Fat Girl - By: Iris Rhoda

Do you know how it feels?

To stand in front of your peers

And have your defining feature

Be labeled your body

Because my weight is just a number

But to you it’s who I am

It has been for as long as I have known

I have always been the bigger one

The fat one

And so it became my life too

I can’t shop with friends because I need the fat girl stores

I can’t eat around others because they will assume that’s why I look the way I do

Can’t pursue my dreams because I learned early the fat girls are seen first for their body

And I will not define the next generation’s girls

The way the fat girls on my tv defined me

Because I refuse to be your fat girl

I know I am more than the first thing you see

So I will stop letting them define my body

I will stop trying on clothes I know won’t fit

I will stop wearing things for the sake of covering curves

I will stop letting you decide when I need to eat

I will stop giving you my body until I trust that your first thought isn’t ‘fat’

Because yes, I am fat, but there is more to me than the number on that scale

The clothing size I wear

The seat I choose to sit in

The stores I buy from

What you see when you look at me

The adjective you gave me

When I was too young to know what you really meant

Too young to realize the vitriol in your voice

That wasn’t there when you called her small

Too young to stop you before you gave me the label that would follow the rest of my life:

That’s Iris- the fat one.

You know her, the kid who doesn’t fit in her chair when she sits

The kid who can’t climb trees because the branches will snap under her

The kid who was always put in the furthest back

where you could make sure no one could see her six-year-old body taking up too much space.

Too young to know that when you didn’t have a gown

a vest

a jacket

a dress

that fit me, that that was your fault- not mine

Too young to understand that for fat women, we don’t get adjectives

We get hidden meanings and subtext

They say fat, they mean ugly

They mean lose weight

They mean shrink yourself to fit their space

Young enough that I didn’t hear the inherent prefix-

Never just fat.

Always too fat.

As if it’s ok, as long as there’s a small amount

But here’s the thing:

I don’t do small.

For better and worse, I never have, and I never will.

And I will repeat myself as many times as it takes for you to understand:

Fat is not a bad word

But there is so much more to me than that

So don’t you dare reduce all of me to that word

Because I promise you, I’ve heard that one before.

Please give a detailed explanation about the meaning and main idea of this poem.

Fat Girl is a poem I wrote about my experience growing up as the only plus size person in my life. Being defined at a very young age by kids who were products of the system that raised us with a label I would spend years trying to outrun- Fat Girl. A label that reduced everything good about me down to only what they saw, and then used that label to make me ashamed of how they saw me. As I got older, I began to push back against what they tried to make me- I stopped giving anyone a reason to call me fat, to make me the Fat Girl, because I knew I was more than that. This poem was written after I discovered a balance- I am allowed to be fat without that being all I am. I am allowed to be a fat girl without being their Fat Girl. So I stopped “proving” I couldn’t fit clothes I knew were too small for me, I stopped trying to hide the shape of my body under baggy black hoodies, I started to just eat when I was hungry instead of waiting for a skinny person to decide that I had proven I wasn’t gluttonous for needing lunch, and I stopped subjecting myself to physical touch when all it had been for me was an excuse for people to call me squishy, soft, pillowy, maternal, comfortable, etc. I can be fat without being what society dictates that’s supposed to look like- I can be fat without that being all I am.

Please explain your writing and thought process regarding this poem.

In my writing, one of the things I wanted to focus on was using the word fat. I didn’t want to skirt around it, I didn’t want to hide it- fat is an adjective and it describes my body. It is not inherently offensive unless you see it as a bad thing. Part of the emotion of Fat Girl is my reclamation of being fat- I am not ashamed of my body, nor am I ashamed of the words one uses to describe it.

Why did you choose to write this poem?

I wrote this poem because I have been struggling with expressing my complicated emotions on this subject when I try to explain them to the people I love. I didn’t really entirely know how I felt and the easiest way to figure that out for me is to write about it, and out came this.