There’s a Weight On My Back

I carry my fat on my back.

My chonk and my rolls and my heft.

I carry the things I feel a need to hide.

I carry my gender and sexuality, my desires and opinions, my fears and the spools of webbed threads of thought thought thought thought thought.

They ramble on and jiggle on weighing heavy on me and I cannot entertain them, most times.

It was, as with every other, from my young self that I began to feel shame.

Shame over the things that I simply was and simply am.

So I zipped them up in a little backpack and tried to pretend that they didn't matter to anyone, nor me, tried to pretend they weren't there.

Shame became fear.

I loathed my backpack, hiding it away as deep into my heavy chest as I could possibly bear.

I carried it everywhere I went, of course, these are not things you can throw away but I wanted it all gone for a time.

But then I grew.

I still grow but it matters all the more that I've come to where I am now.

Because see, fear turned to anger.

And not anger at myself, not anymore.

An anger at the world.

A world that has made me feel I should not be too loud, too big, too heavy, too self-helping, too confident

A world that has made me shut down and quiet myself and hide away in as many shadows as I could possibly find until every dark knook and cranny knew my name by heart

I've spent so many years of my time on earth hiding things away in my backpack

So you can understand why I felt so proud of myself when I declared to myself that maybe I can be fat and be beautiful

You can understand I felt pride when I told my parents I was a bisexual with reckless abandon, sparked by my rage at the homophobia in the world

I've spent so long trying to categorise myself into mental illnesses, into right and wrong, into this is what I should do and it doesn't matter what I want to do

I have spent so many years not being me, whoever that may be..

My backpack is a little lighter of load now,

Much more than it was back then.

There's a while to go but

I have hope

That some day

This weight will slip off my back

My wings will grow again, roaring and big and beautiful and rainbow-hued and rearing for flight

And I

Will be

Infinite