For as long as I can remember, I have been at war with a word. The f-word. No, not that f-word, though I could easily tell a tale about the wins and losses I’ve had with that notorious expletive. The f-word that I’ve been battling, well, it’s been bigger, meaner. I’m not alone in this lifetime fight either. Most of modern society views fat as far more offensive than that cuss-word f-word could ever be.

I grew up in a house where the word fat was only spoken in whispers, with wrinkle-nosed disdain, and shame. One of my earliest f-word memories took place when I was five years old. It was an after-kindergarten afternoon. My mom had picked me up and I’d tagged along with her to the grocery store. We were walking across the Alpha Beta parking lot, my hand tightly held in hers, when I heard the word fat for the first time. She leaned down to me, her voice hushed and shaky. She motioned towards a woman who was wheeling a cart towards the automatic doors and asked, “I’m not as fat as her, am I?” I knew right away what my answer needed to be, whether it be truth, or a lie. I shook my head back-and-forth and said, “no mommy, no. You aren’t as fat as her.” I had to repeat it, three times, before she took the words in. Relief spread across her face and her pace quickened, even her voice lilted as she smiled down at me, offeringa trip to Toys R Us after this grocery stop.

I’d never heard her voice sound as soft as it did when she’d asked me, and never that unsure. She was usually so confident, loud, brash, funny, and intimidating. Looking back, I’m not sure I understood what fat meant. What I did know though was that fat was bad. That fat was something other women were. That fat was something my mother could never be.

My mother was born and raised on a diet. Her mother, my grandmother, had used dieting as currency, to earn things of value - a new coat, a trip to the movies, a sleepover with friends. At twelve, my mother was prescribed amphetamines to help with her dieting regime. She told me that they made her jittery, and that they caused her insomnia to get so much worse. “But hey,” she’d say, “It took all my hungry away.”

In our house, she raised me in a never-ending cycle of dieting, and not dieting. Of restricting, and binging. Food was either a comfort, or the enemy. Food had morality, too. Good food versus bad food. Never anything in-between. I was expected to play along, side-by-side, with my mother’s eating ups and downs. Sometimes it was weeks and weeks of celery sticks and foods labeled with “low calorie.” Other times it was bags of Lays potato chips and M&M’s. As a child, my mother was my favorite person in the world, so I followed along willingly, each, and every step, staring at my own reflection in mirrors and windowpanes, wondering silently to myself if all the other girls were fatter than me.

At the start of fourth grade, my mother bought me a Charlie’s Angels lunch box. I remember wanting to be just like them so badly. Their bodies, along with Barbie, TV’s Wonder Woman, and my idol Olivia Newton-John’s were what I wished for. Mom filled the Angels’ Thermos with cottage cheese and yogurt ever morning before I left for school. It would be warm and slightly sour when lunch would come around, especially on those early hot September days. “Mom, please, can you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, like Alyssa gets? A Twinkie, too? Just once?” I’d please. She’d always respond the same. “You don’t want to be fat, do you?” No was the right answer. I knew it. So, I wouldn’t argue. Instead, I’d stare at the Angels on the side of my Thermos and think they aren’t fat. I won’t be fat either.

On my twelfth birthday our across-the-street neighbor came by with a special gift. A pair of Calvin Klein jeans. This neighbor used to be a cheerleader. She’d married her high school sweetheart, the star quarterback. She was anything but fat. “I’m so proud of you for losing all that baby fat. To celebrate I got you these. Happy Birthday! “The ex-cheerleader said as she handed me those holy grail-like jeans.

We never had money for designer anything, and Calvin Klein were the biggest thing at the private school I attended, on scholarship. I excitedly raced to my bedroom and squeezed myself into them, struggling, trying out the technique I’d seen in a teen movie - lie on your back to get the zipper up. There was satisfaction in the effort, especially once I got them on. I stood up and spun around my room, smiling widely. I felt anything but the f-word in those dream jeans. I felt beautiful. That dreamy, pretty feeling was short lived though, lasting only halfway through my next day at school. I was standing by my locker, grabbing books for science, treasured jeans hugging my in-the-midst-of-puberty body, when two popular boys walked by me. “I didn’t know they made Calvins’ for fat girls,” one said to the other, laughing. His words felt like a slap. I stood there, face reddening, as I felt a poisonous mix of humiliation and anxiety wash over me. Fat. That word had so much power. It echoed in my head, on repeat.

In the days immediately following I started identifying myself as the f-word, and I began hating myself for rit. The word would get used again that year, this time by well-meaning girls who I considered my friends. They’d started to pinch and pull at their skinny frames, calling themselves fat, then looking to me to do the same. I’d try not to stare at their “perfect” bodies too long as we stood outside the showers, changing for P.E. I tried to hide my own body under oversized sweatshirts so they couldn’t see the me underneath. There were two girls in my grade who were fatter than me. This made it a little easier to breathe. I caught myself asking that question my mother had, all those years before in that grocery store parking lot. Always seeking out the fatter girls in the room to help me feel better, all the while dreading the day when that girl would be me.

In high school, a myriad of things fell into place because of the f-word. Feeling fat, whether I was actually fat, was sharp and wielding, powerful, and rife with loathing, and reactive self-destruction. I hated the me I saw in the mirror, but more than that, I hated who I was on the inside. To help quell the hate I would go without eating for days on end, until my hands shook, and my head pounded. Until the world turned blurry. Only then would I give in, buying food with saved up babysitting money, gorging on candy bars and slice after slice of pizza, hating myself even more afterward.

