Fat

The advertisement banner on my MySpace page tonight: "Are you fat? Take this quiz to find out!"

Who needs a quiz? Yep, I'm fat. I've been fat since I was about 9 years old, and that's all I know how to be. Fat and wrong outside; and eventually, I came to believe, in.

I've been wanting my life to arrive for so long. I quit a full music scholarship because I didn't know how to be a singer, I only knew how to be a fat person. Medical or pharmacy school, hell, I killed that dream before it started - do they even take fat people? I got in a car with a drunk friend because being fat made me so thouroughly wrong, that whatever I was thinking and feeling would be wrong too, and wrong people have no right to assert themselves. I quit nursing school on the first day because I couldn't be a nurse, I could only be fat. And staying quiet, dutiful, and desireless for my husband's benefit was more important than medic school any day, especially if it involved scrounging up cash for a dumb fat person to try and be something other than FAT.

What really needs to change about my life, I wonder? In the past ten years I have weighed 302.5 pounds, 176.8 pounds, and everything in between. 30 years I've lived, 126 pounds (the entire weight of Jennifer Aniston, I hear) I've lost, and of all the adjectives I can finally assign to myself (smart, capable, rational, calm, compassionate, but never worthy or deserving), the only one that seems to have mattered is "fat."

It's taken so long to begin - just begin - to start to believe I'm worth a better label. Progress is so slow on this new, foreign ground. I wonder when I'll see myself as I truly am, or if that's even possible any longer...