Trapped

Gluttony, they sneer; her vast and unappeasable appetite; her submission to the incessant demands of her appetite bespeaks her failure. Her all-consuming appetite drives her to gluttony. Sentencing her to a shortened life, to a life devoid of freedoms all others take as their just due. She makes no effort, obviously, to control her appetite, permitting it to rule her life.

Instead, she allows her enormous hunger to guide her to the ultimate failure of existence. If she does struggle, it is unavailing.

It's all very well for those regarding her at a horrified, distasteful distance, with fastidious disgust for the spectacle she presents. But conspicuously regard her, they do. She presents as a freakish prank of nature. Those merely on the cusp of obesity are among the most condemnatory. They assure themselves that by singular comparison, they don't look so bad, after all, merely slightly overweight, and if they really made the effort, they could shed those extra pounds.

But they, at least, do not repel and affront social aesthetic. They do make an effort to control their appetites. They are manifestly superior to the woman who suffers their stares, their silent condemnation easy enough to read by their body language. They don't see themselves in her, nor think for one moment that she once shared their more modest girth, comforting herself with the thought that she'll make the required effort, eventually.

Has she no shame? No idea of how physically repugnant, threatening even, her presence appears to the public eye? Oh, she has, and she does quite handily observe her outcast status. She stands outside herself, as it were, seeing herself as others see her, and takes no pleasure in the exercise. It causes her no end of hapless introspection, guilt, anger, that she is so firmly judged, found wanting, scrupulously avoided.

Granted, her drug of choice is a superabundance of foodstuffs. She is not brain-addled, merely suffers from absence of control, lack of restraint; mortally afflicted thereby. She feels pain, emotional distress, societal distance, physical fatigue, psychological hopelessness. And yet aspires to make the most of her life, as it is. Taking pleasure where she may.

She has a good mind, a pretty face, delicate, if dimpled hands and feet. She is capable of exquisite thoughts, leaping toward eternity. She is resolute in matters unconnected to diet and restraint. Socially conscious, she deplores a world of inequity, struggle, deprivation, where the strong consume the weak, where disease afflicts vast populations and 'tribal' warfare displaces millions.

Her body, vast in its spread over her frail bones and disappeared musculature, is a symbol of nature's providential capacity to alter, yet preserve living matter. Initially, when she was in the expansion process that brought her to her current bloated state, she thought the perfect ovoid of her form symbolically reflected nature's life-force. And then nature's perfect rotund symmetry came full circle.

To some she presents as a vulgar caricature, an unappetizing vision of physical degradation speaking volumes of society's fascination with and dependence upon all that harms us. And she is harshly judged. A contumacious failing of the majority imposing their values, priorities and custom on an exceptional, vulnerable minority.

She does, mightily, mourn her loss of freedom. Freedom of mobility. Freedom from the angry, accusatory glares of strangers scorning and deriding her. Her deleteriously-impacted body leaves her dependent on the goodwill and residual familial regard of those closely connected to her through consanguinity.

And she does suffer from a decidedly predictable lack of personal esteem. Her physician has prescribed a regimen of drugs to balance her fragile state of self-loathing, her insecurities, her severe depression. But more than the drugs, her little coterie of companion-felines ensure her ongoing interest in life, enthusiasms beyond her frail and easily-tipped existence.

Her exoskeleton, she is aware, is suffering. Her internal organs certainly threaten some imminent collapse, incapable of continuing their miraculous mechanical operation under the sheer unadulterated weight that smothers their capabilities, wondrous as they are. Her body's largest organ expands to accommodate additions to the fat her body so efficiently stores.

I will not succumb to starvation quite obviously; rather to the burdens placed on my heart, lungs, kidneys and moving joints. There are many who have expired from life from the effects of tobacco, alcohol and recreational drug-addiction, before they have even reached my current age.

And that is so too for people struck down by dread diseases like various types of cancers in various stages invading their bodies and inexorably spreading, becoming inoperable, steadily moving them toward the inevitable. Serendipitously, I live with my grossly overweight body, past my half-century mark.

I am a devotee and an ardent user of that great modern-day social emancipator, the Internet, and social networking. Where anonymity of physical appearance enhances my social exchanges. I am judged not on the morbidity of my obesity, but on the quality of my mind, my thoughts, my opinions, and my interests.

c. 2009 Rita Rosenfeld