I was seven years old when a few of my first grade classmates giggled and pointed at me, calling me fat. I was nine when I stepped onto the scale at the doctor’s office, and the nurse made a joke about my weight. I was eleven when I forced myself to skip breakfast every day in hopes of dropping a few pounds. I was thirteen when a girl teased that I have bigger breasts than she did. I was fourteen when I refused to take off my shirt at a pool party for fear of eyes being glued to my lumpy physique. I was fifteen when I preferred to wear a sweatshirt with every outfit, regardless of the temperature, because it made me feel less self-conscious about my body. I am sixteen years old, and every single day of my life, I fight a battle of self-love versus self-hate. And unfortunately through most of my lifetime, self-hate won.
I am six feet tall, and I weigh 250 pounds. (And yes, I did in fact subtract 10 pounds for good measure.) I cannot recall a single moment in my elementary or middle school days where I felt skinny, small, or… well… happy with my body. It was difficult growing up surrounded by others who were twice as small as me. Every laugh, every joke, every micro-aggression, and every pound fed the seemingly eternal fire that was my self-hate. Skinny was a word that constantly rang in my head—a word that summarized all of my goals, hopes, and wishes in life. Somehow, I convinced myself that the only way to achieve authentic happiness was to be skinny; that I couldn’t be content with my external figure.
It felt like I was living every day drowning in a swimming pool of self-loathing. For such a long time, I hated myself for my body. When I personified my worth in my head, the first quality that would come to mind was weight. Never intelligence. Never kindness. Never hardworking. Just weight. And I know I’m not alone in my experiences, so I’m not going to throw a bunch of statistics at you; everyone knows that high self-esteem is an extremely underrepresented quality in today’s youth. The purpose of this article is not to determine the resolution to self-hate within the fat community because I don’t know how to fix that. The purpose of this narrative is to help others understand how difficult finding self-love can be for a fat person. I’m hopeful my account can also help anyone else who faces a similar battle understand their journey to self-love because I wish that I had known that others were with me when I was at my lowest.
I’ve grown up in a world that trained me to hate my body for the way it looks. Why? That’s a question I wish I knew the answer to. I’m not going to pretend to know how to prevent the fat-shaming of children because quite frankly, I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t even know if there is a way to prevent it. It has become an unnecessary evil that fills the hallways of every school and seemingly every place, including our own minds. Everyone has the power to convince ourselves that our worth is nonexistent, that we aren’t good enough, that we’re a disappointment to ourselves and our loved ones. Being fat just amplifies those feelings.
Although self-hate ruled my life for awhile, I’ve recently embarked on a journey towards my goal of pure self-love. After discovering and watching Lillian Bustle’s inspiring TedxTalk, “Stripping Away Negative Body Image”, I began to understand how I can become happy in my body. “Society has turned fat into a synonym for ugly. But fat just means fat.” It started to sink in with me that we have stigmatized my body type, especially in modern American culture. We seem to champion ideal exterior physical appearance and shame those who don’t fit into that standard, but after realizing that “fat” is nothing more than an adjective, I began to forget that standard. Subsequently I came across a poem titled “This Is Not Glandular” by Dan O’Neil. The poem proclaims, “I chose this body because other people not liking my body is not a good enough reason for me to change it.” Heralding that path to self-love, this poem is about realizing the greatness in the fat.
After years of agony and despair, I have decided that my weight doesn’t have to define me. Being healthy and fat aren’t mutually exclusive. Being happy and fat aren’t mutually exclusive. Being beautiful and fat are not mutually exclusive. I love myself, and I love my body. Though I experience spurs when I fall back into self-loathing, I quickly remind myself that this is who I am, and I am allowed to love myself.
My experience with finding self-love won’t match everyone’s; mine is simply an example of the thousands upon millions upon billions of journeys that we embark on everyday to find peace within ourselves. We are all capable of finding self-love, trust me; I never thought I would, yet here I am. It’s not about ignoring the “bad” and focusing on the “good”; it’s about realizing that the “bad” was never all that “bad” in the first place. Fat does not have to be a dirty word or a negative quality. If we de-stigmatize the characteristic, we can move towards a more beautiful, happier, and more self-loving society.
