The World, Opened Up

The fear of traveling in my body made the world seem small, until I did it anyway

Roxane Gay
ZORA
Published in
9 min readJul 2, 2020

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Rear view of a fat Black woman sitting on a towel on the beach, watching the ocean.
Photo: MesquitaFMS/iStock/Getty Images Plus

I’m a workaholic. Until recently, I had never taken a vacation as an adult. During graduate school and the first few years of teaching, I couldn’t afford a vacation. I had no one to go on a vacation with. And then it seemed like an unnecessary extravagance when there was so much work to do…

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Roxane Gay
ZORA
Writer for

I write. I want a tiny baby elephant. If you clap, I clap back. Books.: Ayiti, Untamed State, Bad Feminist. Difficult Women, World of Wakanda 1–5, Hunger.