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From Vox

Roman, Shiv, and Tom deal with some major issues behind the scenes of the Waystar-Royco shareholders meeting. | HBO 
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Succession is telling stories about abuse even when it doesn’t seem like it is.

Pay attention to who says “uh-huh” on Succession. Those are the weightiest two syllables in the entire show.

That might sound a bit silly, but “uh-huh” functions as a kind of stealth reflection of Succession’s power dynamics. Logan Roy (Brian Cox) says those two syllables all the time as a way to fill space in conversations where literally anything more loquacious might go, and Cox’s very specific cadence in how he says “uh-huh” ripples throughout the rest of the cast. The more loyal a character is to Logan Roy, the more likely they are to say “uh-huh” in that specific cadence as a conversation stopgap.

Succession’s third season has been particularly illustrative in terms of how the show deploys “uh-huh.” The more Kendall (Jeremy Strong) has fallen out of his father’s orbit, the less he’s said “uh-huh.” And the more Shiv (Sarah Snook), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) vie for Logan’s attention, the more they say “uh-huh.” The more someone has Logan on their mind, the more they speak like him.

“Uh-huh” is also notable as a way to give a response without actually saying anything. Taken as a unit, “uh-huh” can mean “sure” or “okay” or “yes,” but it doesn’t carry much weight beyond that. It allows someone to speak without speaking, to smooth over what might be difficult but necessary to say. The more the Roy family doesn’t talk about its demons — many of them propagated by Logan — the more it falls back on “uh-huh.”

Logan Roy exerts a gravitational pull on all of the characters in Succession. I’ve argued in the past that this pull is rooted in the show’s portrayal of abusive family dynamics, with Logan as the baddest dad of them all. And in season three, the show is finding new, more potent territory to explore within those abusive dynamics. The result can be as simple as a character saying “uh-huh,” or it can be as fascinating and as savvy as the way “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” the fifth episode of season three, portrays extremely common responses to abuse.

The four F’s of trauma and stress responses — flight, fight, freeze, fawn — and the four Roy kids

Several characters listen to Logan rant.

HBO
Logan’s outbursts are always something the characters of Succession will have to deal with.

You have surely heard of the “fight or flight” instinct. The idea is that humans are the same as any other animal and will either lash out or take off if we find ourselves in a situation where we feel threatened. For people who struggle with PTSD, these fight or flight instincts can sometimes become essentially hard-coded as responses to the world at large, triggered by seemingly mundane events. (A famous example: the war veteran who curls into a defensive crouch when they hear fireworks.)

But beyond “fight” and “flight,” two other major responses to triggering events exist: freeze and fawn. Freeze is hopefully self- explanatory — someone encounters a perceived threat, and instead of fighting back or running away, they simply freeze up, as if hoping they won’t be noticed. Fawn is harder to immediately understand, but once you learn that it typically emerges as a response to childhood trauma, usually abuse, it makes more sense. The “fawn” response manifests in an attempt by someone who feels threatened to placate the threat in question; this response often arises in situations with abusive parents.

“Fight, flight, freeze, and fawn” are sometimes called the four F’s of trauma or stress responses. What’s fascinating about this breakdown in Succession terms is that there are also four Roy siblings, and each one of them corresponds to a different F almost exactly. You can trace the siblings’ individual F responses across the run of the show, but they’re especially visible in “Retired Janitors of Idaho.”

Succession is fond of using wide shots to focus on a couple of characters exchanging dialogue in the foreground, while other characters are doing something else in the background.

For instance, here’s a blurry Roman Roy, hanging out in the background of a scene that is focused on something else:

The Waystar-Royco team celebrates their deal as Roman lurks. HBO

Roman is in the extreme background by the window. (Also, in the episode, Shiv crosses from talking to Roman in order to talk to her dad, which draws your eye to Roman’s position subtly.)

Why is Roman there? Well, when Logan yells at Shiv, who just closed a deal to keep Waystar-Royco in the Roy family’s clutches but had to go over the head of her ill and incapacitated father to do so, we can see Roman do this:

Logan dresses down Shiv. HBO

Roman freezes up as Logan dresses down Shiv. Note that earlier, he was looking at the action, and now he’s looking down and away.

