They will tell you that you cannot feel fat.
Fat is not something you can feel, it’s just something that you are.
Well, I have to disagree.
I feel fat all the time.
I can feel it on my arms, my thunder thighs, and my bulge of my stomach.
Oh, do I feel it on my stomach.
And maybe they will tell you that touching your fat doesn't count.
Well maybe, I Feel Absolutely Terrible.
Feel, F
Absolutely, A
Terrible, T
Well, I may be big, but I’m not stupid.
That spells fat.
So, it must be true.
I’m fat, at least that’s what I've been told.

That’s what people everywhere have been told.
We grow up looking at photo-shopped pictures of models,
because thin is in!
So we gorge ourselves on “skinny pills” that market anorexia in a bottle.
We tell ourselves that in order to be beautiful or handsome, or desirable, there has to be an inch between our thighs.
We tell boys to have broad shoulders and a washboard for a stomach.
We tell girls that they have to look like a dog toy when it’s been squeezed,
but instead of eyes popping out, its your chest and your ****.
We have created impossible standards of what beauty is,
and so we **** ourselves in an attempt to reach them.

We feel hurt by the world,
so we cut each other down with stares that could shatter glass.
Some may think that they have risen above enough to educate,
so they offer you the friendly reminder that
skinny jeans don’t make you look skinny if you’re fat,
as if we were not intelligent enough to figure that out for ourselves.
They will remind you that a moment on the lips is forever on the hips,
so we binge in the darkness,
to hide because we now feel ashamed of a basic human need.
We will cry tears that are dry,
so they will never have to know,
that being told you have a ***-belly when you’re seven,
hurts just as much as being called a fat, little girl when you’re seventeen.

We turn away from the things that used to matter to us.
We look at clothes before smiles.
We take in size, before heart.
We call ourselves ugly without any regard for our person.
We know that the outside matches the inside,
but don’t give a second thought to the kind of person we really are.
So we look in the mirror and take a guess.
That answer seems good enough.

But I am sick of good enough.
I want to shatter the glass,
let it rain down in a fine powder
of the person that we thought we saw.
I want to stop looking down at the body beneath me,
and look up at the world that surrounds me.
But, so much of the world is small, and cruel.
So, I hang my head as I walk past.

I sit next to my best friend,
her perfect size zero
is huge in the eyes of the girls who crave it.
She tells me that she feels fat,
that she thinks she is ugly.
I am struck by this;
she has more beauty than she could ever know.
But I guess I don’t pay attention to what she looks like all that much.
I tell her,
“You’re not fat. If you’re fat than I have a gravitational orbit.”
I try to laugh, but she disagrees with me.
I guess she doesn't really pay attention to what I look like either.