POV: It’s the mid-to-late 2000’s and you’re entering your teenage years. Hormones are at their highest, and your perspective on love is based off of teen-romance movies and TV shows where everything almost works out for the girl who crushes on the guy… because he is also crushing on her back.
But what you don’t realize is that you’re an overweight teenager, and most (if not all) of these movies and TV shows are about people who are attractive to society standards. The fat girl or guy was always the sidekick, the best friend, the one who didn’t need a man or woman because media could not (and would not) depict a fat person falling in love with someone that didn’t screw them over or pity them as a joke.
So, you grow up thinking that no one can possibly like you for how you look or if they do like you, only like you because it’s some bet or prank they are playing; you know, like they do in those movies. All the boys you ever liked were always into skinny girls, or “socially acceptable plus-size” girls; if you had a hanging stomach and somewhat of a double chin, you did not qualify to be liked by other people in a romantic aspect.
As you get older, you learn that there are people that do like bigger girls; weight was just a number on a scale to some people and truly liked people for who they were as people on the inside. But now it’s too late; you grew up in the generation that taught us that fat people were incapable of finding love without their crush having interior motives, or having fetishes of being with a fat person. Of course, there is always a side of this insecurity with every body type, but for the sake of my experience, this is about what dating and love and relationships look like from a fat girl’s perspective.
Even when you found someone who loves your body for what it is and even when you start accepting yourself in the body you carry, you still feel this desire to have a body that looks socially acceptable. You wanted to know how it felt like to casually go out shopping in a store and find something “plus sized” that actually fits your plus-sized body. You wanted to know how it felt to follow the trends but literally couldn’t because everything that was your size was either out of style or meant for middle-aged women. At the end of the day, you just wanted to feel like your body was accepted, desired, and seen.
I was over 300 pounds going into gastric bypass surgery back in 2021 and did it to feel physically better. Of course, losing weight made me feel better mentally too, but as the months (and years) passed by, I began to question if the body I had now was even “good enough”. For awhile, I experienced some sort of body dysmorphia and not completely feeling like my body was even my own to claim and accept. In some instances, I began to compare my body now and the body I once has, comparing the differences in it.
“When you were bigger, you had a bigger butt and bigger boobs; something that you were once confident about. Now, your body sags from the excess skin, you’re flat-chested, and your butt is small.”
Such great self-love talk, huh?
I had to learn (and accept) that as a society, we aren’t ever going to feel like we’re good enough, yet alone enough. Growing up in the generation where being super skinny was in and celebrities were constantly encouraging viewers to join weight loss programs, it’s hard to feel like we have our place in society, even if it has more of a progressive perspective. Also, as a person who’s been fat her entire life, its hard to unlearn these ideologies about appearance and vanity.
So, the only thing you can do is fake it until you make it.
“Faking it Until You Make It” has always been one of those things that you were told to do in order to get to places you wanted to be. It didn’t mean that you had to fake who you were and the authenticity you have; you simply needed to act like you have the confidence to take on the tasks at hand. For example, your job. Maybe you lack the social skills to work in retail, but to get through the day meant you had to put on your “retail” voice and use the knowledge you have about your job to successfully interact with customers. In society, you have to act like you have the confidence in your style, personality, and appearance in order to feel accepted within society’s standards. You have to act like you are the shit, and you have to tell yourself that there is no one else just like you in the universe because you have style, personality and an appearance that is uniquely yours. Once you feel like you are bending the standards society has set, you stop caring about what other people think of you and you start to not engage in negative self-talk as much as you used to.
This mindset doesn’t come easy, and there are still days that I feel like I was “prettier” when I was bigger. Being one thing for the majority of your life, it’s hard to not compare the last couple of years where I lost all this weight and be mentally confident in my image. This mindset challenged the things I believed me and the type of behaviors I indulged in because of my mental health; I legit had to treat my toxic traits like an external person, handling it the way I would with external beings. That’s a different story for a different day.
POV: You’re now in your 30’s, learning to love yourself in the ways you should have when you were younger, and because of that, you make it your life’s mission to nurture the various young versions of yourself, because you know that all versions of you deserve to have felt loved even when society told you you were not worthy of it.
Letters From Liz. 