Appreciating My Black Body For What It Is
This piece was originally published through NewPolitics first and was also supposed to be published through the Pillow Talk Project a few years ago, but that never came to fruition so I decided to publish this here and share the difficult but necessary journey toward appreciating my Black body for what it is, and how I’m learning to embrace me, first, while bravely dismantling the oppressive European beauty standards and systemic fatphobia.
Sophomore year in high school, I started exercising in the school gym after school almost seven days a week. I willed myself to start doing it. I didn’t know how to start, but I knew the schemata to exercise: you spend thirty minutes to two hours running outside, or on a treadmill, and lifting a few dumbbells in repetitions of ten to fifteen. After two weeks, I started to see results.
Whenever my mom, or my aunts would make food, sometimes they’d ask me if I wanted to eat. I’d adamantly say, “No.” I had created my own strict routine focused on lowering my food intake, which meant not eating after 6:00PM and only drinking water. That worked for a while. And when I did slip up, I’d punished myself with twice as much exercise the following day.
For a while, I lost the weight. I thought that was all I had to do to feel better. I felt like my depression was somehow lifted off my shoulders. And I’d even gotten positive feedback from my peers. Men from all different grades, from freshmen to juniors and even some seniors, commended me for my perseverance. They asked, “How’d you do it?” I was proud. But soon I realized exercise would be enough to keep me moving and in shape, but relentless exercise and ‘willpower’ were not enough to fully suspend mental illness.
This logic was horribly flawed and was deeply rooted in my upbringing where I first began imposing the oppressive societal expectations of how I thought society and my family viewed me, which only resulted in me mercilessly blaming myself for what I considered to be my biggest shortcomings. The toxic, internal dialogue would rage on saying, “Why isn’t this working? I lost weight so shouldn’t my depression be gone? Shouldn’t I be happier?” I thought this way for a very long time.
It was long after Monroe Woodbury High School, after SUNY Orange, that I learned that maybe what influenced me to exercise was more external pressures and conventional norms of beauty and less solely what I wanted. Jokingly, Broly the Legendary Super Saiyan was my influence for wanting to be muscular. But the memories I can recall even more vividly are when former friend would slap my arms, yelling that I was “too big.” Behind my seemingly lighthearted response grew a desire to be something else because doing so would mean I could become attractive. And that’s when the hard journey of discovering myself really began.
I felt as though what made me physically attractive was my physique alone. What my sense of “looking good” meant ideally was that I was not too muscular, not too fat, but fit enough that I wouldn’t worry about how I looked whenever I tried clothes on. Reflecting on this, what I think I was striving for was to look like a racial archetype: strong, fit, with a degree of braggadocio. I didn’t take into account what this meant for me other than how I’ve been socialized to believe that appearing statuesque is what made me attractive.
There was no in-depth subsistence to my reasoning. Even after I took the initiative to develop a better diet and exercise more to achieve this certain look, the only thing I thought that was rewarding was looking a certain way. Soon, I started to question myself. Why did it matter to me if I looked good, while knowing I was not well psychologically? If I looked good, then why was I still depressed? What good were my efforts to look good, if I only was considered valuable to others because I conformed to what a stereotypically Black male was apparently supposed to look like?
I did gain some of the weight back at some point, and lost it nearly as quickly as I gained it back. I read somewhere that losing weight quickly after gaining it is prone to me experiencing severe heart conditions. That wasn’t the main cause of me gaining the weight back the third or fourth time. It was more indifference.
I felt like what was buried under this indifference wasn’t so much a feeling of helplessness; I felt like it was an unawareness to question why I felt that if I hadn’t looked a certain way, I would accept myself as I was, almost as if feeling indifferent to the failure of not feeling valued because I was physically attractive, was my immediate go-to-answer. My assumptive conclusions of what led up to my indifference were derived from the expectations of my socialization. The logic of patriarchal socialization was as linear as thinking that if I were fit, then I would be happy. If I looked good, I would like myself. I would respect myself. Everyone else would like and respect me, too. Yet, I had been exercising to look good from the collective expectations of my peers, and not for myself.
Not once did I really think about why I would be exercising for my own good, but because it was expected of me, and because it was expected of me, my willingness to go to the gym slowly came to a stop. My aunts, my uncle, mostly my mother and sometimes when her friends would come to visit, many questions that implied hopelessness were posed to me. They would worriedly ask me why I’ve gained weight and what I’d be doing to immediately reverse my “laziness”, acting as though my life was over because I was not as involved in exercising as I used to be.
Of course, here and there, I’d exercise out of guilt. Eventually there came fleeting moments where I just generally didn’t see any meaningfulness in exercising, not because I suddenly believed exercise was meaningless, but because of who I needed to consider what, how, why, and most importantly, who I was exercising for. When I gained some weight back, my dislike for my body was consisted of what I thought about America’s societal expectations of Black men.
I admired how my deltoids and arms used to look after two to four weeks of starting to exercise, but later on, I’ve learned to start appreciating all of my Black body, too. And while I should’ve been exercising more often, with time, I guess, I became afraid of having to exercise to reach that level of physique again.
What has helped me accept my body while decreasing body weight stigmatization was reevaluating who I was exercising for, while also asking myself why our American society correlates rigid ideas of beauty with superiority, separating, and assessing the two premises. One of the premises were that, if I was not actively taking care of myself in dieting and incorporating rigorous exercise in my schedule seven times a day, it was generally assumed, by my peers, if not our whole society, that I did not love myself, which was obviously not true. So what helped was realizing that body weight did not determine the amount of love I had for myself. Taking that into account I felt there was much less of a societal pressure to exercise to look good for others.
In any case, I chose to exercise on my own accord not out of guilt, nor feelings of inferiority, but because I did it for myself. Also, what helped me was once in a while reminding myself that in spite of how others might perceive beauty, it would not suggest that I am less beautiful. Growing to develop a better perspective of positive health involved gradual introspection, recognizing what we, as a society, have been conditioned to think about conventions of beauty, and detecting what we might or might not like about our bodies.
While every person’s journey is different, I think a few challenges that have prevented me from embracing my full self was again, recognizing that I was not striving for this level of fitness solely for the benefit of myself, but because of my societal expectations from others. I didn’t feel as though I was existing for myself. For a long time, I would act upon striving for goals because I was told to do so, and because it was expected of me. Another challenge I’ve faced was assuming that I would be entitled to rewards and reassurance from others. Thus, I used to think the idiomatic expression of having good looks would give me credence and self-worth. Before, I didn’t think to consider why or how I didn’t consider myself as worthy of love because of my weight. Mostly, differentiating how I’ve felt after I’ve exercised, lost weight or not, to not exercising and not thinking less of myself for not exercising have been vitally important distinctions to make when recognizing the progress in my path to a fuller self. While I’ve slowly learned to accept myself, it’s been terrifyingly easy to readopt unlearned behaviors.
I don’t believe that my weight determines my worth, and I’m not saying this to earn SJW points. I’m saying this because it’s wrong, ignorant, and fatphobic to think in that way. I might be overweight, but over time, I’ve honestly come to like my body in the shape that it is. How muscular or refined my face might look shows only how much effort I’m putting into my exercise and that I’m obviously dedicated to fitness, yes, of course, but it doesn’t define my Black beauty.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is an American-born Haitian independent writer and Goodreads author who resides in Brooklyn, New York. Their pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. They write poetry, short stories, and essays. They are published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. They are the author of their 2016 anthological work, Thriving Fire: Musings of A Poet’s Odyssey and newest ebook, Perennial: a collection of letters.
