Cuz I love you

Andrew Nakamura/Daily. For as long as I can remember, I have always been fat. For me, self-love could never be a matter of “you’re not fat” or “it’s all in your head” because through my daily interactions with other people, I’m often reminded that others see me as fat even when they mean well and especially when they don’t. As such, I had no choice but to confront fatness itself and accept myself as I was. However, loving my body was much easier said than done, because fatphobia is so ingrained in society that unconscious bias is accepted as reasonable and almost never challenged. When I was a young teenager, I sunk many hours into scrolling through Tumblr and my Instagram explore page (that exclusively consisted of reposts from Tumblr) in order to find some sort of inspiration to love myself. While I waded through a flood of posts, I saw countless variations of “you have to love yourself before you can love someone else.” At the time, I didn’t think critically about these statements. They promoted self-love, which I recognized as a good thing even if I didn’t really know what that was supposed to mean to me personally.…
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