I was listening to the radio, when the author, Susie Orbach writer of the very famous feminist work, Fat is a Feminist Issue, published in 1978, was discussing her book. She said that overweight women were possibly overeating as a way of protecting themselves from the attentions of men. I began to put on weight when I was about fourteen. Up until that point I had had plenty of girlfriends and was developing normally. But as I put on weight, the girls at school and out of school were no longer expressing an interest in me as a possible boyfriend. By the age of fifteen I was losing my confidence, with all types of social interaction and was losing friends and losing opportunities with girls at school who I liked. I remained overweight for the next four or five years, as my communication skills and confidence around women got worse, I started to withdraw into myself. I developed nervous habits and suffered from loneliness, depression and anxiety. I was also suicidal.
When I was twenty in 1994, I was unemployed, living on my own and going hungry. I could not afford to overeat. As a result, I lost all the weight I had put on and women began to show an interest in me again. But by that time, I couldn't seem to rescue my confidence back and I missed many opportunities to get a girlfriend and the following year I had a massive psychotic episode. From 1995 - 1997 I binged food everyday and by the time I moved back out of my parents house, where I was recovering from my illness, at the end of 1997, I was 21 stone. Very fat, very ill mentally, with a nasty psychotic illness which wouldn't go, fat had started me on the path I am still on today. It began with a loss of confidence, which led on to feeling very low about who I was, effectively hating myself for being fat and unattractive. Fat took me off on a path of loneliness, depression and ultimately a severe mental health condition, with many other factors affecting me along the way. But I do believe that my size at varying times in my life, diverted me from a normal development course, from adolescence to adulthood and once I was knocked off course things just got worse and worse for me. In the end I spent so much time alone, that now I am 44 years old, I no longer want a relationship. I don't enjoy that level of human interaction that is necessary to maintain a relationship, and I'm happier alone.
I never got married, I never had kids, I didn't develop my career, I never got onto the housing ladder, like many of my contemporaries, and I am now cast adrift, with no friends or relationships and very long periods of my life spent alone. It isn't all bad, but it took almost my entire life alone, to get used to my own company and to accept my lot and not get too worked up or depressed about being alone. And fat is such a central feature of my path through life right up to now, that not only did it act as a driver for my subsequent mental illness, I now have diabetes, liver damage, heart disease, and all the illnesses that come from a life time of severe mental illness. That overweightness has determined my possible death as well as the general course of my life thus far.
