Julie

In a previous post, I wrote about my experience in high school with a girl named Julie who delighted more than others in tormenting me about my weight. I also mentioned that she had joined Facebook, though she had not requested me as a friend. Several days ago, she did request me as a friend and I accepted. This answered a question that had been on my mind since other people had discussed getting her to join our former class online. That question was, "was she now fat?" If you have read my other post, you will understand why this was something I would wonder about.

The main issue with fatness is that anyone who is very fat will likely avoid posting a picture of themselves. Julie's profile picture is the default grey box with white silhouette that Facebook gives everyone and she had not posted pictures of herself in her albums. However, someone tagged her in the background of a picture of two other people and revealed her current appearance. She has become extremely obese, likely close to or as heavy as I was at my highest weight.

My response to this is absolutely not a sense of triumph at the justice meted out by the universe. While I am happy that my life has been going so well, I find that I don't need others lives to be comparatively worse to feel satisfied with who I am and how I live. I mainly feel sad for her, though I'd be lying if there weren't a tiny little seed that is gratified that it is very likely she can't help but have some empathy for the fat girl she tortured in high school. I don't want her to suffer as I have, but I do want her to understand what it was like to be me and never treat another person as poorly as she treated me. Empathy is a powerful teacher and if she had to get that fat to ensure that she never hurts another fat person again, I think that is not the worst outcome.

I'm aware that I may be reaching conclusions with little more than a photo of a very fat woman as evidence. Just because she looks to weigh well over 300 lbs., it does not mean she is unhappy. Happiness, like health, is not directly related to weight. She may fully embrace bodily acceptance and be happy with who she is despite her size. However, I know too well how unlikely that is for many reasons. First of all, society makes it extremely hard to be happy at a high weight. Even if you have no health or mobility issues as a result, you are constantly reminded that you are a blight on society. Second, someone who does not post pictures of themselves and used their young, thin daughter's face as their profile picture (only to withdraw it later) is not demonstrating much in the way of bodily acceptance. For me, one thing which I forced myself to do at one point was to start putting my face out there for people to see. This was a form of accepting my appearance. Finally, Julie spent many of our youthful years using my fat body to elevate herself. There is little chance that she's now just peachy with a body which exceeds my high weight in high school.

Seeing this person who brought such misery to me in my youth end up fatter than me has been a complex emotional experience. I didn't expect necessarily to be basking in schadenfreude, so it's no surprise that I'm not doing a happy dance that my former bully is currently living out my former nightmare. Mainly, I find myself having to push a little harder to find my empathy for a fat person. This is something which has come easily for me for nearly everyone else with weight issues because I always had 100% understanding of their suffering. In her case, I think I'm having to push myself to find that kind place in myself for her. I feel little for her either way. That is, little happiness at what could be seen as a proper comeuppance and little sorrow that she is likely suffering. Considering how much glee she took in inflicting pain on me in my youth, I think I'm doing pretty well to be in neutral about her right now.

My Life As a Teen Movie Joke

If you've ever watching a juvenile comedy, especially some of the older ones, you often see kids pulling stupid pranks to embarrass each other. Most of the time, these jokes are physical in nature and not too personalized. As the fat kid in my class, the jokes on me were always personal, and directed at my weight.

One effort at humiliation in particular came when I was in ninth grade (freshman year of high school). I was sitting in math class not doing anything or bothering anyone. For some reason, the teacher was out of the room. I heard a scuffle behind me and some whispering. Being attuned to attempts on the parts of my classmates to treat me like crap, I whipped my head around to see one of the boys with a ruler attempting to measure the width of my ass.

I know a lot of people think "boys will be boys" and that young males are especially insensitive, but the truth is that this particular boy was acting at the behest of one of the girls in the class. This particular girl, whose name was Sheila, was one of the chief instigators of torment for me. She often egged others on to tease or humiliate me. The strange thing was that she wasn't some sort of alpha dog in the class. She was part of second tier popularity because she wasn't very attractive, but she did have her little group of people who she hung out with and they were mean to people as a means of amusing themselves. I wasn't the only target, but I was one of the favored ones.

