Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Root of Desire

Can you look back over your life and pinpoint the moment when you realized you ENJOYED being fat? I'm not sure that I can personally identify the moment I started enjoying it per se, but as I've reflected on my past, I can say with some certainty that I know when I started becoming obsessed with being fat.

I was a fairly average-sized toddler/little kid, but by the time I was in first grade, I was chubby. Chunky. Not obese, but a far cry from being like the other gracefully slender girls in my ballet class. Had no one ever said a word to me about my weight, I might have passed out of my chunky stage, its existence recalled only through a series of birthday party photographs chronicling my life prior to a childhood growth spurt.

However, my extra poundage was brought to my attention on the school bus. The most coveted seat on the bus was in the very back, which made the experience of going over bumps comparable to an amusement park ride. In an attempt to get as near to the back as possible, I, a piddly first-grader, chose the seat just in front of the Queen of the Fifth Grade, who had already claimed the prized back seat. Apparently the Queen had been saving this seat for her Royal Court, for when I sat down, she demanded that I move.

I must have had a tough-spirited nature that had yet to be broken, because I didn't budge from that seat. Her Highness began calling me names and told me to move my fat ass from the seat, but I did not move. With every new verbal assault attacking my weight, my indignance grew, despite the reddened heat of embarassment I could feel spreading across my cheeks. Still, I did not move. More words. More teasing. More humiliating remarks about my weight. Finally, a punch in the back of my head, and the Queen fell silent. Strutting with confidence while holding my head as high as any first-grader could, I boarded that bus, and biting my lip while holding back tears, I disembarked into 12 years of teasing, name-calling, and fat jokes.

Upon arriving at home, the shame and humiliation I had experienced that day came pouring out, and I cried to my mother about the girl on the bus who had teased me about being fat. Expecting to be cuddled and comforted, needing to be cuddled and comforted, I exposed my emotional wounds to my mother, that they might be mended with her consoling words and miracle cure-all kisses. Instead, and oh-so matter-of factly stated, she said, "Well, maybe you should try to lose some weight."

Enduring insult added to injury, I felt betrayed and alone. Any consolation would have to be done on my own, and the next best thing to the loving arms of a mother whispering that her child is beautiful is a handful of cookies and a bowlful of ice cream. Mint chocolate chip.

Here we witness the birth of a vicious cycle. Fat jokes and teasing led to self-comfort with food, which led to weight gain, which led to greater amounts of teasing and more frequent fat jokes, which led to the cycle continuing, and my obsession with weight took root.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Introduction

I don't pretend to be a psychologist. I don't pretend to have a secret window that peers in on anyone else's life. I don't lump all fluffy items together and deem everything a marshmallow. All I can say is what I know, what I have lived, what I have experienced, what I have dreamed, what I have fantasized, and what I have desired:

Fatness.

Obesity.

Corpulence.

I'm fat, and I have been since childhood. I'm more than just fat, though. I'm fat and I want to get fatter. I have daydreamed about gaining incredible amounts of weight ever since I was six or seven years old, but in a world that told me that pudgy kids were unhealthy kids, that chubby kids were lonely kids, and that fat kids were ugly kids, I grew up believing that I needed to have my head examined. In order to avoid such examination, however, I kept my desires stealthily hidden, indulging my fantasies by writing stories about gaining weight and drawing pictures of fat people in a spiral-bound notebook, hidden beneath my bed. As I grew, so did my fear of discovery. Consequently, these child-perspective stories of growing fatter along with pictures of fat people drawn in a child's hand were eternally lost in fire, carefully torn into confetti-sized pieces, and put into the "paper trash" to be burned in the backyard.

In the mid-nineties, I discovered that I wasn't the only one who needed to have my head examined. I first discovered the term BBW in my senior year of college and learned about the underground world of men who love fat women. I later learned that some of these men enjoyed seeing women getting fatter. Even more shocking, I learned that some of these men enjoyed intentionally fattening a woman up! My head was spinning! Where on earth could I FIND one of these guys? A few random searches on the internet containing terms such as BBW + gaining weight led me into the deeper underground world of feederism. It was while browsing through this internet subculture that I realized there were indeed other women like me, with deep desires of becoming extremely fat.

This blog is devoted to exploring the desires of those who want to gain, whether they live out their fantasies or not. I recognize that there are even smaller branches of fetishes that stem out of the desire to gain (or to see someone else gain), from immobility fetishes to clothes bursting fetishes, to measurement charting fetishes to wearing pig noses and oinking fetishes to humiliation fetishes to force feeding fetishes, etc. etc. etc. The list could go on for days. The people who visit this blog will likely be interested in a variety of these individualized fetishes, but what we all will have in common is the desire to add to our own girth, or to that of someone else.

In short, I would like to hear from all of you who desire to gain. As I post musings regarding my desire to gain weight, particularly in terms of my childhood, please reply and share what we have in common and what is different about our experiences. I wonder if there is a common thread that runs through us all that gives us the desire to gain or if we are all completely random. Honestly, I'm hoping to find that there are more folks out there who can say that they are "just like me" so I can set this notion of being a freak and needing to have my head examined aside.

More soon...