I love myself more than chocolate spoon cake.

And I assure you, that means a lot coming from a fat girl.

My mother never let me forget that from the day that the doctor’s told her that it was impossible for me to lose weight.

She took it as a challenge.

Seven years later, and my thighs have the circumference of most people’s waists, and my stomach lurches at the thought of eating one more salad because that was all I had eaten for a whole year after that doctor’s appointment.

Boys had called me four-eyed large-fry, and girls scrawled my name along the insides of bathroom stalls before the words “is a massive whale.”

Even through all that utter bull, the thing that hurt me the most was the fact that my mother had stopped saying, I love you.

And she left bruises along my ribcage when she tried to beat the cellulite out of my thighs, and the kindness out of my heart, neither of which she accomplished.

And even after all that, I’m criticized, and yelled at, and ridiculed, and stomped on and kicked and scolded and frowned at and hurt and looked down on and hung up to dry, not only for refusing to speak to my mother, but for being fat.

Where no one understands that the word now feels like a heartbeat inside the pages of a book, it brings me to life, spitting poetry at rapid fire, and praying until I have a visible clavicle, until I come to terms with the rationality of radicals with no square root in the denominator, causing exponential decay beyond your wildest dreams.

Well, I am here to say that fat is beautiful.

Fat is Fierce and Favorable and Flirtatious and Fun.

But most of all, Fat is FLAWLESS.

Stop using fat as an insult or implying that it has anything to do with looks because I am beautiful and intelligent and strong-willed and powerful and kind,

But most of all I am Fat, and I am Flawless.