Fat Slut

Maybe not ruined ruined, per se. But it certainly changed things.

When I was seven, a kid in my second grade class pushed me over. It wasn’t bullying or anything, he and another kid were in a mock fight and I happened to be standing in front of them. When I fell, my left leg went out and my foot folded in, and as I later found out, one of the ligaments snapped. I was on crutches for a while. And being seven, I didn’t get how important physical therapy was, and my parents were both busy with my new baby sister- she would have been a few months old at this point. So it healed, but not properly.

When I was nine, I stumbled somehow in ballet class and hurt my ankle again. Being a fourth grader with a cane is not fun, except for smacking Matt L. in the shins when he called me “Granny.” The doctor said I would either have to give up ballet – we were about to start dancing en pointe – or not be able to walk when I was an adult. I loved dance, I had been doing it for about four or five years at that point, dancing in a local production of the Nutcracker (I was one of the mice who pull the sleigh at the end) and going to “ballet camp” at the dance school in the summer. But I had to give it up. And looking back, I wonder how much that affected me. I was lucky enough to go to a school where the teacher focused on teaching kids to dance rather than molding our bodies; I was one of the stockier kids in the class, but I don’t remember being told that I was too fat. But if I’d kept dancing, would I have been forced out as I stayed built like a brick shithouse and developed breasts and hips? Would I have grown to hate it?

When I was twelve, I hurt my ankle in swim practice. I kicked “too aggressively,” and had popped the joint somehow, damaging that bad ligament again. Another week or two with the Aircast and cane in my school with lots of stairs, and another mandate to give up the sport. It wasn’t a particularly hardcore league; it was recreational, not school-organized, and while we had some good swimmers we were never pressured to be the best of the best, just to swim the best that we could. I didn’t love competition, but getting in the water for two hours every three days was one of my favorite parts of the bleak hell of middle school. Like most teenagers, I had massive friend drama; this is about when my eating disorder/disordered eating started. Stopping swimming at that point is something I’ve always regretted. I might not have been as fat as I am now; I doubt I would have been as miserable.

My ankle’s still sort of fucked up. I can’t really run – aside from being out of shape and needing a sports bra that resembles the framework of a battleship – because my feet have a natural tendency to supinate (or tilt inwards) and that combined with the weak ligament means bad times are ensured. But I wonder what would have been different if it had never happened, if I had kept dancing, if I had kept swimming. What would I look like? Who would I be?