Designated Fat Girl by Jennifer Joyner

turtleneck. I wore so much black that my brother once referred to me as Johnny Cash (ouch). And Michael’s grandmother once took me by surprise when several family members were talking about their favorite color. She said my favorite color must be black because I wore it all the time (ouch again). No, black wasn’t my favorite color, but it’s what I thought I needed to wear to hide as much as I possibly could. I had a few pairs of slacks that I rotated around to go with my various black tops, but truly I only had four to five working outfits at any given time. I just couldn’t bring myself to buy more. I stupidly thought that doing so would be admitting defeat, and if I couldn’t buy all the beautiful clothing I wanted in the sizes I longed for, then I wasn’tgoing to buy pretty clothes at all. I really made it so much worse than it needed to be. But what can I say? I was mired in sickness. After years of mightily battling my weight, and failing miserably, I think I convinced myself that I didn’t deserve to look good, that it was pointless to spend time and money on my appearance. My self-worth took such a beating; instead of making the most out of a bad situation, I chose to wallow in my misery. Not only did I feel like crap, I looked like shit most of the time.
    When I could no longer fit into 3X clothing, I was forced to go to more of the specialty shops. This was when I was approaching three hundred pounds, and department stores tend to stop at size 24W, or 3X. Thank goodness this didn’t happen in the early to mid-1990s, because I don’t know what I would have done then, the choices were so limited. But as it was, I could go to Lane Bryant and find bigger sizes. The cost was enormous, but I had no other choice. I do chuckle to myself when I remember one time being in the dressing room, trying on a couple different versions of the black top in size 26/28 (yikes!), when all of a sudden a woman from another dressing room cried out, “It fits!” I think all the women there could relate to the relief in her voice, and we all broke out in spontaneous applause. It was one of the few times that I can remember somewhat bonding with another overweight woman, although it was through the relative anonymity of a closed-door dressing area.
    There are two clothing items I abstained from completely as a morbidly obese person: jeans and bathing suits. The latter has to be pretty obvious, I think. I know there are plenty of plus-size women who have no problem wearing bathing suits, refusing to allow extra pounds to keep them from enjoying themselves. Iam so not one of those women. Yes, I have been known to go to the beach FULLY CLOTHED. We’re talking long blouse, capri pants—the works—because I couldn’t bear the thought of baring it all in public. I think I would have rather died first. I felt much the same way about jeans. I thought once you reached a certain size, jeans were no longer an option. And I made that decision even before “skinny jeans” became so popular. I suppose taking that stance came of out of necessity in the beginning. Again, there weren’t many options when I first started to really gain weight, and other than buying a pair of husky men’s jeans at Kmart, an obese woman was pretty much out of luck. Of course that changed over the years, and now you can buy virtually any size jeans you want; but I still can’t make myself do it, even now that I’m not morbidly obese. I don’t know, something seems too binding about them to me. There have been many, many nights over the years when I wondered if I would ever put on a pair of sexy jeans for my husband again, if I would one day don a bathing suit and play at the beach with my kids. When I was deluding myself, I thought,
No problem, I can easily do that in the next six months or so.
At my lowest I felt as though jeans and bathing suits had passed me by forever. Sometimes, I still feel that way.

    Ugghh … my back aches. Wanna know why? Because