At night, alone in my bedroom, I’d cut my skin in hidden places with razors I’d pocketed from Sav-On, the drugstore I’d pass on my walk home every day. I took the blame for the sexual abuse that had been happening in my home, taking it as proof of how bad I was, how ugly, fat, and terrible. I counted pills from the top shelf of my mother and stepfather’s medicine cabinet, wondering just how many of them it would take to end it all; to make the world turn off, to make the f-word go away for good. After all, Angels are never fat.

In the years to come I’d allow boys to do whatever they wanted to me, even when their touch made me feel sick. Even if I felt nothing for them. Somewhere in my head I’d hear a chorus of voices chant, “I didn’t know boys liked fat girls like you.” So, I held on tight to the ones who did, counting myself as lucky to have them, even if they were awful. Even if I wasn’t quite sure that I liked boys that way, at all.

After high school was over, I threw myself immediately into junior college, majoring in theater. It felt different there. I felt different. A tiny blip of confidence came into focus. I was hired for my first record store job. I loved it there. It was a place I immediately felt like I fit in at. With my first paycheck I bought myself this black mini skirt that looked like one I’d seen in an Interview magazine photoshoot. I’d never worn anything that form-fitting. Not since the ill-fated Calvin Kleins. I allowed myself to feel beautiful again, for a moment. I was standing in an aisle, shelving new release CDs. Two of my co-workers, girls I was starting to become friends with, were standing up at the front register. I’m sure they thought I couldn’t hear them as one said to the other, “she’s brave to wear that skirt. I couldn’t do it if I was her size.” I heard every word. And even though the girl hadn’t said the f-word directly, I know that’s what she’d meant by “her size.” She was tiny, thin, and “perfect.” They both were. I was nothing like them. I was fat.

At nineteen I discovered cocaine and speed. A couple of lines of my stash of pixie dust and I’d forget who I was entirely. It helped me not want to eat much of anything, too. I smiled at the bones start to protrude from my body, those sharp angles were bliss to me, their presence as addictive as those magical lines. Anyone who I let touch me then, well, I couldn’t feel them at all. I was miles away, off floating somewhere above my finally not-fat body. The me who went dancing in the underground Hollywood clubs, she was perfect. She was finally as skinny as an Angel. It didn’t matter much that I never felt like I was in that Angel body, it was still all I’d ever wanted to be.

Three years later, a foolish notion of love and the birth of a baby girl helped me back into my body again. The boy and I were young. Too young for family and parenthood, and he was the wrong boy to do all those things with, to boot. Nevertheless, we had a good run of it before we split apart, and for a few years after I forgot about my body completely. I just let myself live.

It took a significant loss, and a passing stranger’s flippant comment about my curves, to throw me right back into the f-word war zone. This time the battle manifested itself into a near lethal, fully realized eating disorder that took complete control of my life. You name it, I did it. Binging and purging, laxatives by the fistful, obsessive exercising, days of eating nothing but one bite. Diet Coke became my new best friend. The caffeine kept me going, and the carbonation made throwing up easier. Sometimes, even now, the taste of it too soon after a meal triggers the impulse to run to the bathroom and get rid of it all.

During those dark times there were days I could barely get out of bed. I did though. I had a child to support, a job to go to, and no one there to help me. There were days when I felt like I was dying. I was in my mid-twenties, but my body felt ten times that age. On a too hot Sunday afternoon, when my daughter was at a rare visit with her father, I collapsed in the middle of the grocery store. The woman who helped me up off the floor also drove me home, half carrying me to my apartment. She sat next to me on my porch until I could identify which key would open the front door.

When I look at picture of me from back then I can barely recognize myself. It hurts to look at me then. Dark shadows under my eyes, and pain reflecting off every part off my frail and fragile body. Only occasionally, on a rough day, do I look at those photos and wish I were her again. That I wish I were that thin again.

It was a rehabilitation hospital by the ocean and group therapy that helped me want to live again. That healing spot by the water, along with a remarkable therapist, helped me restore my creative side, reintroducing me to the writer that had been hiding away for most of my life. Writing and music helped me to save myself. It was a battle of epic proportions, and the memories of it all, how much I had to turn myself inside out to heal even the smallest bits, still shatter me.

The war is never truly over. I’m never completely done with the fight. I’ve fallen back into the battlefield, but so far, I’ve pulled myself back out quickly. It’s a battle of a lifetime, one that can be reignited without warning. Chaos and crisis, anxiety, or sometimes something small can trigger it all again. But I have better weapons now. Tools that help me to defend myself, and to (mostly) win.

That f-word though, it still lives in my head, and it still can wield its power over me. It can haunt, taunt, and makes me think twice about myself. I preach to everyone “love your body,” but still, I struggle to love mine. I still feel judged for the body I reside in, and I still judge myself every time I catch my reflection, or a picture of me someone posts on social media. I’ve yet to say aloud that it’s okay if I’m fat, or to even feel neutral about my not-thin body. I still hear those echoes of my mother’s whispered question, of those boys’ mockery, of my friend’s mini-skirt commentary, and the countless voices singing in the chorus of diet this and fat that. Failure is what I most often feel about being fat, even though, if you asked me to my face, I’d smile and lie, saying I’m happy with the way I look.

I wonder if I will ever truly make peace with my body. If I will ever feel okay with the way I look. I wonder if society ever will. Most days I’m not so sure. But I do fight harder now. I fight to break my family’s generational war with the f-word.

-Laura Foxworthy

Laura Foxworthy is currently working on her first novel set between a hotel in Los Angeles and a cult in the Nevada desert. She has run the music site lyriquediscorde.com for twelve years, and one of her short memoir pieces was published with Wordrunner eChapbooks and HerStry. Laura currently resides in a suburb of Los Angeles with her three grown children, her partner, and a coven of cats. She is a third-generation Angeleno who you can often find haunting local record stores, bookstores, and any place with strong coffee and a Ms. Pac-Man machine.