of the “beautiful people”, I was someone who stuck out to Lizzo.
Personally most importantly, I got to hug her, and tell her from the full depth of my heart that I loved her.
In that ‘I love you’ I tried to fit “you saved me,” “you renewed me,” and “you give me hope for the future.”
