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I Don't Fit...In My Desk Or The World

By Jenn Leyva

March 28, 2012

Despite having difficulty navigating the classrooms and hallways of her prestigious university, Jenn Leyva accepts her fat body. She just wants the world to start accepting it, too.

I go to one of the most prestigious universities in the world in one of the greatest cities in the world, and I spend a good chunk of every day worrying about where I sit in class. 

You see, I'm too fat for most desks. I mean, I fit in them, but it's not comfortable. I try to show up to physical chemistry a few minutes early, hoping to get a seat in the back row where there are a few chairs that aren't attached to the tables. With stadium seating in lecture halls, I try to get a left-handed desk next to a right-handed desk. I put my bag on the chair next to me, mostly as a ruse for claiming an extra inch or two for my shoulders and ass to hang over. The desks are clearly not made to fit my body. I feel like a foot jammed into a stripy sandal one size too small. It fits, but there is skin and fat and flesh oozing out; I look like bread rising. It's not stopping me from showing up to class and participating, but it’s a constant reminder that the space around me is not meant for my body. 

It's more than just sitting in class; it's trying to maneuver in small spaces. Walking to the front of the room is a maze. I try to turn and contort my body to fit between the desks scattered about the room, but it's not meant to be. My hips will nudge something and a classmate's papers end up on the floor. I smile, apologize, and continue to shuffle my way to the front. If I finish an exam before the requisite time, I spend the rest of the class period looking around plotting my exit strategy. Can I find a clear path to turn in the exam without disturbing those around me? 

It gets worse in winter. Like my classmates, I show up with coats and scarves and gloves and a bag with books and papers and who knows what else. I get to my seat and try to gracefully settle in. I look around to see how my peers manage. Somehow, I don't see them struggling with coats and jackets and papers. It's just me. I am reminded of the years I've spent crying in dressing rooms. I get a garment most of the way on—and then get stuck. It won't zip, or it pinches and tugs. I can't stop loathing myself for taking up too much space.

I don't fit in in non-literal ways wither. I can get used to asking people to move and finding a larger seat. What’s more frustrating and disheartening is to tell people that I'm into radical body politics and fat liberation, and get a blank stare or a well-intended “but you’re not fat” in response. Yes, I am fat. It's important that I use my own words to describe my body, so I’m using the word fat as a political statement. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with being fat, and I'm not interested in being slim. My government has classified my body as "morbidly obese,” I wear plus-sized clothing, and I get unsolicited diet advice from strangers. I have to look far and wide (ha!) for an image of my body that is not intended to cause shame and fear. I am fat. This is quite the spiel, and it's only the introduction. (Just wait until I start talking about intersections with race and gender, or the diet industrial complex, or the conflation of health and beauty. That’s a lot for my classmates to handle.)

It's not my job to explain my fat. And there's no end to unlearning body shame and fat hate. These issues are complicated. Health, social stigma, fashion, desk chairs: It's all political, and it's all connected in really complicated ways.

Let me be clear, this is not abstract theory. I have to live this. Each and every day I am utterly outraged. The low-cal, low-fat ice cream at the grocery store, the "slimming" jeans at Torrid, the casual dismissal of certain foods as "unhealthy." Even some of my closest friends doubt some of my tenets. I cannot sit idly back and let it all continue on. I want to stand up in the middle of a lecture on the "dangers" of the "obesity epidemic" and scream “Riots, not Diets!” with all my fury. I want to bring a whistle to class and interrupt every moment that's racist, sexist, body-phobic, and hateful. I want a revolution in the streets where fatties will gather wearing sexy clothes to burn diet books and create a new world order where all bodies are valid. I want a world where it’s not my body that is too big; it’s the world that’s not big enough.

For starters, I just want a desk that fits.

When Jenn Leyva was 16, her dad told her that he'd buy her a car if she lost weight. She cried, finished her calculus homework, and is now a New York based fat activist and a senior at Columbia studying biochemistry. She authors Fat and the Ivy, a fat blog about social justice, feminism, science, health, and fa(t)shion.

Photo by Gary Barnes

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Posted in Culture and Politics, Feminism, Life, nfti-home, Womanhood

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  • Liz
    04/14/12 at 02:14 PM #

    Just because the author is comfortable with her body (and that’s absolutely wonderful!) there are those people who need to lose weight because of health issues. I’m not saying this is the case for the author, or that she needs to change anything about herself. Personally, I do want to lose weight because I am concerned that I will not live a long life if I continue going at the rate I’m going. I appreciate the low calorie snacks in the super market aisle and I don’t think the author should take it as a personal insult that they exist, which is what it seems like she is doing. You’re fine with yourself – great! But don’t take “low-cal” snacks as an attack. Chill out.

