I wish fat girls were taught that they deserve kindness, decency, respect and affection just as much as non-fat girls do. We’re taught that we’re just lucky to have someone interested in us and we should be grateful for the attention. We’re taught to let so much slide.

‘they’re clearly flirting with other people? It’s fine! They’re with you when they could do so much better.’

‘they’re not making your relationship ‘public’? It’s fine! They’re with you when they couldn’t be, right?’

‘they’re rude to you? It’s fine, at least you have someone.’

It took years of being with men who didn’t feel any remorse when they hurt me to realise that my humanness, my personhood, was entirely divorced from my fat. All this, just because I was told even hurt is better than the curse of being the Lonely Fat Girl.

The incredible pressure to be validated by someone else’s- especially a man’s- companionship that women are forced to live with is multiplied when you’re a fat woman because you’re not just alone. You’re undesirable. You’re unworthy. You’re dirty.

And so you keep hurtling from callous person to callous person, learning how to misunderstand, often on purpose, their willingness to hurt you as their willingness to tolerate you and your awful, ugly, unlovable fat. You relish the cruelty because it’s _something_.

You learn how to lie to urself. You learn how to cherish the slivers of feeling wanted. You cling to the spectres of affection and the crumbs of desire. You tell yourself that if you can someone take up less space in a relationship, you can offset the space you take in the world.

And because you’re scared of being the Lonely Fat Girl, you convince yourself that you’re the chill girl. You’re impervious to hurt, to cruelty, to pain. You’re made up of sass and tolerance and patience. You are difficult to love, so you’re okay not being a priority. It’s fine.

You tell yourself this is all fine. You are not delicate, you are not fragile. Your hips and ass and jiggly, wobbly stomach are all a part of the armour. You don’t need to be protected, because you can survive anything at all.

You tell yourself this because you know no one will make space for vulnerability. You tell yourself this because your emotions, apparently, are coated in a layer of fat and that allows people to be rough with them. You’re always fine, because you know there’s no other way to be.

And you let this cycle continue because something is better than nothing and fairytales and joyous, giddy love and sunsets in someone’s arms aren’t for girls like you. You’re not someone to be distilled into poetry. You’re someone to be tolerate despite your fat.

You’re told that you’re lucky to escape the curse of the Lonely Fat Girl. You’re special because the person you try so hard to love doesn’t leave you. You’re ungrateful for wanting to feel like anything more than an obligation. A chore. A dull, uninspiring chore to plough through

You’re told to make space in your vocabulary for words like ‘compromise’ and ‘settle’ and ‘adjust’ and ‘at least he doesn’t hate you’ and ‘at least he’s not angry’ and ‘at least he’s there’. They take up the space words like ‘love’ and ‘grand’ and ‘glee’ and ‘safety’ once filled.

I wish fat girls like me didn’t have to live with hurt because we simply never knew or saw anything else. I wish we weren’t taught to constantly settle for the bare fucking minimum. It broke me and I’m still gathering the pieces it left me in.