“Sometimes, those compliments—meant to assuage unconfirmed insecurities—don’t end with a simple, awkward remark. Increasingly, strangers, friends, and family will enlist me in the work of breaking down their own insecurities, often without my consent. Thin people—especially thin women—expect fat people like me to act as midwives for their confidence. How do you do it? Teach me your ways! They expect fat women in particular to become midwives for their waning self-confidence. We are the hired help who never asked for the job and are certainly not paid for it. We are expected to accompany thinner friends to stores that do not carry our sizes, watching as they try on clothing that makes them feel insecure and boosting their confidence with constant reassurances. We become set pieces, two-dimensional props for their more real lives. More than that, we reflect their bodies back to them, their imperfect thinness made beautiful by its proximity to the abject failure of our fatness. We are reminders of what could be. Thinner people embrace fatter people as a way of finding their relative virtue. At least I’m not that fat.”