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When you grow up being the fattest person in most rooms you're in, you quickly learn how disconnected you are from everyone. As much as people in the world love to preach their tolerance for fat people, when you experience the lack of it firsthand, you learn to set your expectations beyond low, if setting any at all.
The idea that the weight on my body was baby fat was pushed until I turned 18, at which point I was 200 pounds. I'm 22 now, fluctuating at 230. At some point in my life, I accepted what I looked like, and accepted that for as long as I lived, I will be the fattest person in my friend groups. And that's okay. Yet, I can't help but sit here and feel as though, while I'm learning to be okay with how I look and who I am, my friends never will.
Something I've noticed a lot lately is that far too many of my friends hold fatphobic tendencies but don't realize it. And because they don't realize it, they vocalize their thoughts and feelings in front of me, their only fat friend. This isn't an attempt to win the oppression Olympics by any means, and I understand how trivial these problems I face are, yet, I feel as though I'm entitled to my feelings of hurt. Now, ironically, while I'm aware that if my friends ever do see this and read it, they might feel targeted and hurt, I can't bring myself to feel apologetic for reaching this breaking point and needing to vent about it. And above all else, this is my website, so I can say and do whatever I want here.
I suppose my friends mean well, there doesn't seem to be an air of malice when they say the things they do... so it makes little sense that I get so upset about it. I don't blame them either, it's not their fault... thinness being equated to fitness has been something that was pushed since I was a child, surely it was the same for them. They grew up skinny as well, so I can't blame them for not knowing what it's like to be fat. What does hurt, though, is how fucking terrified they are to ever be fat, now or in the future. Why is that? What is so scary and wrong about looking like me? Perhaps it's incredibly selfish and self-centered of me to think that their fears are centered around my body type and me specifically, but how am I not to feel targetted, if you will, when they express so clearly what a travesty it would be to look like me? Is it okay for me to look the way I do because I've looked this way my entire life? I cannot help but feel as though if I had started thin and gained weight, I would be more of a horror story. And God forbid, if I were to, by some medical miracle, drop the weight I have (which I have no intention of doing), I would be their greatest success story.
There's something so isolating about being the only fat friend, too. This doesn't apply to my current friend groups as a new experience, but rather one that I've experienced my entire life, and will forever live with. I have, still do, and will forever miss out on the sharing of clothing, the experiences of shopping together and taking cute dressing room photos. There is no room for me to develop my own personal style because style does not exist for fat people. While my friends have begun to come into themselves and know where to go to curate their closets, I am forced to hope and pray that whatever exists in the plus size section isn't floral, cold-shouldered or animal print. I've given up trying to develop a personal experience for myself looks-wise, hiding myself from the world in every way possible. I'm no idiot, so I do know that not everyone is looking at me at all times, but it comes full circle, truly. They don't need to analyze everyone around them as a defense mechanism. Cringe is dead until its a fat person. Cringe is dead until it's me.
When it comes to my friends, I can't ask them to gain weight to understand how I feel. What a horrid person I would be to force them to be uncomfortable. How wrong I would be to make them feel as I do. Yet, I find myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, as I can't tell them anything either. I'm doomed to hate myself in silence, dodging fatphobic comments like bullets in a war where I'm the only soldier on the battlefield. Truer words have never been spoken when uttering the phrase, "Damned if I do, damned if I don't."
Fatphobia tells us that we have to get small at all costs. It doesn't care how many diets, medical programs, exercise regimens we've tried. It doesn't care what we eat, how much we exercise, or even who we are. It insists on explanations for the size of our bodies, and none are good enough. Fatphobia demands that getting thin is our sole focus; that our bodies will never be small enough; that we sacrifice everything at the altar of weight loss.
If you are thin, this is disordered thinking. If you are fat, this is demanded of you. It is the price of living in the world with a fat body.
There's not a point to this, really. This isn't a plea. I stopped begging long ago. What good does it do to drop to my knees and pray to Gods I'm not entirely sure exist just so that my friends could see me as more than a cautionary tale? There's no point in trying to change people who have no intention of changing. I can't ask my friends to watch their mouths, to go from one thought process to another. Yet, all I could ever want in theis world is to be loved by my friends as I am, not as their token fat friend who sits by and smiles when they wish they were dead because they look slightly bigger than their usual tiny selves.