The Scale of It

Do you believe the cruel things they say?

“Maybe those people were just assholes.” That’s the one thing I tell myself when I think of my worse encounters. For most of my life, I believed them when they called me fat, as if their cruelty was a fact I had to live with. Those voices—sharp, small, and endless—found their way into my head, shaping how I saw myself long before I ever had the chance t…