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By Root 330 0

Me would seem to pop through to the surface and say, “Hold on, wait a minute, what’s going on here is fucked up.” This, however, was not one of those moments. In this moment a fat little boy was given permission by his adult guardian to order a second hot fudge sundae, and the fat little boy, being a little boy, said yes. As I tucked into my second sundae, my grandmother smiled, enjoying seeing her grandson made happy. Now, though, I imagine there was more to that smile. I like to think that that smile was a sly wink to all the women who would someday not fuck me, and a fuck-you to all those who might.

Now it is not my intention to get all victimy, as I know just as well as the next guy how to put down a spoon. And I don’t really think that the women in my family were conscious of the fact that by overfeeding me they were channeling their aggression towards the women who might someday steal me away. But, while it might not take a whole village, it definitely takes more than one person to make a fat kid. And the fat kid is what I was, with the “husky” jeans, President’s Physical Fitness Test dread, and chafing thighs to prove it.

Navigating the waters of adolescent intergender relations is tricky business for even the most psychologically aerodynamic youngster, but doing it with the added weight of added weight is far more conducive to sinking than swimming.

For the longest time I couldn’t fathom how a girl could find me attractive, when there were so many other examples of young manhood burgeoning unfettered. And since I was doing such a fantastic job rejecting myself, it seemed redundant to let the local girls get a crack at rejecting me, too. So, except when absolutely necessary (homecoming dances and proms), I didn’t date. At the time, and in later therapy sessions, I would put this down to being the product of two divorces; to being so shell-shocked by the dissolution of my parents’ marriage and my mother’s subsequent one, that any attempt at a romantic relationship was so deadly important and fraught with eventual domestic doom that I would just rather sit on the sidelines and watch the other kids play the game. Looking back, however, I think a stronger contributing factor to my inaction was simply the fear of having to take my clothes off in front of somebody. Luckily, at some point in college, biology won out and I realized that if I didn’t cut out this self-loathing bullshit I was never going to get laid. And to my surprise, I was very good at getting naked. A genius, even. God bless artsy girls and booze!

I am now on the southern end of forty, married, and the father of two, and my weight is what it should be for a man my age, a health concern. This is because of my wife, whose love and affection make me feel safe and secure and give me a place in the world to really be. And while I really do believe in and truly know unconditional love, I don’t want to give the impression that my wife is that kind of asshole who will stand by her man no matter how much he messes his spiritual diaper. No, don’t get me wrong: if I was to really bloat up, she might very well leave me. Or at least start sleeping around, bless her heart.

And so, aside from wanting to be with my family for as long as I can, my girth, or occasional lack of it, is almost entirely a professional matter. Now that I’m a grown-up it’s as if I’ve somehow transformed my fear of rejection into a career as a rejection junkie, or at least as somebody with a high rejection tolerance. Why would someone with a history of happiness-crippling body issues choose to go into a line of work so heavily focused on appearance? To a job where it seems I can’t read for a part unless the script refers to the character as “expansive,” or “a bear of a man,” or in the better-written scripts, plain old “fat”?

My coping mechanism is fairly simple, and it goes like this: I have brainwashed myself to believe that if they like me, they’re geniuses. And if they don’t like me, then they’re idiots, and I will gather the pearls I have cast before the hopeless, clueless swine and head