I rarely talk about body image. My own personal body image is something I’ve struggled with for a long, long time. Even when I was a size 12 (which is the size I look best at) with awesome tits and a spectacular ass and legs that went on for miles all toned and tanned, I still thought I was fat and gross. I’d starve myself for weeks after spending a day with my size 5-10 friends, and cry at night about how I wished I was that skinny, and beg God and Satan to either take my fat or my life.

People rarely made fun of me. People I knew never made fun of me. I’m nice enough when I’m in a good mood, but piss me off and I get a little scary. It was worse when I was a kid. So I never really had to deal with the fat jokes or anything like that. The fat hatred that I knew existed, and that I began to feel myself, came directly from television, where they didn’t really say fat people are “less than” back then, but they made it abundantly clear that if you were fat you were pretty much obsolete, what with all the thin, beautiful girls and women on television, and how the fat kid was always the nerd no one wanted to hang out with.

I hate giving credence to that argument. I hate that Americans (and especially American children) care so much about celebrities and how they look, live, love and behave that, based on a bunch of people whose biggest asset is conventional beauty, a great many of us have come to believe that fat people are irrelevant. Some of the smartest, nicest, most generous, most beautiful (inside and out) people I know are fat. Being fat does not a nincompoop make.

I hate even more that some of us who are fat believe them.

The other day, I decided to check in on my Formspring account to see if there were any easy questions to answer. (I don’t care what you say. “We wake up in a hospital room together. What do you say to me?” is not an easy question to answer. Neither is “Define romantic love.”) Naturally, since I’ve somehow managed to pick up a few enemies along the way, there are regularly some rather retarded “questions” in my inbox. The ones about how I sound miserable make me wonder if my ex managed to find my account. But the one I got about being fat, most recently, killed me. In the “You’re too fucking funny.” way, not the “ZOMG someone just called me fat. I’m gonna die.” way.

It said something like, “Do you know that green turtleneck makes you look like a big round ball? Oh right. That’s cause you are one.” and I laughed for a good long time before I deleted it.

There’s so much more to that green sweater than the fact that it makes me look fat. It’s lime green and fuzzy and floppy and warm. It’s huge and cuddly and goes great with purple fingernails. And even though it would make even the skinniest person look like a giant beached whale, what with its horizontal stripes and inch thick fabric, it is, without a doubt, my favorite. And I regularly wear it with pride in the winter, not caring that it makes me look like I weigh fifty pounds more than I do.

There is so much more to me than the fact that I’m fat.

I’m intelligent and strive to educate myself in the world around me. I enjoy helping people in whatever way I can. I’m not only tolerant of differing beliefs, even when I think they’re preposterous, but in most cases I strive to understand where the person is coming from. I’m rather empathetic. With my entire being, I love books and music and animals and my man and my friends (not necessarily in that order) with a fierceness I can’t describe. I live life as fully as my body and mind are capable. Wide open spaces make me feel free. The forest is my home.

If the extra ninety pounds that jiggles all over my middle and my thighs makes me unworthy of being treated and viewed as a human, then I’m not really sure I want to be. If being human means that I, and the rest of the world, should hate me simply because I’m not at what’s considered a “healthy weight” for my height and age, a fact that has little to no effect on who I am as a person (unless one includes the fact that seeing how fat people are treated has taught me how I never want to treat anyone), then the human race can take a flying leap off Air Force One at 30K with no chute.

Yeah, it’s like that.

Ten years ago, that question would have put me to bed for at least a week. Five years ago, it would have been the beginning of a week of me checking out mentally and just running on autopilot so I could continue to take care of my responsibilities but not have to actually face the fact that I was one of the millions of fat haters out there. Today?

Today I realize that while my body would be better off ninety pounds lighter, those extra ninety pounds are not now and never will be cause enough for someone to be justified in thinking I’m worthless. I realize that I wasted so much of my life worrying about something that, in the grand scheme of things, affects only me and no one else. (I don’t want to hear about how it affects healthcare costs, or airplane seating, or whatever. You and I both know that the greedy medical and insurance fields would be raising costs even if everyone in the world was healthy and skinny. And as for airplane seating, even when the whole row’s full of skinny people they look uncomfortable. Call a frickin’ spade a spade, people.) I understand that people who spend their lives belittling fat people they don’t even know have issues that run far deeper than my cottage cheese thighs. (Which are toning up quite nicely with all the hiking Master and I are doing, thank you very much.) And I’m okay with being fat.

(Thanks for the title, Emma)