That’s How I Feel When People Look At You / Sarah W.

So I thought I would dictate this story and you can decide if and how you want to use it. When I was young, like 10 or 12, I gained a lot of weight. We had moved from the country to the city. I had gone from riding my bike everywhere and being very active to not. I wouldn’t say I was obese by any means, but I was chunky. I was a chunky kid. That lasted for quite a while into my mid-adolescence probably.

My mom was absolutely horrified by anyone who was overweight. One day we had a conversation about it that has always stuck with me. I think it changed my life. We had a cat. Her name was Trollop and she was a big fat cat like cats get. So my mom and I were talking about my weight and she said, “When people come over and look at the cat, they look at me and say, ‘What did you do to her to make her so fat?” Then she said, “That’s how I feel when people look at you.”

It was the first time that I had an experience of someone else feeling that my body was a reflection on them and it was really jarring and transformative and humiliating and awful. I’m not sure I’ve ever really recovered from that, from feeling that my body is an assault on other people really, regardless of how much I weigh. But I can tell you that I have never looked at myself in a mirror since that day and not seen myself as fat and repulsive even when I weighed much less than I weigh today. Today, I think I weigh a pretty reasonable amount. So that’s my story. It’s kind of sad.