  • Lacy
    04/10/12 at 12:38 AM #

    im about to graduate from high school and should be attending college in about 5 months. I worked hard to graduate i am ready for my furture and not really going through that
     “im going to miss high school and can i really do this?” stage like my peers the only thing standing in my way is these damn chairs. I am so afraid i could just cry when i think about it. I am so scared that i dont even want to start school yet i want to take a semester off and lose the weight. i have have trouble with these desk before and like others have stated i have missed important assembly’s or speechs because of my embrassment. Anyway these desk are a BIG PROBLEM! It can really pose a threat to education even though that may seem silly. Something needs to be done. but i can really use some advice on what i should do since i have to go and take a placement test in 2 weeks and i might have to experience the humiliation of the wooded desks.

  • Liza
    04/05/12 at 01:06 AM #

    From the first sentence on … the author needs to respectfully CHECK her privilege. Ugh.

  • Maryjane
    03/31/12 at 07:20 PM #

    I have the same problem at school. I have had to resort to using the Office of Disabled Students to get my needs met and even then there are often no free-standing tables available! People from other classrooms take them – often the profs think of those tables as a nice place to put their stuff, completely oblivious to the fact that those desks are there for the students. All I want is a place to sit! Assuming that weight-loss is even possible (and I have seen minimal sketchy unscientific evidence and nothing else), in order for me to get to a weight that would allow me to sit in those desks, I would have to lose a pound a week for three years. Should I really have to wait three years to go to school?

  • Jane Raeburn
    03/30/12 at 10:44 PM #

    As a fat person and a graduate student, I have had some success by going to the office that handles students with disabilities, and informing them that I need a non-attached desk in every classroom I attend. It’s not really OK to have my size defined as a disability, but it gets me what I need to learn and succeed.

    I do not think that making people comfortable is dangerous in any way. If we are constantly told that the world we live in does not accept us, we internalize the message that we are bad and wrong. And I don’t know about you, but there’s nothing like a self-hatred to make me dive head-first into a bag of Snickers. When I feel accepted and equal, I am far more likely to consider that I am worthy of being cared for, including self-care such as exercise.

  • Kath
    03/30/12 at 08:21 PM #

    Fantastic post, but my favourite sentence is this:

    “It’s not my job to explain my fat.”

    That says it all!

  • Theresa
    03/30/12 at 02:54 PM #

    Love this piece. I went back to school in my 40s and had the same problem, so I can relate to exactly the situations you describe.

  • M.
    03/30/12 at 01:44 PM #

    I was 100% with you until you put “dangers” in quotation marks and seemed to be dismissive of the idea that certain foods are just unhealthy. Because, well… They are. And there are dangers involved in obesity, and these ideas are not simply created to make larger people feel insecure. The slimming jeans at Torrid? The low-fat ice cream? Sure — bunch of crap. Trans fat clogs arteries? Well, that’s just how it is. However an individual decides to use that information, whether or not someone chooses to buy into what IS a truly oppressive and crazy-making diet industry, is absolutely a personal decision, and the discussion of sizeism in this country is one that hasn’t even really begun… No one should be judging you (or doling out unsolicited advice), but that goes both ways; some folks are extremely health or weight-conscious, and that’s every bit as much of a personal decision as NOT being so. I understand your frustration and am in total agreement with your assessment of our often-insane body standards.

  • Amy Herskowitz
    03/30/12 at 12:41 PM #

    @ Mary – why is Jenn or anyone, for that matter, obligated to be healthy? “As long as you’re healthy, you have no reason to cave in to anyone’s expectation of how you should look.” Why is that conditional on one’s health status?

    Health is a dynamic state. It comes and goes – for ANY person, fat, thin, “average” weight (whatever that means) or otherwise. Health and weight are so often conflated that most people who don’t think critically about the two, just assume them to have an automatic cause-and-effect relationship. They don’t. A person’s health status is rooted in many complex contributing factors.

    Why anyone’s health status should obligate them to “cave” into the ubiquitous social pressure to lose weight – when there is no proven sustainable method to do so, nor is there any evidence to support that weight loss improves health – is a harmful statement to make. One is far more likely to care for a body that they value. Weight stigma and discrimination devalues fat bodies.

    There are no ailments, disorders or diseases that are unique to fat people. Similarly, there are fat people who enjoy good overall health just as there are lean people who struggle with acute or chronic illness. I’m curious to know who you think we are obligated to be healthy for, since you imply that health is such a controllable element?

    I assume you suffer from the odd cold or flu or fever every now and then, despite what may be your best efforts at eating well, getting regular activity, taking vitamins and washing your hands? Most people either have family members or had family members in our family’s history who have had some form of cancer, cardiovascular disease or diabetes.

    My own father, despite his years of weight cycling from every diet known to man, wound up being diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS/Lou Gehrig’s disease) in 2008 while he was at a “normal BMI” on the Atkins diet. Based on your logic, he should have maintained his carb-free diet to maintain his “ideal weight” while he quickly deteriorated from a terminal neurodegenerative disease because he was “obligated to be healthy”…do you see how little sense that makes?

