Dressing my body is always an event. Today, I stand in front of the mirror, scrutinizing my body under the harsh glare of my dorm room’s overhead lighting. I frown at the way my extra-large leggings dig into what is supposed to my waist and constrain my stomach in a tight embrace. I cringe at the stretch marks that emerge unbidden from the waistband of my leggings, clawing up my sides in jagged, faded lightning bolts that prove how much weight I’ve gained over the years.

I cringe at how my body is not able to be contained by the dress, also extra large, that I have wrestled myself into. I am spilling out of the neckline in a way that is not sexy or appealing, but sad. I could try to assemble another outfit, but what’s the use? I will never be able to put something together that doesn’t make me question taking up some scarily unhealthy method of losing weight.

I am not comfortable with my body. I never have been, and I fear I never will. However, I have been told by so many that I should be comfortable with my body. I have been told by girls that will never understand. Girls who will never understand how embarrassing it is to go shopping with your friends and realize you can no longer fit into the clothes that everyone else wears.

Girls who have never had to wonder if maybe that boy would have liked you back if you were thinner. Girls who whine about their perfectly average bodies. Girls who have never had to monitor what they eat in front of others for the fear of being judged.

Girls who wear tight clothes and crop tops and leggings and backless dresses or anything that may show off a bit too much flesh and not be openly gawked at. Girls who tell me that the right boy won’t care that about my weight, even though most of their relationships started with superficial attraction.

Though I am encouraged not to hate my body, I am not encouraged to love it, either. Society is not kind to women with bodies like mine. I have scrolled through the comments of so many articles and videos with people spewing hateful comments telling larger women to stop trying to hide themselves. They don’t want to see our bodies of course, because that would be insulting. Revolting, even.

No, they want us to stop hiding behind words like ‘thick,’ ‘curvy’, or ‘plus-sized.’ They want us to call ourselves what we really are, which is fat. And we are supposed to be ashamed of that label. Fat women and their fatness is only considered acceptable if they are actively trying to rid themselves of that fat. Even if you are dieting and working out and still not losing weight, that’s better than just being fat, because that means you are at least trying to fix yourself. We are only supposed to like ourselves enough to want to change.

These people, the ones disgusted with the bodies of fat women, view us as personal insults to their health and decency. They think we are gluttonous, soft-willed pigs who did not know when to stop, who kept jamming food down our throats like we simply did not know how to continue living if we weren’t digesting something. To them, our fatness is our own faults. They do not care about medical conditions or poor nutrition or that some people, like me, have been fat for as long as they can remember.

So I try to make up for it, the fact that I am fat, the fact that I am so uncomfortable in my own skin that I wish I could carve the fat out of myself. I force myself to be louder, bolder, more memorable. For most occasions I am overdressed, trying to focus people’s attention on my clothes and not the body underneath. I make my makeup dramatic. I make my personality as bright and aggressively cheerful as a newly printed penny. It is my way of apologizing for subjecting others to gaze upon the body I never asked for.