I'm the youngest of five kids, and by far the heaviest. I've always been the fat kid. And my older sister always made fun of me for it.
A few years ago during Christmas when I was 17, my sister had put on a bit of weight and my dad jokingly pointed it out.
I later walked in on my sister crying about it in the kitchen as she poured herself a drink. I remember thinking, "You finally know how it feels."
I still feel bad for thinking that.
I was in sixth grade, and very chubby for my age.
We were lining up to go somewhere, and a girl behind me said, "God, you're shaking the ground!"
Now whenever I walk, I always fear that I'm actually shaking the ground.
When I was 11 and my sister was 15, my sister and I were having yet another argument with our mom about us being so overweight.
According to my mom, we, "Would never find love," and, "How could anyone love us when we are just a couple of fat asses?" The usual arguments.
(Note: I was only about 40 pounds overweight, my sister about 75. We weren't gigantic, but overweight.)
I was crying of course, so my sister spoke up mid-argument and said, "This is why so many kids our age are killing themselves!"
I'll forever remember the tone in my mom's voice and the look in her eyes when she looked at us and said, "I'll give you the f*cking gun."
I still think about it every single day.
Growing up, I was always a little on the curvy side. I developed very early, and by age 8, wearing a bra was not even a question.
One day while walking to the local park with my neighbor and her granddaughter, the granddaughter turned to me and said, "I don't know how you're going to play at the park. You're probably going to break the slide going down, because you're too fat."
I felt the tears begin to swell up in my eyes. I turned to go home, but I was too far to walk on my own. My neighbor saw me begin to tear up, and all she said in response was, "Well, are we going to cry or walk to the park?"
Even as a child, I knew that the way they were treating me was wrong. I trudged on to the park, but didn't get on any of the equipment.
Ever since this experience, I always feel like everything I sit on is going to either break, crack, or fall apart.
In 7th grade, my best friend and I both made it into the final round of a school wide-spelling bee. We were the only two people left standing, which was a pretty big thing. We were the best spellers in the whole school!
The winner would advance onto a regional tournament among the winners from a lot of different schools.
I ended up winning the bee, and my best friend cried because she lost. She was so devastated that she had to go home.
She never congratulated me or told me good job.
Now we're juniors in high school, and I can honestly say this story is a perfect example of our relationship and how it still functions today.
Throughout my entire elementary/middle/high school experience, I was bullied. If it wasn't my weight, it was my scars; if it wasn't those, it was something I said. The way I walked. Anything.
In grades 6 & 7, there was a specific group of kids that bullied me, and they had a ringleader. He was always the worst - he tried to start real, physical fights with my boyfriend at the time - and I was pretty tired of it, so I reported him.
Of course it only got worse. But the weird thing - the odd, wonderful thing - was that, a year after these incidents, he apologized. He sent me a message asking my forgiveness for all the things he'd said to me.
And then, years later, in our junior year of high school, he really floored me: I was tired one day, and I decided to lie on the floor during lunch. He and his friends (the same group that had bullied me for so long) were standing across the hallway, talking amongst themselves. I was lying on the floor, my eyes closed, wondering if skipping class was worth my parents' anger, when someone touched my arm.
I looked up, and there he was. The kid who'd spent a good portion of our middle school years making my life miserable.
"Hey, are you alright?" He asked. He looked sincere. His friend, another big bully, stood behind him, nodding. "Yeah, you okay?" He added.
It's stuck with me ever since, that a kid who was so awful to me and so many others could have such a huge change of heart.
When I was 9, my older sister told me I looked like Littlefoot (the dinosaur from The Land Before Time movies) when I wore turtlenecks.
I haven't worn a turtleneck since.
When I was in middle school, I got bullied a lot for being on the heavy side.
On the first day of 8th grade, I was sitting by myself at lunch when a group of girls came up to me and told me I was too fat for food, and they threw my food away.
In fifth grade, I started taking choir class. On the first day, our teacher taught us how to sing high notes. I was really excited to be learning this, because I loved singing and had never taken formal lessons, and my singing voice was naturally lower and I always wanted to learn how to sing higher.
After a few weeks of choir, I was so excited to share my improving singing skills with my friends. During one of our regular 5th grade academic classes, I gathered a bunch of friends in the back of the classroom at our cubbies to show them what I had learned in choir.
All of a sudden, our teacher yelled to the back of the classroom in an irritated tone, "Whoever is making that horrible noise, please stop! You sound like a dying cat!"
It was clear from her tone that she thought that whoever was making the noise was doing it to be annoying and irritating.
I stopped taking choir after 5th grade, and have never taken the signing lessons that I had always wanted.
Writing this now is actually really helpful for me. Now after all these years, I might actually pursue singing lessons.
My group of best friends in elementary school consisted of three of us. Once we got to middle school, our friend circle expanded, but I remained a very shy person. My "best friend" would always sit next to me at the long lunch table, turning her back completely to me, while she faced the rest of the group and I sat on the end alone with her back in my face.
She would do this any time we were in a big group. Even at my own 13th birthday party. I had invited a bunch of kids I was too shy to actually talk to. Everyone sat in a cluster with their chairs to talk, and she stuck her chair right in front of mine to block me from the group.
One day, I finally got up the courage to tell her to stop doing this. I guess a tiny piece of me still believed that she wasn't aware of what she was doing, that my best friend couldn't be that unnecessarily cruel on purpose.
After I confronted her, she said, "I could stop doing it, but you're not going to contribute to the conversation anyway because you're so quiet, so it's pointless."
She never stopped.
We are grown up now and haven't seen or spoken to each other in decades. I am much stronger now, and have acknowledged that I never deserved to be a victim of her sadistic acts of micro-cruelty. And that she was a completely miserable human being.
But nevertheless, the way she made me feel during adolescence will always stick with me.
Has anyone ever made a fleeting comment about you that immediately became tattooed onto the front of your brain for all of eternity, impacting your self-perception and self-worth? Whether it was an offhand comment made by someone you love and respect or a fleeting declaration by someone you barely know, we share the moments that stick.