Then there’s Roman. Again, he’s out of focus in the background, so it might be easy to miss, but you can see him freezing up, looking anywhere but at the action, hoping not to draw any attention to himself, even though he’s standing some distance from his father and sister. And if you go looking for Roman freezing up, deer in the headlights, when somebody else is bearing the brunt of Logan’s ire, you’ll find plenty of other examples throughout the run of the show — including in this very episode:

Roman makes a cringey face. HBO

Roman cringes after his dad has an outburst about an imaginary dead cat. (Trust me; it makes sense in the moment.) This scene is played more for comedy than the other scene discussed here, but Roman’s reaction is similar.

There he is, in the foreground, looking like he’s trying to be as inconspicuous as possible, after one of Logan’s outbursts.

The more you notice Roman freezing up in the face of his father’s temper, the more you’ll start to notice his siblings exemplifying the other F’s. The eldest Roy sibling Connor (Alan Ruck) is not a character we know very well, but that might be because he’s always got some reason or another (a presidential campaign, a Broadway show, etc.) to just not be around, as if he’s in flight. Even when he advocates for himself to become the head of Waystar’s European cable division — a role he then lands because Logan mostly wants him out of the way — that “promotion” acts as an example of Connor leaving the scene.

Kendall, meanwhile, takes and takes and takes his father’s abuse, but eventually, he gets frustrated and fights back, as he’s been doing all season. He’s the most ineffectual of his siblings in this episode, but there are still a few moments where his “fight” impulse engages: when he enters the family’s suite and tries to bully them into holding everything together, for example, or when he gets onstage to read the names of the victims of the cruise line scandal that’s plaguing the company. Kendall likes to make himself the biggest, easiest target — a fairly classic “fight” response that can also be attuned to protecting younger siblings.

That leaves Shiv, who spends all of “Retired Janitors of Idaho” working her own angles but also trying to reassure her dad that he’s just the best. She’s fawning, in other words. The outburst that provokes Roman’s out-of-focus background freeze-up is directed at Shiv, when she’s trying to tell Logan that her successful negotiations count as a win for him. (He refuses to let his children have a win, ever.) When he blows up at her, she immediately tries to play everything off as no big deal. She’s trying to deflect conflict, to placate his ego, to stay alive.

But Shiv is stuck in her father’s orbit all the same. Even as she tries to chart her own course within it, well … it’s his orbit. After all, look at what Shiv says earlier in the episode, when she is talking to her semi-estranged brother Kendall:

Shiv talks to Kendall on the phone. HBO

Shiv also says “uh-huh” in a later scene, while talking to her dad. In that scene, you hear her say it over a shot of her dad.

No one person always relies on one of the four F’s to the exclusion of all others. You might fight back in one scenario and freeze up in another. Roman, for instance, tends to freeze up when Logan gets angry and fawn over him much of the rest of the time.

But it’s not uncommon for anyone to lean on one of these responses more frequently, and the more we look at the four Roy siblings, the more it seems like the show has tied each of them to a very specific F response to trauma.

How Succession’s love of wide shots helps it tell stories about the ways families destroy each other

Gerri walks with purpose at the shareholders meeting. HBO
I just think this is a very beautiful shot. Look at the light!

Succession tends to pepper its episodes with more wide shots than you’d typically see on even the most prestigious TV dramas. Wide shots take time to set up, which means they can be expensive, and it’s rare for a series to use them for much more than establishing where everyone is in physical proximity to each other.

As such, most TV shows find ways to use other shots that are more actor-friendly, such as close-ups and mid-shots. To point to the example above, Kieran Culkin is one of the stars of Succession and a terrific actor, yet you can only just make out his emotional reactions in the background of those scenes. A close-up would make those reactions more prominent, more immediate. So why the wide shot?

Succession loves to pull back the camera whenever it can. It tends to alternate between wide shots and close-ups. (This is not to say that mid-shots are nonexistent on the show, but even in a medium shot, it crams as many actors into the frame as it can.) And its use of wide shots is crucial to its storytelling about abuse.

Abuse within a family never just involves any one relationship, even if it is only occurring between two family members. The emotional ramifications, the secrets, and the guilt spread outward to everybody else in the family and often others who are in close proximity to the family. So when Succession uses wide shots as it does in “Retired Janitors of Idaho,” it’s finding a way to show that toxicity spreading outward from its source.

Similar wide shots are scattered throughout the show’s run, and usually, when there’s an abusive moment, it’s captured either in a wide shot or in a close-up that immediately cuts to a wide shot, so we can see everyone’s reactions in one go. Many other TV series would cut between the actors individually, so we could see, say, Roman tense up, and Shiv offer a sly smile, and Greg look away. Succession gives us all of those reactions at once because the show’s point is that these moments aren’t discrete events, experienced in isolation. They’re events that disperse through families.

