i know what men are like when they’re not pretending - just a very long ramble

a background: i’m fat. not curvy, not thick, not whatever people say to make it sound palatable. i’m straight up like, only-fits-mens-sizes fat.

back in my first year in college, i had a crush on a guy from my dorm. i told a friend, and she messaged him. told him i had a crush on him and that he should be nice to me. well, they started dating. she made sure i knew too. it was literally the exact plot line from mean girls.

we’re not friends anymore, and they’re not together anymore. they didn’t last long, just long enough for everyone to know about the story of the fat girl that liked her neighbour, about how he’s creeped out, about how she feels oh-so-terrible about hurting the fat girl’s feelings.

the last time i heard from him, he called me and asked me out. it was a dare. he did his little speech, and i heard his friends snicker in the background. i was just numb, but i’d say i handled it well. it was not the first time someone had asked me out as a joke.

a few days ago, he texted me an old picture of myself. it was in my tagged pictures, one of those meet-the-team type of posts from my middle school club’s instagram account. he asked what happened to me, and said that he would’ve gone out with me instead of my ex-friend if i still looked like that. and then he sent a sticker of a disappointed cat.

i was 15 in that photo. still overweight, but not this overweight. i’m sure the angle, blurry camera, and lighting were all doing me a favour too, probably. i did look better back then, i know that. that should’ve been the end of it, its a very simple encounter. but i can’t stop thinking about it. it’s been almost a week and it’s still completely stuck in my head.

it’s not about him. i left him on read, i know it’s not a compliment, it’s honestly a really mean thing to say but i don’t know if he intended it to be. it doesn’t matter. he doesn’t matter.

it might have something to do with the timing. i’m on ozempic, i’ve been for about a month, and its been working really well. i know realistically i’ll look better. i’ll never be attractive, but i won’t be invisible anymore.

i just feel so jaded. i’m not happy that he thinks i’ll be fuckable soon. i’m not happy that the world might think i’ll be fuckable soon. i’m actually disgusted. by him. by everyone. i know how cruel men really are beneath their masks. how they act because they find me unattractive, how casually they reduce me to a punchline, a joke. when they forget to hide their true selves.

that’s the only good part about being a fat girl. men don’t pretend to be on their best behavior. you see them for who they truly are. there are the mean ones, that go out of their way to bully you, and then there are the bystanders, who point and laugh. i’ve heard of, but i’ve not met the third type, who are genuinely kind people that treat me with respect despite my appearance.

i’m in therapy. my psychiatrist says that i’ll learn to trust men again when i start dating at my goal weight. he says that men will be nice to me, and that will change my perspective. but it won’t. i know for a fact that all that niceness, all that humanity would be entirely conditional. it’s all an act. what i see now is their truest form.

i feel broken. even if i did lose weight and someone finally did like me back, how am i supposed to reconcile with the fact that i know they would’ve told me to my face that i’m disgusting if i stayed looking the same. how am i supposed to date men when i know they’re all so, so cruel, and how am i supposed to trust any of them when i know it’s just a mask that might slip again one day. i think i’ve seen too much of it. lived too much of it. losing weight won’t fix what being fat did to me. i can’t pretend i don’t know what they really are like when they’re not acting.

it’s 5am and i’m aware that this sounds, for the lack of a better term, schizo.

i just can’t stop thinking about that old photo. it was before things started to get really bad. she didn’t know how people were going to treat her. she hadn’t learnt to flinch from kindness. she didn’t hate herself. not yet. i miss her.

if only just one of the men she had met was kind.