I spent my entire life looking for a hero I could relate to. Sirius Black came closest, and then I read Eleanor and Park.
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Fat girls have fucking nothing.
I've been reading for, it feels like, as long as I have had sentience and consciousness, and it has taken me my entire life to meet someone in a book who looked like me and felt the same way I do and has struggled with some of the things I have struggled with, and is still loved.
Fat girls have nothing, and fat girls are told they are worth nothing. Fat girls have Aunt Marge Dursley, and Jane Umbridge, and eating disorders to beat and people to prove wrong by losing a lot of weight and letting out Their True Self, aka the Thin Girl Within. The Thin Girl Within is worthy; she is radiant and triumphant and beloved. She cannot be all those things and also be fat; at least, not in the young adult fiction I had at my perusal when I really, really needed someone to tell me it was possible to be radiant, and triumphant, and fat.
The Harry Potter series is not the first thing I remember reading; that was Go, Dog! Go!. It's also not the first thing I remember reading that had a profound effect on me; that was The Phantom Tollbooth, and when I finished it, I cried because I didn't want it to be over. But the Harry Potter series is the only thing that stuck with me from age 9 to age now. It is the only thing I never turned my back on, even when I was in college and decided that everything I had loved as a teenager wasn't worth anything, thereby deciding that who I was as a teenager wasn't worth anything.
I stuck with Harry Potter, and he stuck with me.
I'm not exaggerating when I say that the Harry Potter series, as a whole, has formed most of the bedrock of the person I am now. I did not have a happy or easy childhood; my parents loved me, but like all parents, they are human, and they had their own lives to deal with. They divorced when I was 4. They weren't able to so much as speak to each other without all hell breaking loose until I was 18, and even then it was an uneasy cease-fire. It was the domestic equivalent of the Cold War, and at times I was a white flag, and at other times I was a nuclear warhead. I didn't feel I had much choice.
School wasn't easier. I was smart, and I used that intelligence like armor. I needed some — I was bullied early and often and constantly. Lifetime movie bullying: screws loosened in my chair, lipstick and pads on my locker, called a slut and a bitch and a cow and a hippo. I moved in what felt like an atmosphere of potential torture, under the weight of which I had to trudge without any real reassurance that it would ever end. I went to school with spitballs being lobbed at my head; I went home and had to tiptoe around my parents like one might tiptoe around a minefield.
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The only refuge I had were books, and I sheltered in them like a fox in a burrow. But I didn't see any of myself in any of these characters until Sirius Black: loved, and lost, and tattooed in constellation form on my left shoulder as a reminder that everybody has light and dark inside of them.
Sirius Black, who was so tortured by the prison his life had become that he didn't need anyone else to beat him up — he did an admirable job all on his own. As I was doing. As I still do, all the time. It becomes second nature, you see, when you're told constantly that it's what you should be doing.
Because, if Hogwarts was a refuge for me, it was only that way because the version of myself I had in my head was an eventual version. She was a future me who was older and thinner and less likely to be loathed. All character flaws were forgiven in Harry Potter's world except the cardinal sin of being fat; Uncle Vernon, Aunt Marge, Dudley, Professor Umbridge were all described as obese, and every time it was used as a hammer to drive home their innate unpleasantness. Not only were they cruel and stupid, they were fat! How disgusting! Right, kids? And, when Dudley was finally less unpleasant in book seven and said his borderline-heartfelt good-bye to Harry, all his fat had become muscle. Fascinating.
It's not new, and it's not Rowling's fault, but I think about how readily and completely I accepted that fat was innately and unquestionably horrible and I am terrified. Self-loathing in fat girls is condoned by everything around us. It's in the shows we watch and the books we read, in every other advertisement about a miracle weight-loss pill that will help you be happy as long as you're willing to also be malnourished and/or incontinent. It's in the "no fat chicks" bumper stickers, and the "fat chicks need love too" jokes. It's in reruns of Friends and Will and Grace, and it's in every diabetes joke on Parks and Recreation. It's behind the decision that cast a willowy nymph of a human being as Wonder Woman (an Amazon, for Christ's sake) and behind every question every actress is ever asked about her body or her diet regimen for a role in which she was literally supposed to be dying. It's in tabloid headlines and online anonymous messages. It's in the implication that the Thin Girl Within is the one we really are, and we won't be able to be happy until we become her — and that we don't deserve to be happy, or loved, until we become her. It's everywhere.
What I started to unconsciously understand as I worked my way through puberty, bombarded with TV shows and books and magazines and the opinions of other people that all collectively reminded me that beauty and I lived on separate planets — and, by the way, the planet I was on was my own expanding body — was that as I was, I was not worthy of love.
I was in high school. I finally had friends, and some confidence, and I wasn't consciously thinking about the girls in my books; I wasn't consciously thinking about much at all except how to get good enough grades that I could go to a college in a different state. I felt in no way attached to my body. My body was something that schlepped my brain through the mud. It was a stretch for me to imagine someone I liked wanting to kiss me. It was a god's-honest effort. And I couldn't do it at all unless I imagined myself as someone completely different — someone thinner, someone less loud and more secure, someone thinner, someone effortless and who did not take up as much space, someone thinner.
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