These prints are handmade with a literal old-school letterpress in partnership with Layla Cameron from Stay Fat Design Co., where the prints are also on sale! I have signed all of these on the back side to keep the print clean, though if you’d like yours signed on the front, please just let me know in the “notes” section when you check out.
Limited edition handmade letterpress print on thick cotton paper.
Size: 5.125 x 7 in
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Mary, why would you hope to be “fat forever”?
The short answer is because I really do love being fat. I used to think that people that looked like me were lying, saying things like “I’m happy in my body” to make themselves feel better because no one *actually* would choose to be fat, right? The amount of space that trying to be thin took up in my brain and in my life was enormous. The shapewear, the scales, the dieting, the exercising compulsively, the secret eating, the shame, the destructive behaviors. When I was at my thinnest, I was smoking a pack a day and getting blackout drunk every night. I was starving myself during the day and bingeing at night. But to everyone else, I had done a great job: I was thinner! I got so many compliments about my weight loss and the praise was intoxicating, which made the inevitable rebounding of weight gain feel that much more shameful. The feelings of failure were at times, debilitating. Then I’d start a new diet, and go through the whole cycle again! It was literally madness.
I am grateful for being queer because it gave me a template to understand that some people might see my queerness as something akin to failure (as in, I failed at being straight), and at one point in my journey, I am sad to say that I would have done anything to take a magic pill to be straight or thin. But I’m not either of those things, and whether or not I was “born this way” doesn’t really matter. This is my body, and I am no longer ashamed of the space that it takes up. Truthfully, I have no attachment to what my body looks like, but I really love the way being fat feels. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but I quit smoking in a fat body, I quit drinking in a fat body, I stopped binge eating in a fat body, I ran a 5K in a fat body, I have done herculean trauma work in a fat body, and composed a film score in a fat body. For me, being fat has been transformative and so joyful.
The argument people use against fat people regarding “health” is demoralizing, inaccurate, and ableist. Health is subjective. There are a lot of places you can learn about anti-diet work and fat liberation, and if this print or this idea makes you uncomfortable, I urge you to seek out work from fat activists. I have a workshop that centers around fat liberation called Everybody is a Babe, but there are so many brilliant folks that educate and speak on this subject: Caleb Luna, Ragen Chastain, Asher Larmie, Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Aubrey Gordon, Sonya Renee Taylor, Sabrina Strings, and of course, my collaborator in this project, Layla Cameron.
