My yearning for beauty didn’t only set back my personal health and romantic relationships, but my ability to socialize in general. My best friend and I still joke about how much we hated each other through the entirety of our undergrads, simply because she was thin, pretty, and popular, and I was the intimidating nerd. Our friendship has almost entirely been long-distance, and I wonder how much more of her company I could have enjoyed if social conditioning hadn’t fundamentally posited us as enemies. I can think of no one else who’s more like me in every aspect of their persona, except we spent three good years slagging each other off because she was the pretty girl and I was the brainy one. Instead of friendship and love, we prioritized the fake binary of “beauty versus brains,” and so we lost out on each other.

When I dropped out of grad school after a week, I’d already decided to leave India and head for the bright lights of London, where I could finally shine like an exotic beacon. I put my life on hold till that moment, when I would step out of the chrysalis of the plane at Heathrow and reset. My MA could wait till then, finding a job, making friends, dating—everything I’d envisioned as part of my complete, fulfilled life could stay on hold until I was ready, until I was beautiful.

In the end, it took me two years of limbo before I scrounged up enough courage to pack my bags and get on the plane. Two years of hiding in an attic room as I unlearned everything I knew about myself to find my “beauty.” I had to learn to see myself as though I were a stranger to my body. My phone was mostly filled with photos of me that my ex took, from all sorts of angles and in all sorts of poses, especially those I seldom had the chance to see myself in. It felt like looking at a stranger—a stranger I’d been so cruel to, and for so long. In all the time I’d been trying to better and perfect myself, I’d never really made an effort to like or even know myself very well. I’d simply taken on the assumptions made about me and fatties like me, and internalized them as hard, irrefutable truths. I had to start by looking at myself with compassion, talking about myself with compassion, and eventually find a compassionate space in my mind where I could create a dialogue without berating myself. I wonder how much more I could have done if I hadn’t spent so long just waiting. How much more I could have accomplished in college alone if I hadn’t shied away from putting myself forward every time there was a call for papers, a theater audition, or a workshop. It was never my academic performance that held me back, it was the thought of being visible in front of an audience, the scrutinizing gaze that would tear apart my greasy hair, my heft and bulk that I hid under baggy blacks, and my acne-scarred face: my performance of thought and ability that would be steamrolled under my failure to perform beauty.

In all my “wisdom” now, I speak of rejecting beauty—but being considered beautiful was the doorway out of those years of limbo and into freedom. Being able to see myself as beautiful gave me the impetus to take charge of my life and proceed to action. What I actually lacked was confidence, but it was those three words—You Are Beautiful—that unshackled my self-esteem and gave me the strength to move ahead. Such is the power we place in beauty: All else in a woman’s life is invalid if this one aspect remains unfulfilled or underperformed. I am firmly settled in my femme identity now, but at my lowest point in my early 20s, even my femaleness was a source of shame since I failed so badly at its traditional performance. Performing beauty, performing femininity, and performing femalehood were inextricably linked in my head, and I was hopeless at all of them. I slouched in the baggiest clothes I could find, not just to hide my fat but whatever I could of my boobs and my waist. I scrimped back my hair and avoided all eye contact in my shame at failing traditional expectations of femininity (which I read as the only way of being female in my despair.) Womanhood, I told myself, was something I had to earn through beauty, and my claim to be a person could be channeled through it, much later. I wanted to will myself into invisibility, not a woman, not a person, just an emptiness winking out of all existence. I spent a year seeing myself as a detached agender intelligence, wishing away my body and all else that came with it, not out of a sense of fulfillment, but of failure. That’s how deeply beauty cut me. Before I could accept my body, I had to build myself from ground up, seeing myself first a person who could be accepted among fellow humans, and then as woman, who could inhabit a female bodily space without apologizing for it.

My discovery of my own beauty happened through the then-fledgling internet fatshion community, mostly on the Livejournal group Fatshionista, on which women with body types like mine, plus so many other shapes, posted pictures of themselves looking cute in their outfits. The year was 2007 and I was 21, overwhelmed by my fatness, with no hope of ever finding social acceptance. Then Fatshionista happened, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that my life was changed forever.

It wasn’t just about the clothes. In its infancy, this virtual circle of fat fashion was inextricably conjoined with fat activism. Our demand for fashionable clothes in plus sizes was part of a greater claim: our claim to humanity. The discourse was centered around personhood—of access to, and compassion within, healthcare, of how we were dehumanized as “headless fatties” (a term coined by the fat activist Charlotte Cooper for the sort of imagery commonly used to illustrate articles on obesity), and the ceaseless onslaught of often-unsafe diet plans that we had to weather under the guise of “good health.” There was an alarming universality to the experiences discussed in that community: Most people spoke of being put on restrictive diets as children, mocked as teenagers, harassed by healthcare professionals to lose weight, and being denied treatment when we didn’t. We talked about how we ate secretly, in shame, how friends and family kept an ever-watchful eye on the food we dared put on our plates, the unceasing verbal harassment that greeted us every time we stepped out of our front doors or made ourselves visible on the internet, and the endless barrage of microaggressions we had to navigate our way through all day, every day.