A strange paradox about being fat is how, at the same time as people can’t seem to see past your fatness, you can also somehow be invisible. For some, your fatness becomes the only thing about you, the only quality you have. My fatness causes adults to laugh or sneer or hurl abuse in the street, or to say horrible depraved things online. Strangers hate my extra flesh so much that they can’t help but regularly inform me about it as I’m tweeting, walking home, standing in a mall, ordering a drink at a bar – or once, entering my own front door.
I can’t remember every one of the numerous public incidents but I do remember the first time it happened. I was a (lonely) 14-year-old waiting for the bus with a bunch of other kids at 8:30am, and men drove past and shouted “WHALE” at me. It was humiliating, it was stupid (I am clearly a land animal), and in my memory it was the sharp beginning of my life in a fatphobic world. It was the beginning of fatphobia fundamentally changing who I was, who I was growing into, planting seeds that would affect me for decades. Shortly after that, I stopped being able to do public speaking, and even now I have to drug myself, my body going into flight mode when I put her in front of a crowd.
