I’ve been thinking about perfectionism a lot recently, thanks to my friend Virginia Sole-Smith’s new podcast, Cult of Perfect, which she’s co-hosting with my parasocial friend Sara Louise Petersen. In the first episode, they asked the question: how does your perfectionism show up? And I realized that, for me, the answer had a lot to do with shame, and a perpetual tendency to be shame-faced.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m about to launch a book in January, which wrestles with my history of disordered eating and internalized fatphobia, even as a woman who has not only almost always been fat, but is a committed feminist, and one who has been an avid consumer of fat activist content for the last two decades. I’ve often asked myself: why was I an avid consumer of fat acceptance content, as a political matter, without ever quite connecting with it personally? Why was I so convinced of the arguments, without self-applying them? Why did I loathe diets in the abstract, but struggle to give them up in practice?
The answer for me—and which I wonder might resonate with some readers too—consists in my body shame, and the particular way shame militates against community. Think of the characteristic look and posture of shame—head bowed, eyes lowered, the desire to disappear, even. All of that is such an effective way to prevent people like me from making human connections with like-minded, and similarly vulnerable, others. Shame is a brilliant bulwark against solidarity.
I’m in no way immune from rushes of shame nowadays, even after shrugging off my internalized fatphobia by writing a book to work through it. I am simply a shame-prone person. And although it typically isn’t coming up around my body these days, shame affects me in ways that are as unexpected as they are predictable: with book stuff, in particular. A rush of shame as I correct a footnote in my proofs (how could I not know that?); a rush of shame at the one reviewer so far who didn’t like it (without really offering anything substantive enough to be useful as critique or feedback, unfortunately); a rush of shame at its first three star review on goodreads. A rush of shame in anticipation of all of the ways—little and big—a book might disappoint, especially those associated with a metric: book sales; goodread reviews; ratings on Amazon.
It reminds me, all of it, of being ashamed of my body, and stepping on the scales obsessively—weighing myself against others, and measuring myself using metrics as unforgiving as they are, ultimately, pointless.
Of course, there are differences: fatphobia is, as I’ve argued, a system of oppression, which stands to afflict vulnerable others in ways that are systemic, material, and deeply intersectional. Moreover, there’s a grain of helpfulness in some other forms of shame or at least vigilant anxiety that I struggle to extract and separate out from the dross here: I do want my book to contain maximally helpful research, resources, and footnotes, as well as minimal typos, before it goes before readers. I want it to be as useful and good a read as it can be. (And I’d still love it if you pre-ordered it or gave it a review on goodreads!)
And yet: it’s vital for me as an author to do this for the right reasons. Not to appease my own shame, or to have a “successful” book (whatever that means, anyway). But for the simple, profound reason that I want to reach readers. And it’s precisely in turning down the volume on my propensity for shame that that stands any chance of happening.
So, while the pre-publication book jitters continue to keep me up at night, I hang onto the little things—signs of progress, not perfection, as they say. And I find solace in community. Just yesterday my kid’s amazing teacher (who is amazing enough to have initiated this conversation with me herself) told me the district had responded really well to the articles I’d shared with her about not demonizing certain foods with the children. (Evidence shows that the more we forbid and police foods like candy, the more attractive they’ll become, in addition to it being an eating disorder risk factor. Taking a more neutral approach in how we talk about food, and not pressuring children to choose supposedly healthy foods, is better.) And then I got to have a beautiful conversation with a philosopher I deeply admire about the fatphobia she is feeling dogged by lately, and how she might deal with it.
It was a nice reminder that, however the book fares—and I’m sure some people will dismiss it out of hand—the point is to reach and help support open-minded people, and to be part of a larger community making the world a little bit less hostile to those of us living in larger bodies. And I think that’s happening, a little bit, already—as the happy result of no longer being shame-faced about my own, fat body and my struggles around eating.
If there’s a theme to my writing and teaching lately, it’s trying to combat the shame and loneliness that so often comes with the frailty and vagaries of living in a human body, by finding solidarity—ideally political solidarity—with others. Unshrinking is partly an attempt to meet others’ gaze and make a vulnerable connection, in the hopes it mobilizes more people to join the longstanding political movement built by so many people for fat justice in particular and body liberation generally. It’s fair and makes sense that some people won’t feel moved to respond in kind. But some people will, I think. And that feels hopeful—even something to maybe one day be proud of.
There’s a vulnerability to saying this, and a vulnerability to this project generally. (The vulnerability of trying to not be a perfectionist about not being a perfectionist is a whole tangle I’ll leave for another occasion.) In this book, I am trying to reckon with the experience, as a woman, of not being considered a shiny object by most people, but rather, a tarnished one, and compared negatively to others. I am trying to reckon with the irrevocability of my own fatness, and to proceed from the simple, I’ve come to think beautiful, truth that people simply come in different shapes and sizes, and that our assiduous attempts to shrink ourselves are as futile as they are harmful.
For what a loss it would be, I think, if all fat people became thin and we all thereby came to more closely resemble each other. What a loss it would be in terms of the human bodily diversity which disability activists among others have long taught us to value. (The central metaphor of Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, which argues that disabled bodies are often haunted and taunted by the false promise of a future cure, rather than civil rights and accessibility in the here and now, is resonating loudly for me as I write this.) We would lose the delicious heft of a burlesque dancer; the iconic bikini poses of Nicole Byer; the way Roxane Gay takes up space and, as she writes, can hence intimidate others with her sheer presence—in sharing her brilliance, her stories, her mind-widening opinions.
We can choose our metaphors differently, when it comes to what we value in the bodies and minds amongst us. We can choose to value the bodies and minds amongst us—to be glad and grateful we can be here, now, together, in these physical or virtual spaces—rather than judging or comparing or ranking them. We can choose to view a body not as an object but as a manifestation of a subject, a person, whose body is for them, not for our consumption. (I call this idea “body reflexivity.”) We can choose to find in that stance and commonality a basis for true political solidarity. For when we can meet each other’s gazes unashamedly, there is for the first chance a basis for making something happen, for making lasting change in the world. And that change is so desperately needed, materially, institutionally, and systematically, when it comes to fat bodies, among many oppressed others.
So yes. This book is an aspirational one, for a change, and also a vulnerable one. I talk about being teased, bullied, and othered. I talk about addiction. I talk about ceasing to try to lose weight and finding some measure of bodily peace and autonomy in the process.
Thanks for the support friends. Onward—as always, with others, in community. Reader, have you similarly felt the need to get past a residual sense of shame recently? And is that shame connected, for you, with perfectionism and anxiety?
Oh god, yes. Shame is probably one of the deepest early traumas many of us share, put in place before we even have the rational ability to deal with it. Perfectionism in work, or grades, or ability, or weight (I just wrote about this Tuesday on Substack) stems, at least for me, in knowing somehow in this deep mysterious way that I simply am not enough, am too much, am not right, thus I must be better/faster/thinner/prettier/more accomplished etc. The older I get the more I learn about my own history (familial neglect), my brain (I'm pretty sure I have some significant neurodivergence that was never discovered or acknowledged) and how those things combine in a dangerous combination with capitalism's pressure of "winning" and the shame of not winning. Thank you for this piece.
No doubt Unshrinking will have an impact. Down Girl *CHANGED MY LIFE* and also changed the way I wanted to read and interact with books.