Watching Succession often brings to mind 1939’s The Rules of the Game, the classic French film by director Jean Renoir. That movie, one of the most influential ever made, dissects the intricate relationships that unwind among a group of upper-class socialites and the servants who work at the country house they’ve all gathered at. World War II is on the horizon, and none of the house’s inhabitants are all that well prepared for the coming devastation. (Though the film was made before France fell to the Nazis in 1940, The Rules of the Game seems eerily prophetic about what’s to come.)

Renoir also uses a lot of wide shots. He pulls the camera back from his actors, moving it to follow them as they enter and exit the frame. The wide shots almost resemble a stage play, but because Renoir moves his camera so often, you never think of the action as being restricted to a stage. This technique is simply the best fit for the story: All of these characters are trapped together in a world that’s going to hell, and The Rules of the Game is not about what happens to any one of them, but what happens to all of them collectively.

You can hopefully see why I find The Rules of the Game to be a useful comparison point for Succession. I think it’s also worth noting that while I find myself tracing the way that Succession’s filmmaking techniques chart its storytelling around abuse, the wide shots in both Succession and The Rules of the Game are telling stories simultaneously about wealth inequality, class disparity, and unsustainable systems within our society.

After all, Succession’s wide shots often capture the random other people who end up trapped in a room with the Roys, forced to watch them play out their elaborate psychodramas. And most of the time, those other people are nowhere near as rich as the Roys, because who possibly could be? Their reactions to what the Roys say and do serve to deepen our understanding of the family’s many dysfunctions.

But I think the most important effect of those wide shots is to convey the contagious toxicity of abuse, the way that one action will propagate others. Succession has dropped hints here and there that Logan’s childhood was terribly abusive (there’s a shot of his back in season one, and it’s covered in scars), and it has shown Logan hit both his grandchild (in a season one episode) and Roman (in a season two episode). And what sets the show apart isn’t the act of abuse itself, but the look at how this family reacts or doesn’t. Abuse is never one thing, and Succession understands that.

Every action in an ecosystem as self-contained as a family, or a major corporation’s C-suite, will ripple outward. Even positive actions will send waves sloshing back and forth. Whether those waves are as weighty as a legacy of abuse or as relatively simple as the phrase “uh-huh,” they can easily keep going until everything is flooded and there’s no easy way to clean up the mess.

  1. November 13, 2021

Despite Belarusian efforts to force migrants into neighboring EU countries, however, the vast majority of those currently at the border are stuck there, with little protection from the elements. As winter sets in, migrants are sleeping in tents, often with inadequate clothing and supplies, and EU countries are thus far refusing them entry. Already, at least nine people have died; some estimates are even higher, and conditions could still worsen as winter sets in.

What does Lukashenko hope to accomplish?

Despite the severity of the humanitarian crisis unfolding at Belarus’s borders, Lukashenko’s aims appear to be primarily political. The strongman president desperately wants to bring the EU to the negotiating table over sanctions imposed after he was fraudulently reelected last year and force the bloc to again recognize him as the country’s legitimate leader.

Despite his more recent grievances, though, Lukashenko’s threats to open his country’s border go back even further, Artyom Shraibman, a political analyst based in Minsk and a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center, told Vox this month.

“He actually threatened to do this for many years, long before the political crisis of 2020,” Shraibman said via WhatsApp. “Every time the EU criticized him, every time the West criticized him, he reiterated the same chain of argument — ‘You don’t appreciate me, that I am defending you from the illegal migrants, I am defending you from the drug trafficking, I’m guarding your eastern border, and you’re not grateful.’”

But Lukashenko didn’t make good on his threats until 2021, after the EU sanctioned Lukashenko, his son and national security adviser Viktor, and 179 other individuals and entities, due to Belarus’s fraudulent presidential election and subsequent crackdown on pro-democracy protesters last year.

Though he remains in office, last year’s election saw Lukashenko’s 25-year grip on power begin to erode, when Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, the current Belarusian opposition leader who was a political newcomer at the time, mounted a serious — and probably successful — campaign to oust him. Tikhanovskaya, who only entered the race after her husband, Sergei, was arrested by the regime, managed to unite the Belarusian opposition behind a platform of democratic change and routing corruption and wealth inequality.

