My Life as a Fat Girl

I have lived my life as a Fat Girl. This has only recently begun to strike me as amusing.

At points, it's made sense. I did a stint of 2 years (give or take) at about 80 pounds more than I weigh now. That's not thin. That's not 'overweight'. That's fucking FAT. But after that was up, I returned to my previous weight (give or take). The super-behemoth-lard-butt stage was over. And I won't ever be there again. It takes a special sort of misery to make a person gain that kind of weight in so short a time, and I'll never allow myself to be that miserable again.

But, I digress. I first began to define myself as a Fat Girl in grade school. I was the girl who grew before all the rest; who grew the breasts and the hips and shot up in height and began to look more woman and less girl far sooner than some did. The boys did NOT grow then. So, they were drawn to the itty-bitty petite girls (there were 2 of them in my little parochial school class--they were the ones who "got" all the boys). We won't get into my 10-year gawky geeky stage. That's fodder for another blog entirely.

So, here I was, wearing a bra in the third grade. Towering over the boys in the seventh and eighth grades, and squeezing my C (or more!) cup breasts into little girl bras that just didn't do the trick. I didn't look the way I was "supposed" to. The boys didn't like me. I was a Fat Girl, clearly.

Mom always said that the boys would grow up and be drawn to me one day. And hell, the older ones were. Brandy and I were just reminiscing this past weekend about how grown men would hit on us in our Catholic School uniforms. Or our regular clothes. They never believed we were 12, 13, 16....

But again, I digress. So after grade school, there was high school. I remember very clearly these two teenie freshmen boys in my homeroom calling me "fat". It was just them, no one else did. Whenever I mentioned I was trying to lose weight, I was hit with a barrage of "Why?!?"'s and "You don't NEED to!"'s. I was about 5'9" then. I weighed about 135 pounds. I was a Fat Girl. The 5'1", 98-pound boys had said so.

And I've lived my life that way. Doctors have never told me to lose weight. If I ask about it, they shrug and say "maybe you could stand to lose 15 or 20 pounds". I look at them strangely. Can't they see that I'm obese? Morbidly obese? In need of a Wal-Mart cart to get around obese?

I've lived my life that way. Plagued by eating disorder after eating disorder; subsisting on diet coke and pretzels, and never, ever thin enough. Running every day, in great shape, hit on constantly by men...not thin enough.

I realized the other day that I will never be thin enough. So I decided to stop trying. I'm sick of it. I've wasted my life trying to hide my thighs, my stomach, my butt from people who would probably rather have focused on the person inside the fleshy shell. I've given up things I've loved, I've pushed away people who loved me. All because I wasn't thin enough. All because I was a Fat Girl.

Well, I'm over it. Officially over it. Sure, I could stand to lose 15 or 20 pounds. And I probably will. Whatever. Do you think I'm Fat? A Fat Girl? Well, fuck you.

You're not worthy of sharing my oxygen. :)