'Earlier this month, when one of my TikTok videos racked up over 1 million views in a matter of days, I was unprepared.'
My video slowly found its way to sympathetic accounts. With its popularity ramping up, comments rolled in by the thousands. As I read through each one, I noticed a pattern — one that mimicked my real-life relationships in a surprising way.Most of the comments were supportive, expressing outrage at what the waiter said and even more at the friend who doubted me.“The friend who didn’t believe you is no friend,” another weighed in. “I hope you cut her out of your life.
“I’m sure you just misheard them,” this friend said when I told her. “You’ve been really stressed lately.”Unfortunately, her reaction wasn’t unique. When my sociology professor taught a lesson on the impact of social networks on identity, he closed his talk by reminding us that “If you don’t want to become fat, don’t be friends with fat people!”
I tried to be understanding of their responses. They were new friends, and we didn’t know each other that well yet. They were trying to console me, to assure me that nobody thought badly of me because I was fat. But their denial didn’t reassure me. Instead, it made me feel like a liar, or worse — like I was hallucinating.
What I didn’t recognize at the time was that all of these friends and the therapist had something in common: They were thin. Nothing like my interaction with this waiter had ever happened to them. Interspersed between these comments, cowardly people hiding behind private profiles doubled down on the waiter’s insults:You clearly didn’t learn anything from it since you’re still fat.
Some insisted that servers who lived on tips would never threaten their livelihoods by treating customers so badly. When I informed them that this happened in Europe, where weight shaming is more common and tipping is less, it didn’t change their minds. Even when people outside the U.S. confirmed that this happens all the time in their home cities, doubters still ignored it. They couldn’t imagine any world in which this happens, because it doesn’t happenThey’d never been fat.
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