Evidence suggests Tikhanovskaya’s strategy may have worked; some exit polls from the August 2020 election suggest she won as much as 80 percent of the vote. Lukashenko, however, declared victory, cracked down on protests erupting throughout the country, and forced Tikhanovskaya into exile in Lithuania while jailing other opposition leaders.

The brutality of Lukashenko’s reaction, plus the glaring falsehood of his latest “victory,” prompted the EU to take coercive action against his regime, applying increasingly restrictive measures starting in October of last year.

Belarus’s pariah status escalated even further this spring, after a Ryanair flight was forced down by a Belarusian fighter jet so that the regime could arrest two passengers: dissident journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega, who were detained by the regime. In response, the EU banned Belarusian air carriers from EU airports and airspace.

With few tools at his disposal, and few friends except for a reluctant Russia, Lukashenko finally made good on his threat to open Belarus to the flow of migrants hoping to make a new life in the EU.

The New York Times’s Max Fisher points out that the flow of refugees from border countries isn’t exactly a novel problem for the bloc, and it is one that the EU has created by incentivizing places like Libya, Turkey, and Sudan to keep migrants from its borders, despite the financial and human rights costs.

As Fisher puts it, “Belarus, in other words, is joining a practice that the European Union has long institutionalized: cutting deals with border countries to keep refugees and migrants away from the EU border.”

Still, Shraibman says, Belarus’s latest pressure tactics likely won’t get Lukashenko what he wants: Belarus, having forced the issue by essentially inviting migrants into the country, leading them to the EU border, and then refusing them asylum when they can’t gain entry, is now facing even more sanctions.

“The EU will probably not cave, because the pressure, it’s not that significant,” Shraibman said. ‘It’s not like the million refugees that came to the EU in 2015, it’s just thousands of people. It’s digestible for the EU; it’s not something that will make them change their position.”

The EU is projecting unity, but it’s still facing real internal problems

Shraibman told Vox it’s unlikely that Belarus’s provocation will result in concessions from the EU. Lukashenko, however, couldn’t have picked a better issue to put pressure on the bloc. Poland, where the border crisis has been most acute, is already on the outs with EU leadership over democracy issues, and immigration has long proved a particularly thorny issue for the bloc.

During the 2015 refugee crisis, Poland was one of the most strident critics of the EU’s migration policy; Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the ruling Law and Justice Party, falsely claimed in 2015 that Syrian refugees were diseased and they would use Polish churches as “toilets,” as Anne Applebaum writes for the Atlantic.

Since then, the nation has drifted further from common EU policies and more toward the kind of right-wing, nationalist policies that have been creeping into the forefront of European politics over the past decade.

The rift between Poland and the EU has lately intensified over a disciplinary process in the former’s court system, which the EU charged had been used by the Polish government to pressure judges and bring them under political control. In October, the EU levied a 1 million euro per day fine against Poland for violating EU rules, and Poland has also enacted increasingly harsh restrictions against LGBTQ citizens and the media, distancing itself from the more progressive values the EU embraces.

But if one of Lukashenko’s goals in addition to obtaining sanctions relief was to further fracture the EU, as European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson claimed this past summer when the crisis started, it hasn’t worked.

“Poland, which is facing a serious crisis, should enjoy solidarity and unity of the whole European Union,” Charles Michel, president of the European Council, said on Wednesday during a visit to the Polish capital of Warsaw, emphasizing that the EU intends to deal with Lukashenko’s aggression and the problems it poses for the EU separately from the EU’s internal struggles with member countries.

As Applebaum points out, however, Poland has been somewhat less quick to align itself with the EU. While the country is now relying on EU sanctions and calling upon NATO to deal with the issue of migrants on its border, Poland previously rebuffed assistance from Frontex, the EU border police, and declined to address the flow of migrants over the summer by accepting help from the European Asylum Support Office.

Now, Poland and the EU both are facing a genuine humanitarian disaster at the Belarus-Poland border, where thousands of people are stuck in limbo between two nations that won’t accept them, ill-equipped to survive a harsh winter, and unable to return to their own countries. Thousands more, who have been exploited by Lukashenko’s government into buying travel packages to Minsk so he can use them as leverage against the EU, wait in the capital or near the border with Poland, according to the Moscow Times.

Several nations, including Iraq and Turkey, have limited or canceled their flights to Belarus in order to stem the flow of people into the country, as has Dubai; however, there are still thousands of people who desperately need aid waiting at the border or stuck in Minsk.

