There were moments from my childhood when I remembered realizing that I was too big. I carried them around as weapons to use against myself, to remind myself there was something wrong with me.

There were moments from my childhood when I remembered realizing that I was too big. I carried them around as weapons to use against myself, to remind myself there was something wrong with me.

If you're making yourself vulnerable in your writing, then they know where to hurt you, which is extra fun. I had to develop coping mechanisms on the fly, and slowly it got better, to the point where now I barely notice. I'm like an old, gnarly turtle now. The interaction with the troll who impersonated my dad made me start to understand who these people are, and I figured out, in a really profound way, that happy people don't do this. It's hard to feel afraid of someone when you pity them.

I've always been an escapist, I guess, and I spend so much time on the internet absorbing ideas and processing the horrors of the world that when I'm actually going to read for pleasure, it's always something ridiculous about a dragon. I'm so saturated with the injustice and torment of the real world that it's really hard for me to get myself to read anything that's even set in our universe, because I'm exhausted by our universe.

When I started tentatively dipping a toe into fat-positive internet spaces, I learned that reclaiming the term was the quickest and most powerful way to make it stop hurting. If you can say, "Yes, I am fat, and it's okay to be fat," then all of a sudden it doesn't hurt when someone says it to you. And it's also just a descriptor. It's like tall.

I don't want any woman to think that I don't have empathy and deep care for all women's body issues. I just want to make sure that we don't only focus on the most palatable ones.

We only get one life. Wasting someone's time is the subtlest form of murder.