Examining My Biases via My Fiction

About four months ago, I seriously started eating disorder recovery, working with a new therapist and a nutritionist. 

I've also taught my class on how to be an ally to people with eating disorders (without being an ally to the eating disorder) twice now, for two different virtual conferences, and it broke my heart a little both times. The participants list, the chat, the people on camera nodding emphatically. Always more people than I expect. Kind acquaintances I had no idea were struggling, sharing their experiences in the chat. Bigger bodied people who have been unfairly shamed for so long, nodding along as I condemn diet culture. Queer people, people of color who have just faced so much stigma for how they look. Disabled people who were shamed for not exercising, like it was the only thing that mattered in life. Men who were told to man up, that men didn't get eating disorders. Someone younger than me who has probably never said the words I have an eating disorder before but nodding to every bullet point. Someone twice my age who's clearly been knowingly caught in this cycle for far too long. 

I always come out of the class with so many mixed emotions. Anger at diet culture and those who profit off it. Sadness for those lost in an eating disorder or just a society that shames them for what they look like. Pride for everyone in the class who's come out the other side or is clawing their way there. Never ending surprise at how many people that is. And somewhere in there, a tiny bit of guilt. 

It took an eating disorder—and recovery—to make me learn the truth. That so much of what we're taught isn't true. And to learn what is true. Even if I only had a full blown eating disorder for a few years, I'd never eaten or lived the way recovery taught me to. Because I didn't know better. And so I'd been spitting diet culture right back out, because it was some of the only information that had ever gone *in. *

When I examined where my eating disorder came from, I always came back to my fiction. It's a fine line, being a schizophrenic author and writing a character with a mental illness you don't have. That self and character line is so thin and ragged and hazy for me, I picked up one of my main characters' eating disorder in no time. But I see now how I was primed for it—how we're almost all primed for it—by society. And I had advantages, a wall of people who wanted me to be healthy and happy between me and the relentless media messaging. But they were getting those same messages, and some of them didn't necessarily know any better, either. 

So when I looked back on my own bias, I looked to my fiction for clues, too. And there it was. 

I never thought I was fatphobic. I understood that just because someone was bigger bodied, it didn't mean anything negative about them. I understood the importance of not drawing a fat equals bad line in my works. I was also very careful about including the biggest eating disorder triggers—deciding to avoid most numbers; I could paint a picture without them. But boy was the bias there. 

Sure, I had both protagonists and antagonists who were bigger bodied, and my bigger bodied characters were a generally diverse group. But I noticed that there were characters I personally imagined to be bigger bodied, who were never mentioned to be such in the actual work—and they were almost always more positively portrayed characters. But antagonistic characters who were bigger bodied were frequently described as such multiple times. 

A major antagonist in the I'll Give You series was mentioned to be bigger bodied multiple times, but there wasn't a single mention of the series' kind and helpful therapist having the same figure, even though she'd always looked the same in my head. 

There were mentions of diet culture that I had previously accepted as truth everywhere—bigger bodied characters being told they should lose weight (and agreeing), trying to lose weight (for "health"). A joke about giving yourself diabetes by having too much sugar there, a mention that a character "had probably gained more weight than was 'healthy'" there. 

I removed diet culture driven dialogue and narration, or at least found a way to call it out as such. Realistically, my characters are touched by diet culture, and that has its place in the narrative, but I can still call it out. 

I added in a mention that those positively portrayed characters I'd always pictured as bigger bodied are bigger bodied, and removed gratuitous mentions of more antagonistic characters' weight. Honestly, I did a little more thinking on which characters I pictured to be bigger bodied and why altogether, making edits as appropriate. 

Even after my initial scan, mostly using the find/search feature—I have quite a lot of fiction available publicly at this point, I haven't reread it all with this exact lens in mind yet—I would, in random bouts of rereading, find more to edit. 

Deciding to get eyes on it other than my own, I edited my surveys. My fiction works have surveys available to readers where they can anonymously provide private feedback, and I have all kinds of questions they can answer that inform my writing—whether it's pointing out a stylistic issue, a setting that seems inconsistent, or a character they just can't understand. One of the questions asks about the portrayal of a long list of identities and demographics (ranging from age to queer identities to people of color to disability and mental illness), asking if they have found anything offensive or inaccurate. I added body size to the list in the hopes of collecting more feedback over time.

I also explored the subject with my therapist, nutritionist, and people in my life (of all sizes). 

Ultimately: *when you know better, do better. *

I know better now, though I'm still learning. And I want to do better, too.