Virgie Tovar

One of my yearly rituals is making a list of things I’ve learned in the past year. So, I thought I would make public the list of things I’ve learned, and rather than just focus on one year, I thought I’d share my most important lessons from all the years I have been on this sacred poo-ball called earth.

It all started with a text from my roomie, Kori: "I am manifesting lying out, and getting some sun on my cooch."

I don’t want to move the line of the socially acceptable body by 50 or 100 or 150 pounds. I want to get rid of the line altogether because the line hurts everyone — even the people who are seen as the “winners.”

When we both moved to San Francisco in our 20s, she moved to a wealthy neighborhood and I moved into a neighborhood where old men had phone sex on the pay phone at the laundromat. Our friendship threatened her world in a way that it didn’t mine. The people I knew had neither wealth to protect nor any desire to play at that game, and so their lives were inspired by a freedom I adored. The kind of freedom that allows you to talk about shitting and fucking over dinner.

The 3 Levels of Fatphobia are intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional. Yes, everyone is affected by fatphobia. But the follow-up question is: How?

My unique capacity to see the vile underbelly of “normal” life made me an important witness to the reality of cultural failure. My inability to pass as a “regular lady” had helped build a road out of the stifling reality that so many of us face — that women’s lives are mapped out of for them before they even embark on their life journey.

I arrive at the airport and I see the chubby, bespectacled face of my friend, Andrea. This was the beginning of my adventure with Chile's fat mafia!

October is a busy month for me. It’s one of two peak periods for lecture bookings on university campuses.

I told you I never wanted to speak to him again. I offered that we work together to rid him from our lives. I thought we had both made the realization that he was garbage, but in reality, only I had.

Bodies of all sizes do amazing stuff all the time. Don't let fatphobia hijack your body's right to exist in all its vast complexity.