It’s my 35th birthday tomorrow (look out motherf***ers, I can finally run for President!!).
Birthdays inevitably have me thinking about milestones, and what I’m supposed to have achieved relative to my peers with every year that passes. As you can imagine, sometimes this puts me in a rather melancholy mood — when I should be celebrating with my friends and loved ones. I’m happy to say that this year is a little bit different.
The Delayed Adolescence Unique to the Fat Experience.
Delayed Adolescence is a concept I first read about with regards to the queer experience —
For most heteronormative, body-normative people, the following developmental stages play out on this timeline :
Adolescence - between the ages of 13-17
Emerging Adulthood - 18-27 (or 33, depending on who you ask).
In adolescence, we are first exploring issues of identity and sexuality. We are trying things out. We are having our first romantic relationships and our first intimate experiences.
For many queer people (particularly millennial queers and older), we don’t fully experience this normative adolescent stage. Because of wrestling with our issues of identity and attraction, often with fear and often without support and guidance of elders, it often takes us longer to even get to the point of intimate experimentation, or “practice” if you will. Therefore many queer people experience a second, delayed adolescence in our early to late 20s. We are quite literally having the first experience of holding someone’s hand and feeling our heart beat out of our chest and the brains leak out of our ears — sometimes at 25 instead of 15.
This means that often our milestones are completely out of synch with the normative achievement progression. Everything — from marriage to house-buying to kids to retirement, can get bumped back by years or even decades.
I think this phenomenon is also typical to the fat experience.
Those of us who are “lifetime fatties”, who were perhaps fat children and fat adolescents — often felt completely betrayed by and disconnected from our bodies as teenagers. Many of us were endeavoring to fundamentally make ourselves smaller before our bones were even done growing.
Because of external or internalized fatphobia (or usually, both), many of us were kept from those normative adolescent experiences. Many of us were not able to experiment or experience love and sex — until we more clearly understood our innate value and worthiness as human beings (something which diet culture endeavors to tell us is directly dependent on our size). This is part of why Fat Liberation is so meaningful to so many of us — it gives fat people permission to actually, finally live. The journey towards accepting that permission, for me, was years in the making.
Here I am, facing another birthday — but this year without that comparative thinking melancholy.
Despite family members having different hopes for my timeline, different definitions for success than mine — perhaps my development, my mistakes, my growth, and my choices were valid.
I can’t compare myself to the girl I knew from high school who got married at 25, house at 30, 2 kids at 35. Our lives and our priorities are on completely different tracks, neither more valid nor valuable.
But I can give myself the space and grace to go through every developmental stage on my own timeline and in my own order, without shame. I can give myself permission to define success as I see it, honoring my values and my community.
I can be proud of myself for so many things.
I can think through the life I have built — the people I love, the art I have made, the mutual aid I have organized. I can think through what I have actually prioritized, and the impact those priorities have had.
And when I do, I’m proud.
I’m proud of the person I am, and the person I’m still learning to be. Not too bad for 35.