How to Become Fat and Ugly: A Manual Only for the Very Brave. Chapter 1: Origin Story

I don't remember the moment I first learned that I was fat and ugly. Surely I wasn't born thinking I was. My parents, both of them fat adults, were extremely loving to me, their only child, and gave me huge amounts of positive reinforcement. But I can't remember ever thinking I was anything other than fat and ugly. So I must have been very, very young when I learned that. Certainly, I received many lessons early on that I didn't look like a normal girl. I was born in 1971 to educated, liberal, bohemian parents in New York City and they dressed me in tomboy pants when I was a toddler and my hair was cut in a short Beatles bowl cut. Around age 3 and 4 people started mistaking me for a little boy. I remember my father taking me to work where he was a guidance counselor at a middle school in the Bronx, and his students saying "Mr. J, is this your son?" This kind of thing happened often. It bothered me so much at age 4 that I decided never to cut my hair again, and indeed I wouldn't cut it again until fifth grade when I got it feathered like Kristy McNichol. So, very early in my life I knew I looked wrong and that if I didn't make myself look right, people wouldn't see me properly and wouldn't even understand that I was female.

I probably learned the fat-and-ugly lesson even earlier than this, but, for sure I know I was bullied every day of elementary school from kindergarten through sixth grade for being fat and ugly. I was in the "smart class," throughout elementary, which meant that from first grade through sixth, every year I was in the same class with the same kids. They called me "The Elephant." The boys bullied me. The girls bullied me. Cute boys bullied me and ugly boys bullied me. Very pretty girls bullied me, it was especially the pretty girls. But mostly it was boys. Sometimes it was verbal abuse. Sometimes it was physical, too. My classmates were relentless, very cruel, and never seemed to get tired of making me sad. I had three best friends in my class who loved me and everyone else was mean. The boys I had crushes on for years bullied me, which was a real mind-fuck. I remember being totally in love with a boy I'll call Andrew Klein: I thought he was gorgeous and just wanted him to like me, and somehow the fact that he was one of the bully ringleaders didn't make me hate him, I only wanted him to like me more. If that isn't an early lesson in cognitive dissonance, I don't know what is.

I never understood why my classmates had such a bottomless appetite for cruelty and why they spent so much time and energy targeting me. I will never understand.

The most heartbreaking part of all this is that I never told anyone outside of school about the bullying. Never once. I lived with my mother and saw my dad often and on weekends, and I never told either of them. Even at age 6, 7, 10, I somehow already knew I had to protect them -- especially my mother -- from the truth of my daily shame and misery. My mother had Lupus, and the high doses of steroid medication she was on added to her natural tendency to put on weight and so she was very, very fat. She also used a cane to walk and was very strange looking in general because she was so light-sensitive from the Lupus, she had to wear thick sunscreen, long sleeves and a turtleneck no matter what the weather, and a very wide-brimmed hat. People stared at us on the street and I was embarrassed to be seen with her even though I loved her immensely. So not only did I fear and hate my classmates, but really I feared and hated everyone, everyone who stared at my mom, everyone who was cruel to me at school. The world was a mean place. My mother was very ashamed of her weight and appearance and somehow I knew I had to keep the school bullying from her. Indeed, she never knew about it. Actually, to this day no one in my family knows, and I only started talking about this with my friends when I was much older.

I could detail all the things my bullies said and did but I can't bear it. Once, my friend Paul was walking up the stairs to my apartment to see me when my downstairs neighbor Scott, who happened to be on the stairs too, asked him where he was going. Paul said he was coming to see me and Scott said (and I quote), "Why? She's a fat, disgusting pig and I hate her." I was at my door one floor up, waiting for Paul, listening. One time we were learning about animals in class. I loved animals and wanted to be a veterinarian or a zoologist. The teacher said something about what kind of animal we'd be and Andrew Klein squealed with delight and pointed at me and shouted "Elephant! Elephant!" One time a boy in my class, while taunting me on my walk home from school, swung his backpack and hit me in the stomach and my abdomen sort of caved in and I couldn't breathe at all and I crumpled to the ground on my hands ands knees and his eyes got big and scared and he immediately turned and ran. Once when visiting my best friend who had moved away to the country, a boy I had just met told me matter-of-factly while we were in a swimming pool, "You are ugly and fat."

Oh, by the way, this is me as a child.

The result of all this was that I learned with every fiber of my being that I am physically repulsive. The only logical explanation for unending emotional torture about my appearance was that I must deserve it. Any other explanation was too confusing. So, the knowledge of my hideousness sunk into my flesh and bones, worked its way into my neural pathways and lodged itself there, seemingly permanently. The result is that when I was kissed by a boy for the first time in 7th grade, I was so confused because I didn't understand why a boy would want to kiss someone fat and hideous. The explanation I came up with for myself was that it was only because I happened to be there and I was the only available girl at that moment, and boys are always desperate for sex and so they can't help it even if the girl with them is hideous and fat. An alternate explanation is that this particular boy or man is just extremely odd or can't get anyone better or that he isn't exactly lying but is just being nice because he was brought up to be polite. These are the explanations I have continued to use throughout my life (I am now age 50) when boys or men have been sexual with me or told me I was beautiful or pretty (this list is extremely short). I still think all these things. As a bisexual woman, there is a different set of reasons and excuses for women.

Writing about this is cathartic but exhausting. More soon.