The Gifts of Fatness

I know how hard it is to walk through the world in a fat body, but you are stronger for it

Photo by Mari Pa on Unsplash

I was 19 years old the first time someone told me I was going to die.

I was at a work event, and I was dishing up catering, welcoming attendees who made their way through the line. An older man, well dressed, smiled as he accepted the plate of food I handed him. In the midst of an assembly line job, I was grateful for a kind face and bright eyes, and I smiled back.

“When did you put on all that weight, sweetie?” he asked me. Stunned, I didn’t respond — my face froze, smile turning into a mask of a grimace.

“Was it when your dad left?” he asked. Still, I couldn’t respond. I was reeling, my brain struggling to make sense of what was happening. I had been doing my job — a job I loved, was good at, and was proud of — and then this sharp turn left me woozy and whiplashed. Who was this stranger? Why was he asking me these questions? And why did he stay so unsettlingly friendly while feeling so entitled to draw conclusions about my family, my history, my emotions, all based solely on the shape of my body?

I opened my mouth, but no words came. I wasn’t sure I wanted to respond. My silence didn’t stop him.

“You don’t have to die just to spite him. And you are going to die.”

I stood there, dumbfounded, at once feeling the humiliation that comes with being judged so readily, and a deep, bewildered kind of anger that I had never felt before. I was burning, incinerating myself from the inside out with rage. Still, my body wouldn’t move. I was frozen like some living sculpture, and he was the passerby happily critiquing my performance.

My co-worker stood next to me, her face a wrench of shock, frozen in place, just like mine. After our event, the two of us talked about that stranger for hours. She couldn’t shake him. Neither could I. His specter haunted us both.

In the coming years, I came to realize that behavior like his wasn’t the exception — it was the norm. Something about the simple sight of a fat body called out the worst in strangers, acquaintances, friends, neighbors, colleagues — nearly everyone. I came to learn that that stranger wasn’t a…