To body positive friends who don’t wear plus sizes.
I’ll never forget the way I first heard of your mother. A mutual friend told me about your wedding day: how happy you looked, the way the ceremony shook and shone with joy for you and your partner. At the reception, he overheard your mother, talking to you.
“Well, we can’t all reach goal weight for the big day, can we?”
He watched your face fall, drained of its color. You forced a smile and figured out how to slip away. You didn’t return to her after that.
I know how much it hurts to feel that constant pressure, especially from the ones you love most. The friends, the aunts, the exes. The pressure to lose weight before the wedding, before the summer, after the baby, after the holidays. The impossibility of those last 5, 10, 20 pounds. The ways in which your body is always slightly wrong, its ideal self perpetually just out of reach.
The inescapability of friends talking about how much they hate their arms, bellies, thighs; friends looking for diet buddies; friends frowning at their reflections in dressing room mirrors; friends looking for diet buddies, even when those diets masquerade as cleanses or detoxes. The insidious closeness that comes with bonding over hating your bodies. It must be so much for you to bear.
