This post isn’t to brag, I swear.
This is me in 2008. (I am not the 2-year-old girl)
Jesus, what a fat fuck I was. Big ol’ lard-filled tub of hogfat. This is distressing to me, but not for the reason you might think.
I’m not pissed because I was fat for my whole god damn life, I’m pissed because I was fat for my whole god damn life and nobody told me.
Look, I know it’s not the rest of the world’s fault that I have some weird brain thing, but back when I was the guy in the first picture, when I’d look in the mirror, I’d see the guy in the second picture. I don’t mean in a fantasy, mirror-mirror sort of way, I mean my brain actually projected a reasonably thin me wherever my reflection was. I suppose it was denial. It was bad. And it only worked for mirrors…
For pictures, I’d see the fat fuck that I was, but it was so traumatic to my brain that I’d just look away and think about something else. I never let anybody take a picture of me. If somebody was taking pictures at a group event, I’d find their camera later and delete any pictures with me in them.
“It’s just bad lighting,” I’d say to myself, or perhaps it was a bad angle.
It’s a miracle that one picture survived. If I had seen it on my sister’s computer before I went on this diet, I would have instantly deleted it and then emptied the recycle bin. I wouldn’t think about it, I’d just do it, like a reflex. Luckily, I didn’t see it until very recently. I’ve been on this diet for 5 months and lost 60 pounds, but to me it didn’t seem like I’d lost any weight (brain thing), then I saw that picture and was all, “Jesus, who’s that fat retard with my face?”
When people know fat people, they probably don’t address it because they assume that the fat person knows that he’s fat, and is ashamed of it. That might not always be the case. With me, my subconscious knew I was fat, but was keeping that a secret to my conscious. Anything that would chip away at the Wall of Imagined Skinniness would send me into a sort of nervous fit until I found something else to distract me.
When I was in 6th grade, I one of my friends was named Dylan, and he was a pretty portly kid. Since there were only about 30 kids in my grade, it wouldn’t be wild to say he was the fattest kid in the class. One day, some kid was being a dick or some shit, and said, in passing, “Dylan and Aaron, the twin titans.” I started to laugh, because it was funny that Dylan was fat, then my brain got around to processing the fact that my name was in that sentence too, and I just stood there frozen on the playground for at least a minute, my mind a whirling dervish of activity, working overtime to rebuild the Wall of Imagined Skinniness so I could go back to doing things like breathing and digesting my food. Eventually, I just thought to myself, “That’s strange. Dylan is fat. I’m not.”
That wall started to crumble about 2 years ago. I was having kidney stones, so from the ER I was sent to get a CT scan. Later, when I was referred to a urologist, I was told I should get my CT scan on a disc to take to him. I went to the records department, got the disc, and when I got home stuck it in my computer to see if I could see the scan images. CT scan images are saved in some proprietary format to be used in with medical imaging software, but with some digging I found a way to extract the images without that software, and started flipping through the pics. “Hey, there’s my jejunum,” I said. “And my liver. And my kidneys. And my bladder. And my penus… backspace” and as I was spotting the organs and finding out that I might have actually been paying attention in anatomy class, I wondered why there was a kind of wavy cloud around the organs, like a halo. When I got to a scan of about the level of my belly button, the cloud sort of dimpled in at the top… right where my belly button…
It was fat. FAT. I was a neatly bundled nest of organs wrapped in a 5 inch layer of FAT.
Somehow, looking at a CT scan and its associated authority as real science, I was having a hard time building a wall around that.
Then, 1.5 years ago, I was at my doctor’s office and, after going over my blood pressure and the fact that I have the appropriate amount of arms, he asked if I was getting any exercise, and said that I could probably lose at least 20 or 30 pounds.
That was it. Right there. After about 13 years of being an oblivious lardass, someone had actually said out loud, in english words, that I should lose some weight.
So I did.
That was all it took. Someone telling me. If someone had told me when I was still in highschool that if I stopped eating cake and pizza for a few months, I’d look like how I think I look, and maybe I might have a very remote chance of having a female touch me at some point in my life. Nobody told me. I wish somebody had.
So if you are close to someone who is a fatass, make sure that they are aware of it. They might have walls just like me. They might think that they have to ride a fucking scooter from the door of the Burger King to the counter to place their order because they have bad ankles, or a bad back, or think they look really fucking rad in a scooter. They don’t look rad in a scooter. Sit them down, show them a chart of recommended weights for gender and height, and when they say, “Those are just made by a committee and don’t really reflect the varying types of bone structure and—” SHUT THEM THE FUCK UP AND TELL THEM THEY’RE FAT PIECES OF SHIT AND NEED TO TAKE IT EASY ON THE BISKITS N GRAVY.
For the good of humanity.
And, as a service to you, the reader, I just want to let you know that if at any time while reading this you thought to yourself, “Yeah but I’m not that fat,” you are.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to tonight’s dinner of a tic-tac and 3 packing peanuts.