At any rate, as an adult, I've learned that this is a common dynamic with girl bullying. Girls play power games with each other and selectively isolate and deride other girls. Even though I know that I was just collateral damage in whatever teenage esteem issues Sheila and her posse were playing through, I still hope her life is one big, unhappy failure. I know that sounds bitter and not forgiving, but the misery I was put through added to the layers of suffering in my life which in turn led me to be even fatter.

Gym Class

If you were a fat kid, you can relate quite well to what I'm about to talk about. I'm going to discuss the agony of gym classes in school. Even if a fat kid happens to be not so terrible at some activities or sports, there's so much indignity involved in the classes that they'll learn to hate them sooner rather than later.

Being fat in gym class means being picked last when teams are chosen (unless one of your friends gets to make the choices and chooses you out of loyalty). There's nothing like always being treated as the least desirable person to help tear down any remaining self-esteem that is left after having to wear shorts in front of everyone and show off your fat legs. What is worse, of course, is community showering where people get to see your entire wobbly body in a manner which violates your privacy and puts you on display for others to laugh at.

Of course, being fat does usually mean you're slow and probably not the greatest at sports, and that's all the more reason why gym classes shouldn't be about competition as much as health. I never understood why my gym classes were centered around things like softball, kickball, dodge ball, etc. Those sports actually ensured that we spent less time being active because they were turn based. You spent a lot of time waiting for your turn, acted on your turn, and ran a bit then started the whole process all over again.

What was worse than the competitive sports though was the absurdity of doing gymnastics activities. I'm not sure how walking along a balance beam, jumping over a pummel horse, etc. was meant to make my young body fit, but it sure did make me feel inadequate and hate every gym class. Instead of encouraging fitness, they tested for it and it was a test I always failed. If anything, gym discouraged exercise.

I believe that, if schools were really interested in helping kids be active and healthy, they'd offer a variety of options for gym like constantly walking for 30-60 minutes a day. Can you imagine how much better it'd be for overweight kids to spend an hour walking around a track or the gymnasium each day than facing the humiliation of organized sports and fitness-testing activities? At the very least, the option to do this instead of a regular gym class should be offered. I know I would have been happy to spend an hour walking and talking to friends each day instead of taking gym class twice a week. Walking not only would be better for overall fitness, but it'd encourage daily movement and show how you can get helpful exercise without feeling or looking foolish in front of everyone.

Fat Myth #2 - fat people eat constantly

On the T.V. show "Friends", the character of Monica Gellar used to be fat, but lost weight and kept it off in her late teens. Sometimes, the show does flashbacks where Courtney Cox puts on a fat suit and we see her as she supposedly was as a fat girl. They showed her eating all of the time and ordering food deliveries just for herself.

The idea that fat people eat all of the time is, at best, a half truth. The notion that they are eating a lot in front of other people is a complete lie. Most fat people are like alcoholics. They eat in secret and often in mindless binges which provide psychological comfort. The last thing a fat person wants to do is to be seen gorging because he or she will be seen as disgusting for having the audacity to eat while being fat.

In fact, when I was in high school, I wouldn't even eat lunch in front of the other students. In a move that I'm sure screwed me up good and proper on the metabolic front, I wouldn't eat all day and then binged from around 4:00 pm when I got home from school. To this day, I won't eat much in front of other people and I don't even want my husband to necessarily see how much I eat because it's humiliating to be seen as enjoying food. No matter how little or what I eat, I'm embarrassed about it because of the shame of being a fat person who actually eats.

So, the whole idea that fat people eat all of the time is just as wrong as the notion that an alcoholic keeps a flask of liquor in his pocket at all times for fortifying nips or a drug addict walks around with needles stuck in his arm. Of course, fat people eat too much, but they tend to do it all at once rather than in view of judging eyes or around the clock.