For every doctoral student, living within the liminal space of approval from the human ethics committee before one can commence the next stage of the research process can be an uneasy time. For me, this time was not a straightforward one. My human ethics application was not approved initially, not only on the grounds of technical issues but also with some confronting words that questioned the merit of my research topic. What I am studying is life from the perspective of fat women. This perspective did not align with a narrow, bio-medical perspective of obesity that some members of the ethics committee clearly supported. Within this chapter, I journal the vulnerabilities of my passage and how I became enabled to move forwards with my research.

You can’t let people delegate to you what you should do when it’s coming from way in here, you know? … I wouldn’t let anybody influence me into thinking I was doing the wrong thing by singing about death, hell, and drugs.
—Cash, 2003, as cited in Adamopoulou (2011)