“I just realized that Sara* is here.” my best friend Anna whispers to me over the hiss and crackle emanating from my office crush’s attempts to start a bonfire in the light rain. “That’s not Sara, not all fat people are the same” I shoot back. It’s true that Anna has only one working eye (20/800 vision, to be precise) and that more often than not she forgets to put in the glass contact that corrects this. It’s also true that it was not especially bright around the fire, even though my aforementioned newly acquired office crush was trying her hardest to fan its flames. All we could see of this girl across the budding campfire from us was her outline, which took up her entire camping chair. “You have to admit, she sounds just like Sara. Like, her yelling about her apartment complex is totally something that she would do” Anna says defensively to which I have to concede that yes, it’s true, this is something that Sara would, in fact, do and that we historically would roll our combined three working eyes at.
I’m not mad at Anna. I understand an honest mistake when I hear one. The reason that this stuck with me was not Anna’s faux pas but the fact that this girl really did remind me of Sara, which in turn made me think about myself.
I have the kind of body that lets me sneak into social spaces that might be closed off to someone less charming than I and that definitely would be to someone larger than I. This is to say that I have crossed the fat girl picket line and by virtue of doing so have literally no idea what my body looks like compared to most of the world, only in relation to my white athlete friends. While it is delicious to relish the social position achieved by virtue of my shining personality and not by virtue of my body (something that I can’t say is true for everyone at this college), it’s also lonely and takes a lot of hard work. I’ve only recently begun to examine how this has happened and the ways that it has come to shape the way that I exist in the world.
Last weekend my girlfriend and I (yes I can have a girlfriend and an office crush to keep me on my toes to get me through the day) had a conversation about the coping mechanisms that we’ve adopted to guide us through new social situations where we will meet strangers, where we will surely be perceived. My girlfriend’s response is to clam up: concede to the fact that people will always have an opinion of her but that the best way of controlling this is to not do or say anything that might be fodder for judgement. Mine is the opposite. When I am in a room full of people that I don’t know, I try to manage what people think of me by putting my wittiest, silliest flat foot forward. Unlike their assumptions from the silence of my thin and beautiful girlfriend, I know that people will not presume that I am “cool” unless I prove it to them first. I know this to be true because I have heard my skinny friends talk about themselves and others from my privileged position on their side of the picket line: in a friend’s semi-sarcastic quip about not wanting to have kids because they don’t want to pass on the family gene of “obesity,” in Emma describing a pack of sophomores as terrifyingly cool because of the thinness that they wear like a uniform, in the way that certain people are heralded as “style icons” for their ability to “pull off” low waisted jeans, in Anna’s mistake.
This brings us back to the girl at the bonfire whose tales of the epic highs and lows of almost (but not actually) signing a lease in a specific building complex reverberated throughout the backyard in which we were sitting. I realized that this girl and Sara actually did share more in common than their size, but that their personalities – much like my own – are inseparable from that fact. I started to think about all of the fat people in my life and the ways that we have adapted to the social climate around us. I think about the boisterous Sara and her foil at the bonfire; about the warm, irresistible magnetism of my friend Alex; about the statement earring collection of the person in my class; about the way that I turn on like a light switch when introduced to new people. I think that a lot of us have concluded that if we’re going to take up space, we might as well claim it: turn societally mandated self-awareness into a power that helps people breathe in our shared humanity between peals of laughter.
But these are just the people that I know, the people that I have noticed because they’re like me (and isn’t that what our brains are always looking for?) I know that not everyone has the energy or desire to try to construct a digestible self-image all of the time, let alone the time or money to assemble a wardrobe that rivals those of our thin friends who can walk into any thrift store and leave with a pair of pants. These people deserve and need friendship too. In the same way that my girlfriend’s silence is often interpreted as her being “too cool,” fat people deserve the benefit of the doubt that thinness allows.
As much as I love being told “you’re so right I can’t believe I never thought about that”, it concerns me how often I have to be the one that, in conversations with friends, pulls back the curtain of mystique to reveal that the objects of their ire or affections are not that hot or interesting or stylish, they’re just skinny. I’ve always maintained that skinny people are on the whole not especially interesting because more often than not they don’t have to be to be liked. I almost resent the thankfulness that I am usually met with, as if I am the first person to ever point this out to them and that they have never thought critically about the issue before. I understand that part of privilege is that people are allowed to ignore something that is not part of their identity, but as college students who are forced to constantly engage in social interaction, how can people not stop to unpack their own fatphobia? I can only hope that, like in the adage, I am teaching my friends to fish, that in the future they will be able to recognize their biases for what they are.
At this time, when people are returning to campus larger (and therefore sexier) than ever after one of the most difficult years of our short lifetimes, I am asking for some recognition for all of the effort that it takes to exist in a body like mine at this school. While I can’t ask for everyone to instantly unlearn a lifetime of fatphobia, I am asking for a little bit of grace for the ways that people like me have figured out how to be part of the social scene, even if that way might not be your cup of tea. I promise that you will feel so much better when you let go of the fatphobia that the world dictates you hold onto.
Tell your fat friends that they rule! That they look cute and are sexy and that you’ll still love them if they let their guard down! And if you don’t have any fat friends you’re missing out because, even if it’s all a coping mechanism, for better or for worse, we’re really fun to be around.
*All names changed for anonymity
