Resolution

This blog is sort of one of my New Year's resolutions.

My resolution is not to lose weight. It is to be honest, even if behind a thick pixelated veil of anonymity, and so this is a blog about being fat, and in places and spheres in which one is not supposed to be fat. For all this talk of the Obesity Epidemic, I have always been the only Fat Girl. Or one of two, one of two girls who never looked at each other and for the love of all that is holy never talked to each other or walked next to each other, lest they blow their respective covers.

Because nice girls don't get fat. Not smart, witty girls at top-tier liberal-arts colleges, not girls with pretty faces, not upper-middle-class girls with nice parents with good jobs, not girls who read Vogue and know the names of fifteen-year-old models and the designers whose clothes are draped over them, not girls who listen to indie rock and go to parties in Brooklyn. Not those girls.

I am smart and witty and upper-middle-class and educated and I live in New York and go to school on the West Coast and read Vogue and care what's in it and I weigh two hundred and eighty seven-pounds. I don't exist.

The fact that I don't exist is what makes it okay for people to make fat jokes in front of me. Yesterday I was at the final performance of Golda's Balcony (which, frankly, I found underwhelming) and the part of Tovah Feldshuh's curtain speech that drew the most commentary backstage was her remark about "getting into [her] fat suit," which she seemed to want to get in to make sure we knew that "if you think this is my body, you're crazy."

"Spoken like a woman," my father said to her in the warm self-congratulatory backstage glow, enormously amused, and though I wanted to tell him later that I hadn't found it quite as charming as he had, I didn't want to draw attention to myself, the elephant in the room.

Something like that happens almost every day. A commercial on television that makes me freeze but at which other people don't even blink. Someone tapping me on the shoulder on the street, urging me to take off my headphones so that he can hand me advertisements for a weight-loss system.

So that's what this blog is for. I'm not trying to broadcast my weight-loss whatever. I'm trying to tell the truth.