The Fat Game

I was in second grade when I first remember feeling…fat. I felt awkward and bulky around the other girls. I was a chubby kid, definitely, but at age seven I thought that I was the fattest girl in Mrs. Slavin’s class. It had started when Meghan said that my cheeks were fatter than hers and that it wasn’t pretty. Suddenly, nothing about me was right. My hair was too dark, my eyes too brown, my fingers to stubby. And because Meghan, my best friend, was the all-knowing girl who told me what was pretty and what wasn’t, she was the standard I measured myself against. I wanted desperately to look like her…And it wasn’t that she was thin, really, it was that she didn’t look like me.

Part of me is really surprised that I never developed an eating disorder, but for me, it wasn’t about the weight; it was about knowing that I wasn’t supposed to like myself just the way I was. I don’t know. I guess part of me always wanted to be model thin, and still does. All throughout high school my friends and I played this game, the “I’m-fatter-than-you-are” game where one person would complain about their hips and another would reply, “What are you talking about? Your hips are nowhere near fat! But look at my arm flab,” and the game would continue until the bell rang and we had to go to our next class. This was really a never-ending game that picked up on the bus home and continued when we hung out after school. And no matter how many times your friends promised you were pretty, you never felt satisfied…and this need for reassurance became like an alcoholism of sorts. I drank up their comments, but the buzz wasn’t there, that good feeling I used to get when someone mentioned that they liked my shirt or that my hair looked good was gone, like my compliment tolerance was so high that just one wasn’t going to do it.

And when I was complimented, I rarely believed it because my friends poured compliments out like they needed to relieve themselves of a minimum number of niceties each day. Boys hated the arguments because it made their jobs a lot harder. When a boy DID compliment me, I was actually uncomfortable accepting it because I knew that if I disagreed, the poor boy would argue back and then it would continue back and forth for a while. The stronger he argued, the more truthful he was and the more likely I was to possibly accept the reality of his statement.

I wasn’t even aware of how bad this addiction had become until college when James, my friend, finally said to me, “Why are you arguing?” and I had to stop and think about it. I had no response, so I just said, “I don’t know. Thanks.” And that was the first time I accepted a compliment in over ten years.