It’s 8 o’clock on a Friday night. You’re getting ready to go to the bars in town with your ride-or-die BFF, and it’s happening. You are feeling absolutely disgusting in everything you try on. You know logically that you’re your own worst critic, but you are feeling…big, which, as we all know, has a derogatory meaning within our fat-phobic society, no matter how much you absolutely hate it and know in your heart that “all bodies are good bodies.” Pssh, what do they know?
She’s no more than a hundred pounds, and you’re, well, not. You’ve struggled with your weight and body image for years, not to mention you have trouble finding your size in some stores (ahem, Forever 21), and you watch as all your skinny friends land guys at the bars, while you’re the lone wolf sipping your gin and tonic in the background. You try to convince yourself it’s just a coincidence, but…
You’re about to cry. You are at your wit’s end. It feels like your toothpick of a friend can look good in anything, and here you are, beating yourself up, convinced you look like a damn beached whale.
You throw your dress that highlights your FUPA (#FatUpperPussyArea) to the floor and let out sounds of exasperation.
“Jesus Christ I am so fat!” you scream at the world.
You go back to your closet to rummage through all your disappointing and tragic options. Then you feel a hand on your shoulder. It’s your favorite human, your best friend in the world, the woman who has seen you at your worst—aka she held your hair back when you got sick in the airport bathroom from drinking too much vodka on the plane ride back from Vegas. You can tell she doesn’t quite know what to say, but then she looks you deeply in the eyes, and those words, those classic words you hate hearing escape from her mouth, never to be erased from your memory again.
“Aww, you’re not fat, you’re beautiful! Don’t say that about yourself!”
Hold. Up. You know you have your own insecurities about your weight (because of fucking society), but you never totally equated fat with ugly. You’re just conditioned to think fat is bad because that’s what we see and hear from literally everyone. Lit-er-a-lly. You want to reclaim the word “fat”, but it’s so hard when all you see in the movies is when the fat character falls in love, everyone else is completely shook that someone so big could even find a significant other.
That being said, when someone complains that they’re fat, it is your friend’s absolute duty to say, “Nah, you’re not fat, and I think you look hot in that dress!” I mean, even if they do think you’re fat, just, you know, shut up for now, because you’re still working on breaking down years of convincing yourself it’s a bad thing. You may think fat is a bad thing, but, like, they can’t. Fine, fine, it’s a double standard, but they’re supposed to let you live in a world of hypocrisy and denial…and help you find a way to embrace your fierce diva self, no matter the number on the scale. Now the only problem is convincing yourself of that phenomenon…
Image: Tenor
