To the first person who called me fat,
As a child, I was chubby. Not big boned, not obese, just chubby. I attributed this to having “baby fat” and liking sugary cereals just a little too much, but that’s beside the point. I was happy with my body as a kid; I mean, who isn’t? I had better things to worry about than my weight. I would have much rather devote my time to playing outside with my friends and adding to my “rock” collection (which turned out to be mostly gravel). You probably don’t care about any of this, but the point is that I didn’t care if I was a little chubby. This was back in the days of wearing the same stained pony t-shirt until my mom forced it off of me and waking up at 8 a.m. to watch cartoons. I was blissfully unaware of the fact that I had a little extra fat on my young hips and on my belly, but I didn’t care.
All that changed when you came into my life, when you raised your eyebrows at my adolescent frame and whispered the word that has haunted my brain and resounds in my ears every time I look in the mirror: “Fat.”
I wish I could say that I brushed off your judgment after this, that I held my head high and didn’t listen to comments from people who didn’t know me or my life. As you could’ve guessed, that wasn’t the case. After you called me fat, everything changed. I second guessed everything I ate and began to notice that I didn’t look like my skinny, lean friends–where they had muscle and flat tummies, I had extra skin and a bit of a belly. They wore bikinis on our trips to pools or the beach, while I covered up my one piece and my embarrassment with an oversized t-shirt.
I know the fact that I’m a little bigger isn’t your fault. It’s no one’s fault, really. What I do want to blame you for is making me realize that I was “fat” at a much younger age than I should’ve. No one had ever used that word with me before–they had beat around the bush, but hadn’t said the most self-deprecating word in the English language.
Because of you, I started hating my body so much earlier than I should have–and you made me hate myself because of it. I went from playing outside until dark and not caring about anything, to carefully thinking about the calorie count of food and wondering if I should eat at all. This change happened when I wasn’t even a teenager, before the expected years of angst and acne and lamenting everything that wasn’t exactly right.
I have learned to love my body, extra fat and all. I’m still learning, and there are definitely some days where I look in the mirror and hate what I see. But what living in your shadow has taught me is that I need to be in control of how I feel about my body–nobody else’s opinion matters but my own. If I’m happy with how I look, curves and cellulite and all, that’s what matters. Your superficial judgment of my adolescent body has mattered to me for too long, and it’s time for that to stop.
Thank you for teaching me to hate my body, so that I could teach myself to love myself. You’ve impacted me much more than you thought you did.
Sincerely,
The chubby ten-year-old