On Monday, the EU — with the support of the US, which has also sanctioned the Lukashenko regime — is set to impose further sanctions against Belarus, the opposite of Lukashenko’s goal. However, if Lukashenko continues or escalates his tactics, Michel has floated the possibility of “physical infrastructure” like barriers, to keep migrants out.

Whatever happens, Shraibman says the current crisis has put paid to the possibility of direct talks between Belarus and the EU.

“I can … imagine a situation where Lukashenko backs down, if he’s given some option to save face,” Shraibman told Vox, suggesting that could happen by sending migrants back to their home countries with the help of the UN. “But to imagine direct diplomatic negotiations between him and the EU, that is something that is not possible at the moment.”

I remembered that my body was hungry because it was keeping me alive.

In the last diet book I ever bought, the author is pictured throughout at her kitchen island and in her garden. She’s following the template of many would-be diet and wellness gurus: a smiling and serene white woman, posing with artfully arranged food in a vast kitchen, inviting you into her perfect life.

When I purchased the vegan keto book in the fall of 2018, I noticed the sharpness of the author’s collarbone. Her skeletal sticks of arms. Her hair that hung limp and greasy. The smile that didn’t reach her eyes. There was something disturbing there, a message trying to reach me.

But I ignored it. She was promising me the fix for my fat. And that was all that mattered.

Just weeks before, my doctor said it was time. “Can’t eat the same way you used to,” she said, pointing to the extra fat around my middle. “That’s just the awful fact of aging.”

This was not news to me. I’d been increasingly frenzied at the gym and increasingly brutal at home, cutting my calorie count to subsistence levels, to try and fight the fat back. It wasn’t working; now that I was 41, my doctor said, my body wasn’t listening to me.

So I scoured the internet, just as I’d done for decades. What would work this time? What would finally tame my body? I found keto, just as it was starting to become the current fad du jour. The idea of hacking my body’s fat-burning mechanisms, tricking it into burning away weight by cutting carbs down to nothing, was intoxicating.

I found the book. I tried it. And after a few weeks, my body finally said no.

I learned early: The worst thing to be is fat. My mother, looking in a mirror, crying as she pinched at her thin body, terrified at any new softness.

Fat people were the butt of jokes in every family conversation. My mother, my father, pointing out fat women on the street, in stores, at work, disgust wrapped around pointer fingers. Fat people were the butt of our family jokes because they were also the targets of ridicule in every movie, show, news program, and school classroom around us. Everywhere. They were the butt of jokes because my family, my culture feared becoming them.

My mom’s sister was a target of the jokes. She used to be skinny from a diet of cocaine and crystal meth. But over time, over her five husbands and divorces, she gained significant weight. Then she became the specter, the threat. The worst-case scenario.

And she believed the bias and whispers; each Christmas, looking mournfully at her plate as she talked about her latest diet. If she could just lose this weight, she’d say, maybe she could find love that lasts. Maybe this time.

I stuck with the vegan keto plan for a few weeks. I ate tons of oils and nuts and avocados. I limited my vegetables, and I cut out nearly every grain and carb. There was a strict, short list of allowed foods, and a long book of every other food.

As I ate this way, my head grew cloudy, my stomach knotted, my bones ached. I returned to the book again and again. Was I doing it right? Should I feel this way? Stick with it, the author said. You’ll feel terrible. That’s just your body finally submitting.

After a couple of weeks, sick and weak, ravenous, the inevitable happened: I broke down and ate everything in sight.

And with my stomach full and my brain clear, I looked at the diet book again. The author’s skin stretched to the point of breaking over protruding ribs. Her face, tentative, searching, pleading. Pale, wan, a waif who could barely lift her lips to smile. Do what I do, it said, so my sacrifice will be worth it.

Was this the ideal? Was this what I sought for my future?

The worst thing to be is fat: That’s what I internalized from my family and my culture.

So I spent 40 years trying to control the uncontrollable. A young girl in elementary school, frantically doing sit-ups so my crush might like me. A teen girl watching others pour Slim-Fast into their milk cartons, watching after-school specials about bulimia with longing. A young adult starving myself as I ran and ran, at track meets, on treadmills, on city streets. An adult with a partner who called my body fat, the worst in a litany of things he called my failures. A past-her-prime woman offering her beat-down body to those who would take it, hoping to make it feel.

