The other day, a friend of mine was minding his own business in the gas station.  He was holding a magazine (not a dirty one) featuring a cute, young actress that he likes a lot, and he was waiting to buy it.

     A young lady in front of him, for no other reason than apparently, lack of food and the heady effects of wearing too much Gucci, made a few rude comments regarding his weight, and implied that he was bringing the magazine home for less-than-honorable purposes.

     His response was not composed by the higher angels of his nature.  In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was wrong, and he lowered himself by making it.

     His response amounted to a verbal sexual assault…but then again, her initial instigation was a verbal sexual assault.

     But she’s young and cute, and somehow has enough money to dress in the latest and most expensive fashions…and he’s overweight and "old" (not 20-29) and male.

     So he’s accountable for his actions, and she’s not in the minds of society…and he’d better be careful of what he says.

     Bullshit.  There is such a thing as an enough point.  And if you callously, gratuitously, and maliciously invade another person’s life and give them a good shove just because you think you can get away with it…and then you find out that you were the final mover that put them over the enough point…

     …well, I’m not going to say you “deserved it”, because that’s not true.  But I am going to say that there is a certain level of responsibility that you have to accept.

     I’ve been in my friend’s position before.  5’7”, 245 lbs.  We were at the Renaissance festival and a couple of guys in their early twenties came rampaging out of a crowd and trampled Adventure Boy, who was four.  I yelled at them, while trying to carry my newborn Grasshopper over to see if Adventure Boy was OK.  They yelled “Oh shut up ya fat cow, he’s OK”, without missing a beat.

     Adventure Boy was bruised, shaken, and crying.

     Had I not been holding my new-born and trying to care for an injured pre-schooler I probably would have done something a lot more permanent, damaging, evil, and clever than yell “fuck you” at their backs as they achieved their goal…the line for the beer tent.

     Had I not had defenseless small children that that I was solely responsible for at that moment, I would have been calling around for bail money that night…assuming they allowed me bail.

     My anger at their treatment of my child was dismissed easily because of my weight.

     In fact, the “fat” card is used to trump just about everything in our society.  If you are fat, and you are in a social situation where you have a conflict with someone “You’re fat” is supposed to shut you up and shut you down and make you back off.  And it usually does. 

     That is the most illustrative anecdote I have about that attitude.  To list them all would be tedious.  The crude jokes muttered so that you could just barely hear them…the disgusted looks…the being treated on a daily basis as less than human because of weight…total strangers coming up to you in public and feeling free to tell you to have some “self-control”.

     Oh, if they only knew the level of self-control it took to not hospitalize them, they would never say the words again for any amount of money.

     Same with the teeny-bopper who came up to me in the mall (no doubt on a bet with the group of tittering little things behind her) and said “You know, if I ever got as fat as you, I’d shoot myself”.

     Even my doctor told me I just needed “some self-control” and needed to do “pushups, you know, push-up from the table”.  This was his response to my request for a thyroid test.  It was seven years before I got up the courage to ask again, get tested, get treated, and take my life back.

     There’s the lady at the gym who was forever telling me I needed to eat less, and that exercise would do me no good unless I got a little self-control.

     Sometimes it bothered me how I looked.  But not most of the time.  I’ll tell you right now that I’ve BEEN drop-dead gorgeous…and sometime when we’re both really, really drunk I’ll let you know how that worked out.  I mean, sure, we all like to feel attractive, but looks were not my primary concern.

     It was how I felt.  It was feeling the daily limitations of the weight on a body that used to feel like it could do almost anything.  It was the feeling old, and tired and dragged down and put down…and not knowing how to change it.

     It was having tiny people come up to me, a total stranger, and give diet and exercise advice unsolicited.  Worse, it was diet and exercise advice that I was following, and sometimes they were giving it to me while they held a bag of chips and a can of Coke in their hands.

     Another thing that bothered me was that despite having low blood pressure, low resting heart rate, being able to run a ten-minute mile, kick over my head and do sit-ups until people got tired watching me, I was in the same health category as people who had to be lifted from their beds with a crane.

     What bothered me is that anyone who met me on the street only needed to know one thing about me “Wow, she’s fat.”

      People looking at my health profile made decisions about insurance, health planning, treatment, based on two words “morbid obesity”.

     It can get to you on a very deep and profound level.  It can become your identity, not just in the eyes of the rest of the world, but in your own.  And it can settle into your bones and make you feel that nothing else in the world matters.

     I still exercised.  I’ve exercised all my life.  Not to look good, but to feel good.  I do it to push the boundaries of what I can do…to go farther, feel better, do more.  Beyond that, it gives me a feeling of being strong, capable and in control that I need in my life.  And I’ve been addicted to endorphins longer than anything else.

     I’ll never be a size five again.  I shouldn’t have been a size five in the first place.   It was bad and wrong, and the habits that got me there most likely contributed to the thyroid problem that came later.

     Besides, being a size five leads to the same problems that being a size 24 causes.  All people need to do is look at you and they already know all they need to know about you.

     And I guess that’s the point here, whether you’re a gorgeous size five blond rocket scientist, or a surprisingly fit and healthy size 24, or a person wearing sweats because they’re comfortable who can do an eye-ball estimate of a fabric composition and thread-count at 50 yards, or a black man on the street, or an old bald white guy in a three-piece suit driving an Oldsmobile…

…sometimes it just gets to you.  Sometimes mean people being mean just because they think they can, will push you past the “enough point”, and sometimes you just aren’t the best person you can be.  It doesn’t make it right, and it doesn’t make it good.  It’s just…human.