CW: Fat-shaming, body dysmorphia, eating disorders

I'm fat.

"Omg, no you're not!" "You have such a beautiful face, though!" "Ugh, I'm fatter."

It doesn't hurt my feelings anymore, mostly because I've accepted that I'll never be skinny. Even if I lost a lot of weight, I'd still be bigger, because that's how I'm built. My boyfriend and I often joke that I'm built to survive a Russian winter.

Fat isn't an insult to me anymore because I've been called it so many times. The word just absorbs into my skin at this point. But, as they say, actions speak louder than words. It's not the words that hurt me anymore. It's going into stores and finding out they don't even carry anything past large. It's sales people making that face, you know the one, when they feign pity for you. It's paying extra money for the same clothes to be just a little bigger.

It's as if the fashion industry says to us fat people "How dare you try to be beautiful? You're fat, you have no right to feel like a princess in your skin."

Sure, we may be carrying a few extra pounds, but us fat people know that the heaviest things we carry around are these judgements.

How dare we try to love ourselves.

We're constantly being told we aren't good enough. We're pushed diet pills, diet foods, surgeries, literal colostomy bags to rid excess food from our stomachs, things that are in no way healthy for us, but hey, you'll lose five pounds!

Our society tells us that it's more important to be skinny than it is to be confident, or smart, or funny, or anything of real value. It pushes our sisters and brothers, our sons and daughters, into being so afraid of fatness that they don't eat, or purge when they do, or they overexercise.

Rarely are we praised for our skills anymore. It's hard to believe fat people can be successful, right? We're all so lazy. Who cares why you're fat, you probably just love cake too much. It doesn't matter that your antidepressants make it extremely hard to lose weight. It doesn't matter that your genetics have determined you're bigger. And it especially doesn't matter if you're too poor to afford healthy food, or too busy working or studying to be able to exercise.

And it doesn't matter how badly you hurt, or how fine your mind is, or how you can make anyone in the room laugh, or that you're always there when your friends need you. Because you're fat, you hold no value.

But you do. Because those things do matter. You, me, we all are worth more than a number on a tag on the back of a poorly made shirt. We are worth more than the profits people make off of our insecurities. We are worth more than anything, because we are us. Because one of us could be the doctor that saves lives, or the lawyer who stands up for what's right, or the teacher that inspires a generation, or the parent who inspires their children to be kind, and helps them learn that, yes, you are worth more than a number on a scale.