"I am strong, tall, and powerful" - Marita Liivak

Marita Liivak

Oil on canvas

150x150cm

As a kid I wasn’t fat per se, but I was always the biggest in my class. A head taller than the boys, often mistaken for the teacher. I remember hearing “diet talk” as an 8 or 9 year old but even then I rejected it. Why did I need to be smaller? I was strong, tall, and powerful. Yes, my thighs were bigger, but that’s because I could kick the hardest.

As a teen my mom would pick me apart and try competitively dieting with me: “Whoever loses 5 pounds first wins a PRIZE!” but I hated her and thought all her ideas were stupid, so I directed my anger back at her instead of internalizing it. Maybe not the healthiest scenario, but it really did help me escape a lot of self-hatred.

In my 20s I worked as a fit model for designers - kind of a living mannequin. My only job requirement was to stay exactly the same size: a “perfect 2X”. I’d go to fittings and hear people say things like “well, she has a belly… so that’s good.” And then they’d hire me for $125 an hour to stand in one spot. How could I hate my body or try to change it when it was literally keeping a roof over my head?

My body’s always felt like a tool for me to use. It’s a vehicle to get me where I want to go. I think the insidious belief is that it somehow keeps me from being loved. That someone who claims to be attracted to me is either lying or pathological. If they’re not playing a joke on me, it must be that there’s something wrong with them.

I’ve never been ashamed of the way I look, but there was definitely a defensiveness in the way I presented myself - like “Take a look everybody! Get your eyes full. I’m your WORST NIGHTMARE and I’m still kicking.” Today I think my challenge is to be vulnerable. To let people see me and allow myself to be loved - instead of permanently protected by not giving a shit.

Today, there are so many places to buy sexy clothing in my size and there are so many people with bodies like mine on social media, it’s become easier to recognize that fat bodies are beautiful. Not just normal, not just useful, but to be desired. But it’s hard to be hopeful. You can’t control anyone else and it’s really scary to admit that you want or need things from them.

As far as being an actor- I can only think of one time that someone I respect ever told me (to my face anyway) that my body was unacceptable. When I was 22, a college professor said kind of cavalierly that I was very talented, but I’d have an easier time in my career if I lost some weight. I dismissed the idea pretty much immediately because I’d been fortunate to discover fat acceptance a few years before that, but if I’m honest- there’s a good chance that he was right.

It’s impossible to know what my career would or would not have looked like if my body looked differently, but I think it’s likely that I would have tried harder to get paid work much earlier. I spun my wheels for nearly 10 years doing free theater in Los Angeles before ever really trying to get an agent or to get film or TV work. I didn’t see anyone who looked like me working so I assumed it would be pointless to even try. I think if I were thinner, I might have felt entitled to the opportunities that my friends and classmates were getting. Instead, I saw it as just the way things worked: the cute, petite girls get to star in shows. Girls like me play mothers, grandmothers, and support staff.

I heard things like “You’re too fat to be pretty, and too pretty to be fat!” There wasn’t yet a space for pretty AND fat so I felt my only option was to create work for myself. I got really into solo performance and wrote a one woman show that I took to festivals across the US. I turned one of my monologues into a video that went viral on YouTube when the site was just one year old. 2M views is nothing today, but at the time I was written up in newspapers and flown to NYC to be on the Morning Show. (And! One of the people who watched that YouTube video in 2007 was Sarai Walker, who went on to write a novel called Dietland that got turned into a TV show that I got to star in 10 years later!).

I feel so blessed to be able to audition for so many different things today. I feel like my reps really understand me and believe in me and they work so hard to get me seen. I feel really proud of the work I get to do, but every time I don’t get cast, there’s always a little voice that says “BUT WHY?! Is it because they couldn’t imagine a fat person in that role? Is it because I’m too big to fit here?”

Someone gave me a kind of backhanded compliment after Dietland started airing. They said: “She’s so talented. She would have been a big star way before now if it wasn’t for her size.” Maybe they meant I should have gotten thinner sooner, but I took it to mean that the world needed to change before a body like mine could be given a starring role.

That said, I think I’ve always had the essence of a 35-40 year old woman. Literally from the time I was 13 years old, I have never once played a character younger than 30. Maybe I had to get old enough to be believed as the person I am.