  • Amy Herskowitz
    03/30/12 at 12:04 PM #

    Excellent. Everything you wrote is spot on. I love the idea of blowing a whistle every time there was something racist, sexist, sizeist, fat-phobic and harmful said. I’m sure it’d probably sound like a Carnival parade going on in your classroom. Hopefully, you have found community and support and a network of likeminded individuals who can help you to replenish your sanity points by being linked with the FA/SA movements, the Association for Size Diversity And Health (ASDAH), the Health At Every Size® movement, the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA), and the Council on Size and Weight Discrimination.

    Thank you for this!

  • Big LIberty
    03/30/12 at 11:21 AM #

    This is a great piece. I’m involved in a research summer school every year and I’m always concerned about finding (and keeping) one of the few seats that is a free-standing, armless chair, and not some squeezy nightmare of molded plastic-and-steel hell (i.e., stadium seating). I find that many of my colleagues and the students aren’t aware of my difficulties, or if they are, are disdainful or think it’s rude to call attention to them. But really, I wouldn’t mind the space issue being acknowledged if someone wants to be compassionate and help without judgment.

    For the health-concern trolls of this piece, I find your condescension incredibly insulting on behalf of the article author. By virtue of no evidence at all you proclaim that she is engaging in harmful health practices and shame her for her fat. Even if you’ve read a book or two I doubt you’ve done as much research on the subject as the article author, and if you have, you still haven’t lived in her shoes for any amount of time. I find it amazing that an article pointing out the shame and institutional stigmatization of fat people draws out commenters who insist on some kind of practical utility for that shame, based on some ill-defined epidemiological statistics about public health.

    Not that the health-concern trolling is unusual in the comments of any article that even hints at obliquely being about weight. I just found it especially ironic in this instance.

  • Nikki
    03/29/12 at 05:07 PM #

    While I wholeheartedly support some of the sentiments of this article, I find it a dangerous idea that medicine should conform to make people more comfortable. Being dramatically overweight takes years off your life. We live in a world where the “healthy” BMI range is even defined in a way where you start to see declines in quality of life within that range (see Walter Willet’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy), simply because people aren’t willing to accept that Americans are too big. You may be perfectly comfortable making your life decisions, but you and everyone should do it with full knowledge of the effects that will have on the length and quality of your life. Your professors are far from repressing you by telling you the truth.

  • Nicole
    03/29/12 at 03:40 PM #

    Oh how I relate to the elaborate logistics of choosing a desk. Fabulous post!

  • BB
    03/29/12 at 03:15 PM #

    I understand and sympathize with your struggles, Leyva. You are right in that you shouldn’t have to deal with fat stigma, and having to stinks. I had a friend in NAAFA who was an outstanding nurse. Having been invited to an interview at a prestigious hospital, she was turned down for the job. When she asked, she was told she “wouldn’t fit in.” She wouldn’t fit in to the ethos of that hospital, and she wouldn’t fit behind the nursing station. Lucky, however, for the hospital she then went to and where she did excellent work.

    I want to suggest that you contact the office for disabled students at your school, even though you might not want to be considered disabled. Other large students have done so. It is the job of that office to make sure you are adequately accommodated. Your contacting them could raise their awareness and help them take better care of future, larger students at your school.

    I also wanted to add that many smaller people may be well-intended and politically on your side, but may simply be ignorant of some of the needs of folks with larger bodies.

  • Priscilla
    03/29/12 at 02:16 PM #

    There are so many ways people don’t think about being inclusive. I totally get the classroom desk thing, since I work at a university and have been to meetings in rooms where I don’t comfortably fit in the seats available. I also don’t drink, and I was the guest of honor once at a party celebrating a project I completed, but there was nothing for me to drink while the others emptied bottles of champagne.

    Those on the “in” don’t naturally think about those on the “out” so it’s time for us to speak up. We need to stop being the good, quiet, polite, girls we were taught to be and instead say, “There’s nowhere here for me to sit” and “Excuse me, but where is the non-alcoholic beverage?” Or the non-caffeinated or the low-carb or the whatever it is we need.

    Our needs are important. Let’s point out those needs.

  • Mary
    03/29/12 at 11:51 AM #

    As long as you are healthy you have no reason to cave in to anyone’s expectation of how you should look. But please, listen to your health care professional if they suggest your weight is causing health problems.

  • Heidi
    03/28/12 at 03:58 PM #

    I dropped out of college because I could no longer fit into the desks. And, all these years later, I still blame myself for just being too fat. Thank you for this.

  • DeAun
    03/28/12 at 03:22 PM #

    One of the things that influenced my decision to go to the med school I went to was the free seating (the other school had stadium seating with desks) and they also had suits that were to be worn during gross anatomy (not at the school I chose). There were other reasons, but those two definitely played a big role.

  • Sydney
    03/28/12 at 03:14 PM #

    Great piece! Thank you and Rock On.

  • plazajen
    03/28/12 at 02:43 PM #

    Bravo. I get so tired of the battle – finding my space in the outside world and claiming it without residual or internal/external judgment or guilt. Wouldn’t it just be easier if everyone stopped hating that which is different? That might be too tall of an order, so I’d settle for an airline seat in which I could actually relax.