To every fat teenager out there who sees “Insatiable” and feels like they will never be loved,
Those stories are NOT written by fat adults. Those stories are NOT representative of our real lives at all. They are fantasies, pure and simple, and you should not allow that to dictate how you feel about yourself, or how you live your life. I know, easier said than done. But I wish that I had someone who told me, when I was a teenager, that those stories are NOT realistic, and that I would be able to begin my “real life” whenever I wanted, not when I lost weight, no matter what shitty shows and movies like “Insatiable” told me. I wish that I had someone who had looked me in the eye and told me what life as a fat adult could really be.
So here I am. Telling all of you. You can and will be loved. You can and will be desired. You can and will be successful. You can and will have friends and lovers and family who all care about you deeply. You can be ANYTHING you want- you don’t need to lose weight to be a “brain” or whatever other stupid categories were listed in that trailer. The narratives you see in media are so far beyond what life is actually like that, frankly, it makes me wonder if any of these people have ever actually spoken more than three words to a fat person before. It is imaginary, it is fake, it is not the truth of the lives of the many, many fat people all around the world.
Loving yourself is fucking hard- it has taken me 23 years to begin to learn how to do that, and I am still learning how every single day. But it was made so much harder because I believed that what I saw on television was the truth- that if I had the audacity to be anything other than thin, I would be condemned to be unlovable, lonely, helpless, unintelligent, boring. Unwanted. And that is the furthest from what I am today. Narratives like “Insatiable” exist to put down people that are deemed “too large” and uphold a standard of thinness, and equate body size with worth and wealth and a whole host of other things that, really, have nothing to do with how you look. That fantasy exists to uphold someone else, and not me. And not you. And that is a fucking problem.
I can’t fix that problem. I alone cannot change the pervasive narrative around fat bodies in media. But I CAN be the voice that I needed when I was a kid. I can tell anyone who needs this, and reads this, that shows like “Insatiable” do not define you, and that the story presented there is not an honest one. And above all else- you ARE GOOD ENOUGH.
