if you really knew me …

My turn. Because Oprah said to…

If you really knew me, you would know I think I’m fat. Not just fat. Obese. Morbidly so. I have since I was nine.

I sometimes see photos of myself and think “No way that’s me. That person looks normal. Not like Jabba the Hut. Not like me.”

I’ve always been this way. I’ve always not liked people looking at me. People seeing me. Because when you’re 10 and an adult laughs at you and calls you BOSS HOGG (You know, Jefferson Davis) you think everyone else is gonna do the same. You automatically assume you’re fat. Even though you’re not.

My father, once or twice removed – I’ve never understood how ‘removals’ work – use to throw the lovely label at me. BOSS HOGG. ‘Jaws’ was another. I had chubby cheeks. Reeeally chubby cheeks. So I guess it stood to reason I’d like a nickname like Jaws.

I was also called BUFORD – after Jackie Gleason’s Buford T. Justice character in Smokey and the Bandit. My father didn’t call me that. Not originally. That one started with someone who didn’t know any better – my youngest brother. But my father laughed whenever he said it, and everyone knows when you laugh at something a five year old does it just encourages them to do it again.

Who knows. Maybe he really thought I was fat – not the brother, the other. I mean, he’s pretty little himself. One hundred and forty pounds was a healthy weight for him, a grown man. So maybe 72 on a 10 year old girl looked a little on the large side.

Or maybe it was because I was bigger than certain stupid cousins. But certain stupid cousins were already throwing up in the toilets … and they weren’t 5’4. I was. And I had those chubby cheeks. Skin and bones everywhere else. I realise that now, looking at other children. The same age. The same size. Who I’d call skinny.

“I thought I was fat.” I said to my mother a few years ago. “What? You were so thin, you looked sickly sometimes.” Is what she said to me.

Maybe someone should have told my father.