Truth is the female body is always heavy, regardless of its size.

(Content note: Talk about weight gain, weight loss, and sexual harassment.)

Something happened yesterday that hasn't in years.


I was cat-called as I walked from the parking lot into the CVS to pick up my prescription.


It was frustratingly common in my teens. In my 20s, it was ubiquitous. I literally could not even walk from my front door to my car without some douchebag loudly commenting on my tits or my butt, or some other means of asserting that my body was there primarily as an object for his amusement.


The one good thing about severe clinical depression hitting hard in my late 20s, pulling me into its depths, and packing 60 pounds onto my 5'1 frame, is that I hit this amazing Limbo that I didn't know existed - a land where you're too fat to be visible to serial harassers, and too thin to be visible to fat-shamers. It's entirely likely that my white privilege had something to do with this. Black ladies of similar height and build to me still complain of this dehumanizing sort of treatment, and I absolutely believe them. There is no body more disrespected than the black, female-presenting body.


That having been said, the last time I was drive-by sexually harassed before yesterday was in 2012, when someone asked me how much my services cost. (I was wearing pajama pants and an over-sized sweatshirt.) It was the last time I was under 155 pounds. Between 2009 and 2015, I went from 120 to 182. Lo and behold, I get back down to 153, and here we are. It's enough to make a girl want to stay fat. Alas, my cholesterol was paying a hefty price according to my last screening. I also really like being able to run for 20 minutes without stopping these days. So, onward I go. I made some jokes to David about how I'm going to "dress like such a ho" when I get back under 135, but... Now I don't even want to wear clothes that fit me. I actually almost forgot how much this sucks.


The cold, hard truth is that if I'm out and about with David, the odds of anyone hollering their bullshit drops to nearly zero. As long as I'm with him, I can basically wear whatever I want. In their eyes, I'm his property. They'll never respect me, but they do respect what they perceive as his ownership of me.


And none of this information will stop me from regaining my body and wearing whatever I want. I just wish that reality wasn't so... Well, heavy.

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