“Hungry Girl” by Kim Johnson

image by Pauline Rochette | @rochette.pauline

I have always been fat. Bar that year in matric. I have always been soft, no angular edges or little

elephant elbows. No delicate bird-like wrist bones, or collar bones, or ribs breaching my surface.

I have always been fat...but I have been S T A R V I N G.

Glutted with taut bellies, bikini bridges, slender necks, upturned nipples and noses... laughing girls

with ankles as delicate as wrists. I choked on girls as paper thin as the pages of

CosmopolitanFairLadyMarieClaireGlamour. The idols in my girl bible. I’d cut them out, use them to

punctuate my space. They’d crowd, festooning mirrors, populating vision boards. One guarding the

fridge. Paper fetishes to ward off the horrors of fat and ugly.

In my girl bible, people who looked like me were always waiting to become. A way station on the journey

to really living. “BEFORE” to the ever tantalising, unequivocally good, nigh unreachable,

thinhappypretty “AFTER”. Or the butt of a joke. You know, that funny fat woman.

This was no good fare for a growing-up-fat girl; or any girl for that matter. There was simply not

enough on the menu. In this unyielding landscape of thinperfectbeautiful, there was not a morsel to

sustain my Self.

Then, stumbling through social media, I come upon a smorgasbord of fat bellies, thick thighs, double

chins and PRIDE, wrapped up in a glorious fuck-you attitude. Here I am not “BEFORE”, I am not waiting

to happen, I am NOW. I throw away my girl bible and take my daily bread here: “Fat Girls Doing

Things” and “Fat Girls Can”.