All the diets. The diets with names: Fat Flush and Low Carb and Whole Grain. The diets without names: Wellness and Mindfulness and Boot Camp. All of them designed to reinforce that the worst thing to be is fat. All of them designed to take my money and dignity. Then, when it failed, ensured I felt like the failure.

There was a moment when I could have stopped. In my 30s, I met a woman with a big belly, one who seemed unashamed, who walked with her belly out. I was awed and shocked. Later, she and I had sex, and I marveled at the belly, its smoothness, its softness. All of her, worth adoration. A body and belly she delighted in and invited me to delight in.

But still, I didn’t learn. I was terrified of my own belly and body. So I ran and ran and ran, and didn’t eat, and first my hip screamed its agony, and then my knee. I ignored the pain. Because we must do this. We must fight our bodies. What else is there?

I consulted that diet book again. Looked at the author. Willed it all to make sense.

And here’s the thing. I was (and am) a radical in so many ways. A young woman who knew early she would not marry or have kids. An angry bisexual weirdo. A vegan, for god’s sake, in the Midwest land of meat and potatoes.

But I had massive blind spots. I didn’t understand the extent of my privilege as a white, straight-size woman. I looked at the world so critically, yet I didn’t think to challenge our ideas of body size. The morality, the goodness we assign to thinness; the supreme failure we associate with fat. The assumption that only thin, angular bodies are healthy, and that soft, round, warm bodies are at death’s door.

I put down the book with the haunted, haunting author.

And that’s when, in some sort of afternoon fugue state, looking online for another way, I found a “body trust” questionnaire. The questions were things I’d never asked myself before:

A long list of questions like these, inviting me to think, to critique, to use those critical skills I was so proud of. To understand how I’d been duped.

After I finished that questionnaire, after I started to feel the edges of something like understanding and relief, I kept going.

I found Yr Fat Friend (later identified as author and podcaster Aubrey Gordon), who described the realities of living in a fat body and the parameters of our culture’s phobias. I found Health at Every Size, a paradigm for medical care that validates all bodies. I found Christy Harrison, a nutritionist, author, and podcaster exposing the limitations of our medical and health care approach to fat. I found Caroline Dooner and The Fuck It Diet. I found an entire world of fat liberationists on Instagram and body neutrality teachers across the podcast and internet space.

From these teachers, I learned the science that shows diets fail over 90 percent of the time. I learned diet and wellness organizations make billions a year based on that fact. I learned that there is little evidence that fat is actually the killer that health care and public policy has portrayed it to be, and anti-fat bias may have the most disastrous impact on health. I learned that our body size is as random and unique as our shoe size or height and equally as uncontrollable.

And then, I remembered that my body was hungry because it was keeping me alive.

So I let myself eat. I let my sore and broken body rest.

I gained weight. But suddenly, that didn’t seem like the worst thing. Because then I saw how much time and energy I’d wasted.

The worst thing. Especially for women, fat is the worst. Because we need to be small, to take up as little space as possible. We need to spend all our time and energy and creativity and love and intelligence toward making our bodies fuckable. That’s how our world works.

And if we don’t, if we take up space, if we critique that messaging and advocate for ourselves, if we use our voice, we’re feminazis and hags. If we let our bodies grow, we’re ugly and unlovable.

We must be distracted by the quest to be small, so real power will elude us.

If we don’t? We become something different. Even dangerous.

The worst thing happened: I got fat. I grew a big, round belly. My thighs rub together, and my hips are thick. I’ve got back fat and armpit fat.

I know that my family views my weight gain as a moral failing. Pitiable laziness. I’m the fat aunt now. I know that my culture views my fatness as sad. A middle-aged woman who has let herself go.

But now I don’t think about calories and macros, and the hours I will need to torture my body at a gym. I eat anything, without restriction. Over time, the foods that I felt uncontrollable around have lost their thrall. I eat with more peace now, less frantic and anxious, an animal with eyes rolling in need and want.

My body is bigger than it’s ever been. I have moments of sadness about that, vestiges of my upbringing and living in this world. But most of the time, I just feel … neutral. My body keeps me here, alive, able to breathe and smile and fuck and pet animals and eat good food and laugh and fight.

And in the years since I gave up dieting, I had time and energy for so much more. I write and create with a fever now, art sprouting forth from me after years of numbness. I’m lit with incandescent rage at the way the world lies to us but also burning with fiery hope that we might all find our way to this new place.

The worst has happened. And I’m free.

Amy Lee Lillard is the author of the short story collection Dig Me Out. She is the co-creator of the podcast Broads and Books.

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