Thin privilege is not having your friends blaming you for being too difficult to shop for (because-you’re-fat-duh) when they give you awful presents in your first birthday party ever.

This was ages ago but I still hate birthdays. Long story:

As a kid I’ve never had a birthday party with friends. My mom’s excuse was they were out of town on vacation because it was in August, the reality was we couldn’t afford to have a party. I wasn’t popular at school, the usual, the kids laugh at me and called me names (guess what for!) and when at 8 years old a kid gave me my first invitation I was really happy. When my mom told me I couldn’t go, I cried and beg until she had to explain me that we couldn’t afford the nice present I was expected to bring. When the next day I told the girl my made up excuse to decline she said “whatever, you would have eaten all my cake.”

At 14 I had a close group of friends, they never made fun of me but I was still “the fat one”. To celebrate our birthdays we used to go out to have dinner (everyone pays for themselves) drink sangria and sneak into a disco. We put 5 euros each to buy presents that mostly consisted in clothes from the same stores that only carried sizes 34-40. They wondered why I never wanted to have a dinner birthday party. I hated those shopping trips. I didn’t fit in those stores and I was ashamed of telling my size or to bring them to the only store I had to buy from, “the shop for fatties with boring cloths for old people”. I didn’t wanted them to also laugh at me. That year we started to give to each member of the group an engraved bracelet as a present and I didn’t wanted to be left out, so I had my first birthday party ever.

It was fun, it was like every other Saturday night until presents time. I was anxious all week and I could see that they give each other weird looks. they told me the bracelet (the only reason I was doing this) wasn’t ready yet. I said it was ok and opened the others gifts. It was school supplies, like a damn pink binder and stuff and one of those the best of compilation cd of music I didn’t like, god I didn’t owned a discman at that time. I said thank you and smile but they started to defend themselves “you’re too difficult to buy for” “you don’t like it, do you?”, at some point, even thought I never complained they were attacking me “we had to spend the rest of the money and its not like we could just buy you a cute t-shirt”. Like it was my fault. I was fat and they couldn’t buy presents where they always did. I was fat and they didn’t wanted to think what could I be interested in besides clothes.

It might be a silly story but reflects that if you are fat even the people you trust might sometimes not see you as a person with interests but just as a fat body they don’t know what to do with. Instead of ‘oh, she likes to draw let’s buy her art supplies’, they thought 'ugh, she’s not gonna fit in any of this, let’s go buy whatever because we’re running out of time’.