Despite All My Rage I Can't Use a Smashing Pumpkins' Lyric as a Title Even Though It's Perfect Because I Do Not Care For Them At All

I’ve referred to my 50th birthday a lot, both here and on social media. I didn’t want to ignore it, to play into the patriarchy by hating myself for aging, that is, to continue to exist and breathe air. I don’t want to hate myself as I get older for time passing. I’ve been working on having a decent relationship with myself. Not because I’m all about me, but because I’ve witnessed the alternative, and it is not great.

There are facts I can’t shake though, the numbers and statistics that accompany aging are grim, especially for women. Women working full-time make about 84% of what men do, this is an average based on ethnicity and education. On paper, things don’t look that great for me. I’m on the low slow trajectory to earn less money until death, something that has never been my strength to begin with. 

This information is from the census, so it’s from people who would answer the questions. Not terribly uplifting, huh?

I’m also fat, a fact that has fucked with my earning capabilities since I could work. Fat women in this country have fewer job opportunities and at that, fewer well-paying job opportunities. From Pallavi Gogoi’s April 2023 story “The Weight Bias Against Women in the Workforce is Real- and It’s Only Getting Worse”:

“Economist David Lempert, who worked for the US government for over a decade, found in his analysis that an increase of 10% in a woman’s body mass decreased her income by 6%. This wage cut comes on top of the fact that women already earn 20% less on average than men in the US.

…

As women age, the effect of weight on their wealth gets worse. The National Institutes of Health published a report that found that the financial net worth of moderately to severely obese women ages 51 to 61 was 40% lower than that of normal-weight peers.” 

I have always tried to be other things, so that being fat was not my main signifier, the first word when people described me. What a fucking fool’s errand. Being fat has influenced my life every day, from what I wear and where I have to go to find it (rarely a real store) to what jobs I have had. I started working in kitchens as a teenager because it was made apparent to me that the front of the house was not a place for a body like mine. Kitchens are cool and all, they’re also the lowest wages around.

Every time I start to write about my body, about the fact I am fat and always have been, what I want to say changes. The center always shifts, my feelings about my body shifts. Even though I am supposed to just believe my body, the fact of my body, is that it is a failure.

This chip on my shoulder probably started because I’ve been able to read between the lines since I was a kid about my body’s worth. Fatphobia isn’t terribly nuanced, even when it tries. There were years as a little kid when I only wore dresses, not because I wanted to be a princess or was girlie but because I noticed no one criticized my body when I did, opposed to pants. My value in other people’s eyes increases when I lose weight as side effects of opening restaurants, generally 100-hour work weeks with meals of caffeine and cigarettes along with a steady diet of self-loathing and exhaustion. The first time it happened at least no one insulted me by pretending I was healthier, including, especially, my mother.

I don’t have the issue of becoming increasingly invisible as I age, that no one notices me when I walk into a room or down a street. I’ve heard women bemoan this specific loss of power, the power of being young and hot. I’ve always been invisible, because I’ve always lived in this fat body. If I’m not invisible, then I’m a target for ridicule or abuse. It’s a complex duality in which to exist. My only relevancy in a culture that values a woman most for her beauty and youth is to assist and support others with achieve their hopes and dreams. So my life has been spent seeking communities and spaces that value me for the person I am.  

The passage of time has allowed me to shake off many fears and the damages of my upbringing. The liberation of not caring about the shit not worth caring about, is why I haven’t peaked yet, no matter what the general consensus is. I’m not sure if we ever outrun the things that fucked us up, maybe they just melt into our psyches and we call it style and personality. 

Aging is a weird gift. We’ve just spent a few years consumed with grief and mortality numbers. More and more of my friends have cancer. There’s something in the water, the air, the wildfires, the stress, the cells. There’s a shark in the sea and something’s in the fentanyl, wait, it’s the fentanyl in the fentanyl. The beauty of age is giving fewer fucks, understanding what’s worth it and what’s folly. Sometimes the folly is worth it.

These past few weeks since my birthday, I’ve felt an extreme discontent reminiscent of my teenage years, a rage still against a world that tells me who and how to be, seething anger at spending my time doing something that isn’t worth my time, except to pay the rent. 40 felt like an epiphany in letting go of the shit that doesn’t matter. 50 is pissed about the lost time. I both curse this life and know I’m lucky to live it. My hormones tell me to fuck it all and then my brain tell me to embrace and cherish it, or maybe it’s the other way around. It doesn’t make a difference because, as my therapist says, my brain is my body. Eye roll. 

I know I took a sharp turn in this essay, but it wasn’t sharp to me, to my thoughts. My body has changed at a pretty swift rate lately and my mind can be cruel, for people going through perimenopause and menopause¹, this happens, maybe a little, maybe a lot, who knows. This probably also has something to do with my adolescent petulance. I read and follow a lot of people who write about and speak to fatness, this is where I learn how to try to eviscerate my own fatphobia. The writer Aubrey Gordon’s books, 2020’s “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat” and 2023’s “You Just Need To Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths About Fat People” are essential to understand just how pervasion and erroneous fatphobia is, in our society, and in our brains. Gordon also hosts the delightful and smart (two words you don’t see together all the time) podcast “Maintenance Phase” with journalist Michael Hobbes that uses science and research to debunk different diets. Certainly there are more, but I find these books and podcast to be a great starting place.

1. Don’t worry, you can’t catch it by reading about it.