"Not Another Tragic Fattie"



Burningword Literary Journal: “Not Another Tragic Fattie”


In sixth grade, a boy tried to make fun of me for being fat. It did not go as he expected. Instead, he was the one who ended up being marginalized. I’ve always remembered it over the years as him being ostracized because he made fun of me. But I suspect I was mixing up correlation with causation. It’s likely he was also a dick to others. So the class decided collectively, if unconsciously, fuck that asshole.


I wanted to write about this memory to push back on the idea that being fat is always tragic. That the fat kid is always bullied and miserable. Most memoirs and novels I’ve read with fat characters focus on fatness as the result of trauma (overeating to create a larger, protected body) and/or the trigger of trauma (childhood bullying). But sometimes one is just fat. It’s not positive and beautiful. It’s not repulsive and wretched. It just is. Like being short. Or neurodivergent. Or having red hair. 


There was one other time in which someone at school made fun of me for being fat. It was seventh or eighth grade. I was walking down the hall with a sea of other students, heading to math class behind two of the popular girls. One of them yelled to someone further ahead of us to do something-or-other “or we’ll make Michelle sit on you!” They then turned around and discovered I was right there, less than a foot behind them. They reacted in that universal way of all junior high girls to the unexpected: they widened their eyes, covered their barely suppressed smirks and mouthed “oh my god!” before turning straight ahead and pretending it never happened. It was the first time it occurred to me that the other kids might be making fun of me behind my back. And yet they never did to my face. Despite my nerdiness. Despite my hyper-Evangelicalism. Despite my (relative) poverty. I was just too earnestly—though not obsequiously—nice. 


That’s not to say I didn’t grow up terribly insecure about my body (what woman isn’t?). That I didn’t desperately wish to be thin. That I didn’t diet a great deal trying to be thin. That I didn’t experience some amount of bullying about my weight from adults in my life—especially from a certain pediatrician when I was nine to twelve years old (though a neurologist when I was seventeen validated what that pediatrician insisted was “not possible”: that you can still be obese despite eating a healthy diet and exercising — hopefully more on this in a future essay). 


But as I say at the end of my Burningword piece, fat kids are not guaranteed victims. When we act as if they are, it normalizes their being bullied. It also creates the pervasive sense of fatness being abject, adding even more weight to burden those who are fat. 


Other pieces I really enjoyed in that issue of BLJ: 


Also in publication news: the only other piece of creative writing that I have ever published (so far---just found out there's another forthcoming!) was this piece at Hippocampus Magazine. Not only was I surprised when it was among their Pushcart Prize nominees that year (it’s hard enough to just get a piece accepted by them) but I’m even more amazed (and so pleased) that it continued to resonate with them enough that they have now included it in their recently published anthology of their most memorable pieces since Hippocampus was founded fifteen years ago. You can buy a copy here and enjoy thirty pieces of great creative non-fiction. 




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