This is a story about how my fatkini completely changed my life.
I grew up surrounded by water. I had a pool in my backyard, Lake Huron down the street, and weekly swimming lessons throughout my childhood. I was always a total fish–the first one in the water and the last one out. Coldwater could not deter me, nor could cloudy skies. If I was in the water, I would be happy.
Everything changed when I hit the fifth grade and started to realize that girls who looked like me were not supposed to swim. Swimming was OK for girls who were skinny, and the rest of us were supposed to come up with one million and one reasons why we couldn’t–a period, a pain, a fear of open water, whatever. In the fifth grade, I had none of those things, so I gave other excuses: I didn’t want to get my hair wet, I forgot my bathing suit, it was too cold to swim.
After a few years of self-imposed exile from the water, I’d had enough. I missed swimming, goddammit, and I wasn’t going to waste one more minute of my life sitting on the edge of the pool with my feet dangling in the water and my hands gripping the cement. I concluded that I would need to buy a cover-up. If I wore something over my suit, I could swim without subjecting anyone to the sight of my body. It seemed like the perfect solution.
So for well over a decade, I covered up. I wore T-shirts that hung down to my knees and nearly drowned me in the water. I wore extra-long tank tops that did the same. I wore shorts and beach dresses and mesh and linen and all manner of strange things to keep my body hidden.
And I was swimming, but I was miserable. Wearing a cover-up in the water is not conducive to all of the things that I wanted to do: laps, hand-stands, and Marco Polo. Instead, I floated around my pool in an inner tube and stood completely still in the lake. It was boring, certainly, but I was back in the water, and I tried to make myself believe that was enough.
Things began to change when a coworker told me about Gabi Gregg, the woman behind the amazing style blog Gabifresh. Gabi’s fashion philosophy is to wear whatever the fuck she wants to, regardless of whether it’s considered “flattering” on her plus-size body. She takes risks with her style, eschews all of the “rules,” and encourages other women to do the same.
I began to seek out more style blogs written by plus-size women, which led me to people I consider pioneers: Nicolette Mason, Nadia Aboulhosn, Karen Ward, Karyn Johnson, Natalie Drue, supermodel Ashley Graham, and Tess Holliday (whose #EffYourBeautyStandards online movement is the best thing that’s ever happened to the Internet).
The more I read their blogs and studied their Instagram accounts, the more I began to realize that I had been selling myself short in a big way. These women all wore bathing suits, and nothing bad happened. Nobody died, and nobody freaked out (except for a few vitriolic nut jobs on Instagram, but they don’t count).
After seeing Gabi’s beautiful fatkini* collection for SwimSexy, I knew what I needed to do: I needed to buy a fatkini. I needed to invest in a bathing suit that would fit me properly and make me feel good. In the past, I bought cheap, ill-fitting, and sometimes downright ugly suits because spending money on something that no one was going to see seemed ridiculous to me. I needed to get out of that mindset–I had to be willing to spend whatever it took to make me feel confident and comfortable in the water.
After checking out the selection of fatkinis online, I finally found the pieces I wanted. The top was bright red with cut-outs in the back, and the bottoms were high-waisted and black. Because the suit isn’t available online anymore, you’ll just have to check out this picture of me wearing it instead:
My fatkini cost around $100, which is way more money than I’m used to spending on a bathing suit, but trust me when I say that it was worth every penny.
At the risk of sounding super over the top, finding a bathing suit I love and feel good in has changed my life. I’ve been swimming dozens of times since buying it, and the thought of covering myself up hasn’t even crossed my mind. I tossed all of the shirts and dresses that I used to wear as cover-ups because I had no intention of ever putting any of them on my body again.
I’m sure that not everyone I come into contact with is thrilled to see a fat girl in a bikini, but I couldn’t care less–I’m thrilled to see myself in one, and that’s what matters to me. I feel good at the pool, and I feel good at the beach. I can swim laps, unencumbered by unnecessary fabric. I can walk into the lake without tugging at a T-shirt or hiking up a dress.
And that’s exactly what I did this past week while on vacation in Ontario’s beautiful Muskoka region. I dropped my towel on the sand and walked straight into the water. Nothing happened–nobody died, nobody freaked out–and I was free.
*A fatkini is a bikini for fat girls.
Written by Kristyn Filip.
