Obesity Surgery: Stories Of Altered Lives

Chapter 2 Responding to the Kindness of Strangers Now You Don't See Me, Now You Do

chapter 2 Responding to the Kindness of Strangers Now You Don’t See Me, Now You Do At 500 pounds, I was invisible. Now they see me because I look normal. —Orianna It seems a cruel irony that at 500 pounds we can feel as if nobody sees us. Yet the experience of feeling invisible seems to be a common one in individuals from stigmatized minorities, as they navigate the world of the dominant majority. Ralph Ellison’s seminal novel about racial prejudice in the United States is, after all, called The Invisible Man, in reference to the oppressed black protagonist. But how can you possibly be invisible when you are black in a white world or obese in a nonobese world? The complete opposite would seem to make more sense. The sense of invisibility, however, emanates from the experience of being ignored or dismissed. And what do people generally ignore in life? Well, to name a few things, we ignore what doesn’t matter to us, maybe what frightens us, sometimes what confuses us, and often what we really want to look at but don’t want to be caught looking at. Maybe it’s the more polite people who act as if we’re not even there, twisted though this concept of courtesy may seem. The more ignorant ones may make fun of us or stare. In any case, when you are extremely obese, being in public can be, paradoxically, a very isolating experience. One of the first things that our interviewees noticed as they lost weight was that people started to see them, to hear them, to notice they were there. 54 chloe: When you’re obese, you’re invisible. And all of a sudden you become a person, and people see you. A lot of times I felt like I was saying things to people, but they weren’t hearing me. I’d be shouting, “Hello, I need help. Help!” And no one was hearing me. It’s like I was in a glass bubble, and people could not hear or see me. daphne: Gosh, when people quit smiling at you, when people don’t even want to look at you, or, if they do, they can’t look you in the face, you feel very small. Now on many occasions, when I am walking through a building and I make eye contact, the person will smile at me. This small gesture from a stranger may not seem all that important to people who have this experience countless times a day. We probably don’t even register how often this happens, but our interaction with the world consists primarily of these momentary encounters with total strangers. And these small kindnesses are important because they indicate the following: 1 we belong to a community 2 although we are not close to the vast majority of people in this community , we share some low-level concern, at the very least, for each other’s well-being 3 the world is essentially a decent place 4 we are not completely alone, even when surrounded by strangers Taking the humanness out of these daily encounters eradicates these comforting beliefs and makes for a very lonely and marginalizing experience. Some of our interviewees noticed what they had been missing only after the weight loss—when people actually started acknowledging them. gabrielle: I never thought I was discriminated against. I never thought people treated me badly until I lost the weight. The contrast was a surprise to Gabrielle and many others. Whereas some of our interviewees found it more pleasant to be treated well, others experienced it as a painful realization of how mistreated they had been when they were obese. They had gotten so used to it that it no longer even registered. It Responding to the Kindness of Strangers 55 56 O B E S I T Y S U R G E R Y was the dramatic weight loss that illuminated the extent of the discrimination they had suffered preoperatively. Most struggled with the meaning of this newfound responsiveness. What did it say about people? What did it say about them? mona: People looked past me before. I don’t know why. I don’t even know if I’d call it discrimination. I don’t know how at 290 I could have been invisible . But I was. Most people enjoyed the new, friendly acknowledgments, but it...