This post is just your imagination.

This just made me cry a little -- partly, given, this is because I am currently a cheerfully bubbling pot of emotion stew these days. However, it hits home. I'm a fat girl. I've always been a fat girl, even when I was a skinny girl (which, when you're really a fat girl, can be an incredibly confusing thing).

Fat girls know that the very last thing a fat girl wants to do is call attention to her fat. However, it is pretty much the predominant thing in her life. As a fat girl, you are preoccupied with trying to simultaneously hide and prove your worth. That's why fat girls tend to be very funny. We tend to be pretty competent, and, unlike the imaginary fat girls, we're usually not lazy.

At least not in front of other people.

We are always watching these images of the "imaginary fat people." I don't know anyone else who would talk about it, but I think we're all thinking the same thing. "I'm not like that." And, as an inevitable subext, "Why do they think I'm like that?"

As I've changed my body over the years, back and forth, the world has changed the way it treats me. I have a theory, formed at my fattest, that people don't want to look at me when I'm fat.

The mere existence of the "imaginary fat people" makes me think -- they don't see me, after all.

Of course, sad but true, the fat girl in me is a little relieved.