Grade 5 was the first time I had a boy tell me he had a crush on me.

Well, he didn’t exactly tell me. He sent me an email to my newly minted email address, babybop90; it was an e-card playing Shaggy’s “Angel” with exploding hearts, kittens sitting on fluffy clouds, and glittery letters saying, “LUV U GURL.”

There were a lot of emotions circulating my 11-year-old, barely-pubescent body upon opening that email—horror, excitement, surprise, lust—but the one I remember most vividly is embarrassment. I felt embarrassed not for me, though, but rather for him.

Grade 5 was also the first time I remember being aware that I was fat.

My class had just concluded our presentations for Career Week. The topic: “What do I want to be when I grow up?”

There were firemen, teachers, veterinarians, and a large handful of marine biologists (the job that had a chokehold on every girl in the 1990s), but I chose actress. I wore a pink feather boa and recited my essay in the form of an Oscar acceptance speech, and I thought I absolutely smashed it. I thought my classmates were going to remember that moment years later when I was super famous and say, “Wow, I can’t believe I knew her then.”

Instead, one of them said: “Actresses aren’t fat, they’re beautiful.”

This wasn’t said to my face, but rather to a group of my classmates, who were all nodding in agreement before they realized I had turned the corner, running right into their debrief about my presentation.

Immediately, my soft, mushy little unformed brain accepted their statement as fact. “Actresses aren’t fat, they’re beautiful.” And so when, weeks later, I received that e-card blasting Shaggy, all I could focus on was how embarrassing it would be to have a crush on a fat girl. Fat girls couldn’t be pretty—they were fat. They couldn’t be glamorous, or wear feather boas, or have careers in the spotlight. I was a delusional, ugly wannabe—what kind of weirdo would “luv” me? How utterly embarrassing for him.

I’m 34 now. I have a husband and a child and a career—yes—as an actor. And I’m still fat. But the thing is, even now as a 34-year-old married mother working my dream job, I still on some level believe the words that those mean kids said.

Because our society has so openly and unabashedly hated fat people for so long, it would be ignorant of me to deny the unconscious fatphobia that hunkered down into that mushy little brain of mine and stayed there.

We are obsessed with two things as humans: health and appearances. We want to live forever, but not look like we have. We want to sculpt our bodies into machines that get “the most” out of life, even if we spend all of our waking hours doing it. We want to feel good, but only if doing so also looks good. And for whatever reason, no matter how many scientific articles and medical journals say otherwise (and they do), we have decided that fatness spits in the face of both of those obsessions.

We have unconsciously determined that someone’s health is an indication of their value to our society. And we have very consciously determined that fatness is an indication of a lack of one’s health. Ask any fat person with a judgemental parent.

Chronically ill people, people with disabilities, and people with invisible illness understand the deep, infuriating burn of the health/appearance paradox. Why have we decided that we can determine somebody’s health just by looking at them? Can’t thin people be unhealthy, too, and at the same rate of which fat people are? And why is it that unlike with other manifestations of “unhealthiness,” we have decided to put a moral judgment on fatness?

My 11-year-old self was not guilty of some grand moral failing by existing in the body I had. It was not wrong of me to want the things I wanted for myself—to have the aspirations I spoke so proudly about—while being fat. That boy with his glittery e-card and interesting taste in music was not wrong for seeing me as a lovable, cool girl to crush on.

As someone much smarter than me once said, “there are worse things to be than fat.” So as we push on into this new year and bring with us new goals, resolutions, and hope, remember that your body, no matter what it looks like or how it does or does not function, is not a representation of how good or bad you are as a person. It never has been and it never will be.

That can only, in fact, be determined by one thing: how much you secretly like “Angel” by Shaggy.

Cheyenne Rouleau is the creator and star of Fat Joke, which is showing at the Anvil Theatre in New Westminster from January 31 to February 2.

© Georgia Straight