Scales

“And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose…”

I saw beauty in a fat body for the first time in a Costco sometime between 2000 and 2004. I was standing in line with my mother, and the checker was wearing sweatpants and no makeup and a blond ponytail, and she wasn’t actually beautiful, perhaps, but it was not unpleasant to look at her hips as she moved comfortably to maneuver each item steadily across the code reader. And I’d never found such a sight “not unpleasant” before. Seeing my own loathed fat in every fat body, up till that point I had always recoiled from bodies that reminded me of my own, with which I nevertheless felt some sort of fat kinship.
 
A Costco line moves slowly, big parade floats of food-laden carts arranged in ungainly lines waiting to pass through their designated checkpoint. I had a bit of time to adjust, to experience some wonder. The checker wasn’t huge or elephantine, merely large and rounded. And yet hers was a body which, when put through the automatic sorting process of all bodies into categories of “acceptable” (meaning thin) and “unacceptable” (meaning fat), would have been easily classified as the latter.
 
The moment was a strange one; it estranged me from my own perception. I was simply and suddenly aware of an absence, of an expected response which failed to materialize. I gazed at this stranger’s body and felt no repulsion, no disgust; I was able to see the beauty in it. Scales fell off of my eyes; I could see something in a new way, and it was bizarre and miraculous. I hadn’t been thinking particularly about bodies and beauty at the time, certainly not any more than the usual constant drone of worry cycling with self-righteousness and self-reassurance. This sudden sight came out of the blue.
 
I wondered if the blonde woman was the only object to which this new vision applied, and almost reluctantly removed my gaze from her to cast it about for other bodies. I saw an older Mexican lady, her short three-rolled torso wrapped in a red suit — and my new vision held true. Her body caused me no disgust, no revulsion, no immediate “no!” shouted silently at the unacceptable body. 
 
This alteration of vision has persisted. I don’t see all bodies as beautiful in their entirety; I’m not some fucking PollyAnna of bodily aesthetics. But that automatic, binary sorting process has been quieted. All bodies are not required to be either affirmed or denied. I can see beauty and grotesquerie living side by side in the forms that present themselves to me.
 
But at the same time, the way that this visual capacity descended upon me was so particular, so unexpected, that I cannot expect the same experience to have occurred to everyone. In a brief correspondence earlier this month, anxieties about attraction were summed up as “feelings of inadequacy.” But I don’t feel inadequate at all. I feel entirely adequate. What troubles me are are feelings of unintellgibility. The response to fat bodies are so polarized, so charged with all of these bloodygodawful freighted Kantian legacies. I don’t fear having my advances simply and kindly declined — I fear being flung across the room in a spasm of recoil and disgust, as if I encroached like overconfident vermin in search of warmth.

I fear that I cannot be seen, cannot be read, because for years I simply could not see beauty in a place where it clearly had a foothold — my own body, the bodies of others like me.