Let’s all hop in my time machine (don’t worry, it’s bigger on the inside, so I know we’ll all fit) and travel back to 1991, the year of my junior prom. It’s a big event in the lives of most high schoolers. And for me, it defined my entire high school experience perfectly.
I didn’t have a date to my junior prom. In fact, I didn’t have a single date all throughout high school. I had a lot of male friends, but none of them were interested in me romantically. So I went solo to the biggest dance of my high school life. Well, actually, I went with a big group of friends, but they all had dates. I was the seventh wheel! I’d like to take this opportunity to, belatedly, thank those friends for not making me feel more uncomfortable and awkward than I already did at the time.
Prom dresses. If you were a “regular” size, those two words probably made you feel excited. Think of all the beautiful dresses you got to try on at the mall! You could have your pick of color and style, ruffles or lace or satin or silk. Depending on how much money you had saved from your after-school job, the sky was the limit. For me? I couldn’t find a single dress that would fit me that didn’t make me look like a dowdy, frumpy mother of the bride. Thankfully, my mom knew a seamstress who custom-made a dress for me. For fat girls going to the prom in 2013, there is a much bigger selection of dresses for them to choose from. Still not the variety provided to skinny girls, but we’ve made a lot of progress in the past 20+ years. My dress was lovely, but there was still a sense of stigma to the fact that I couldn’t just walk into Deb and pull something off the rack like all of my friends.
So there I was, in my homemade dress, dateless, at the prom. And what happened? I was elected to the prom court. Princess, to be precise. To say I was shocked and overwhelmed is an understatement. My classmates voted for me for this! I was so thrilled. There may have been a few tears. But still: dateless and wearing a homemade dress.
That night was my high school life in a nutshell: no boyfriend, but lots of friends, doing the best I could with the limited clothing selections I was given. I’m not telling you this story so you’ll feel sorry for me. I’m actually telling you this so that I can say thank you to the people who loved me despite my weight. Who didn’t shame me or pressure me to change. Sure, there were a handful of boys who made it their job to make fun of my size, and there was the guy who said to me, “If you wore make up and lost weight, you’d actually be pretty” (and yes, I remember that verbatim). But for the most part, I was surrounded by people who loved and cared for me, who saw me as a friend and classmate and neighbor first, not as a fat girl.
I read a lot of blogs now about the experiences of fat people. Every day my heart breaks to hear the stories of classmates, friends, and even (sometimes especially) family who shame, ridicule, and abuse the fat people in their lives. So I just wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you to the Class of 1992, and to everyone who treated me like any other teenage girl, even though I was bigger than most of you. I truly believe I would not be as confident and self-assured as I am today if it wasn’t for the way I was treated twenty years ago, during those scary and formative high school years.
Except the boys who said no to me when I asked them to be my prom date. I’m still bitter about that. But just a little. 🙂
