"Every time I think I'm done crying on airplanes, the world prices me wrong again," I whisper at my boyfriend through hot tears. But really I don't blame the world – I blame myself.
I knew the minute I squeezed into the exit-row seat that I'd been mistaken to think I'd be more comfortable there. I'd moved us partly so we would have more space and partly to grant a reprieve to the very tall man folded into the window seat beside us; I had originally hoped the man would move of his own volition, thus improving all our experiences at once, but he had been asleep by the time the seatbelt sign went off and waking him to suggest he move seemed rude. So when I spotted two empty exit-row seats, paired off separately from the rest of the three-person rows, I leapt up to snag them. As my boyfriend settled in beside me, though, thrilled with the legroom, I grew increasingly agitated. The armrest was digging into my fleshy hip in a painful way that was far too reminiscent of my pre-GB days, and no amount of squirming was alleviating my discomfort. Meanwhile, back in our original row, the tall man had awoken, noticed our absence, and stretched across all three seats – there was no going back.
As my anxiety escalated and I began to cry, silently at first and then in great shuddering sobs, I blamed myself: I should have been patient and waited for the man to wake up; I should have aborted the move the second I sat down sideways because of the narrowness of the reinforced seat; most of all, I should have been smaller, slimmer, less of a monster, so I could FIT IN THE FUCKING SEAT.
Most of the time I am okay with my body – after 13 years getting used to my shape and size post-surgery, I've stopped hating them so much and come to accept them, even appreciating parts of my body in rare moments of active self-love. But flying is a risky game; one wrong move or extra-narrow seat or seemingly disgusted look from a seatmate and I'm a 300-pound teenager all over again, collapsing my limbs inward in an attempt to minimize my offensive bulk and fighting claustrophobia and tears.
This wasn't the first time I'd had a body-panic attack in a reportedly-roomier seat: when I went to Naples on BA with my ex, four or five years ago now, we paid more for the exit row and the flight was fully booked, so I sat in considerable pain and emotional misery for the entire flight, while he sat next to me, worried and incapable of helping me and feeling guilty about his own slim-hipped, long-legged comfort. This time my partner refused to sit idly by (he also had another option). He let me cry, listened to my quiet hiccoughing laments – "why did I go through everything I've been through in the past 13 years if I'm still not going to fit into airplane seats?!" – and then he firmly asked me pointed questions until he could suss out a solution. When he determined that it was impossible for me to stay where I was and ever be comfortable he insisted we move back to our row: he would sit in my old seat and I would sit across the aisle, in a seat on the end of a row with only one person, who was asleep in the window. My angst, which had eased slightly at the thought of a solution, however imperfect (we couldn't cuddle or watch a movie together from across the aisle), increased exponentially when I saw the giant feet of the tall man in the foot space of my old seat, but my boyfriend was determined that I should not sit back in the exit row, so he wedged himself in around the boots and I sank down into the still-narrow but much more reasonable seat across the aisle, where I breathed deep, unsteady breaths and tried to will myself to think about anything but my body.
But my body was alive with sensation, in a torturous way. Every tiny movement felt like it sent waves of ripples across my soft flesh; every shift from my seatmate sent my heart into a panic at the thought of her impending horror upon waking up to find me encroaching on her slender-person personal space buffer. We had a seat between us, so I was objectively not imposing, but I panicked nonetheless, and I spent the rest of the flight in self-loathing and despondence – a state with which I seem still to be far too familiar.
Now that a day has passed, and I'm here in Germany, surrounded by tall, often robust women, I feel like less of a freak. But it boggles my mind that no matter how 'normal' I think I've managed to make my physical form, there are all these traps waiting for me out there. And that's just my experience, the size-12 perspective! Imagine how many poor size-18 women have booked the exit row, paid more for a bit of extra comfort, only to discover the physical pain and extreme shame of wedging themselves into a seat so narrow my slender boyfriend's hips touched both sides.
I know the airlines are always looking to save money, and in this case we were flying a budget airline, Wow, out of Iceland...but Icelandic people are pretty tall/broad overall...I don't know. I don't have a solution, is I guess what I'm saying. And I don't have a positive attitude about the emotional aspect of this. To some extent I suspect I will just always be sensitive about my size; however much I toughen up and scar over, there's always a festering wound just under the surface. No matter how much evidence I gather that I'm 'not that big,' and experiences like this latest flight seem to reinforce all the horrible thoughts about myself that I work so hard to repress.
So that's all: a shitty thing happened and it reminded me of another shitty thing and together they reminded me of how worthless, how almost not-human I (and anyone else above a size eight) am considered to be by the society in which I dwell. Now enough angst – there is a vibrant city outside my door, filled with delicious food and beautiful architecture and reminders of life's beauty and ugliness and the constant interchange between the two. So off I go to eat a wurst and try to think about anything but my own inconsequential flesh.
(Posted from my phone; please excuse typos and brevity)
Sent from my normal-sized iPhone5
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