They Will Not Keep Me Down

Photo by Richard Sabel

I discussed before my love for Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If”. One of the stanzas has come back to me recently as I’ve been dealing with some trolling.

Something that I’ve found in my experience with trolls is that people who revel in their bigotry will stoop to any level to keep the people they are oppressing down. I’ve dealt with this in many ways but most recently I’ve seen it around a piece I wrote about doing a 5k with my dance team. As usual, many of my haters experienced a failure of reading comprehension.

The piece was about being an athlete, doing an athletic endeavor unathletically. Specifically I wrote “I struggled with not being “good” at the 5k. I benefit from a tremendous amount of athletic privilege, and the athletic things that I do are typically things at which I am naturally talented and have put many, many hours of hard work so I’m used to being among the best. I’m not naturally good at this type of running and I didn’t train hard so of course it’s not a shocker that I wasn’t very good.”

In the hands of the haters it became “This fat bitch claims that she is an athlete because she walked a 5k.” There are now, literally, entire forums online devoted to repeating and commenting on the “fact” that I claim to be an athlete because I walked a 5k. Since I have no insecurities about being an athlete, I also have no need to try to make it an exclusive club, so I think it’s absolutely fine for people to claim to be an athlete for walking a 5k.

The issue here is that the point of the article was that I am an athlete (national champion dancer) who was doing something out of my realm and, because of outside circumstances, not even to the most athletic of my ability. These people’s sense of self is so frail that they are just desperate to discredit me, to make sure that I don’t upset their bigoted world view, even if they have to twist my words or make things up to do it. Which bring us to the Kipling that’s been running through my head:

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools

Fat people face tremendous stigma in our society and those of us who choose to fight back against the onslaught of bullying and oppression will almost certainly face a backlash from those who are benefiting from the situation. Among those things will be having our words twisted by those who are willing to do whatever it takes to keep us down. The only solution I know is to just keep rising up.

I think that fat people, whether or not they consider themselves fat activists, are truly underestimated. In the face of a tremendous amount of bullying and stigma, in the face of the government recruiting our friends, families, and employers to fight a war against us, in spite of the intense oppression that tries its best to crush us, that we keep living our lives is a testament to our incredible strength.

In a world where waking up as a fat person and not hating yourself is considered an act of rebellion, I’m proud to be a rebel. In a world where refusing to feed my body less food than it needs to survive in the hopes that it will eat itself and become smaller is considered a crime against society, I’m proud to be a criminal. In a world where loving my body is an act of revolution, I’m proud to be a revolutionary. They can say what they want, they can twist my words as they will, but they will not keep me down.