Throwback Thursday: Fat Teenage Girls

From the WW:

When I was fifteen (or something around that), I lived in an area that had three main high schools, and we (meaning my eclectic group of friends) were just starting to make connections with other similar groups at other schools.  For hormonal teenagers, that means not only new friends, but also new dating possibilities.  So it was no surprise that I soon developed a thing for a guy at one of the other schools.

Let me just pause here to say that even though I was more chubby than fat at this point in my life, this was the hardest time of my life in regards to body image.  A lot of fat people will tell you high school sucked for that reason.

Also, when you’re fat in high school is when you’ll face the most discrimination for the hygiene myth we talked about on Monday.  I think I still lucked out with chubster privilege, meaning I wasn’t fat enough to be “fat,” so as far as I knew, I wasn’t targeted for that kind of teasing.

BUT, being any kind of fat in high school is hard when the object of your affections is a heterosexual teenage boy.  Even the fat ones aren’t always open to dating fat girls.  So while I sort of had boyfriends here and there, they never lasted long.

But this guy. I won’t use his name, even though I’m pretty sure there’s no way he’s reading this (we stopped talking about five years ago).  He was everything my fifteenorwhatever-year-old self looked for in a guy.  He had nice hair.  He was tall.  He had pretty eyes.  And he made everyone laugh.  Oh, and we liked the same music.

So what happened?  A mutual friend told me that he had made a joke to some of the other guys about me needing to lose fifty pounds.

Obviously, my fifteenorwhatever-year-old self was devastated.  Fragile fatties don’t need to be hearing that kind of comment.  Thinking about it now, as I’m sitting next to my wonderful, awesome, supportive (yeah, he’s reading this over my shoulder) partner, it just seems so stupid.  I even did a laugh that the BB and I reserve for people when they’re getting into trouble (you know, the laugh you used when your friends were getting yelled at).

I guess that my empowering point here is that high school is awful, and real life is usually so much better*.  I stopped defining my happiness on finding someone, and because that’s generally how it works, I found someone who loves me even though my body has made a lot of changes since we met four years ago.

Make sure you check back tomorrow for Fat Shaming Friday.  I don’t know about the other half of Gribbski, but this half has a lot to talk about.

*At the same time, however, this doesn’t mean we should belittle the feelings of teenagers or just tell them to deal with it.