I am—presently—a size twelve. That puts me two sizes below officially plus-sized and my clothes at the bottom of every pile in every store. I gained twenty pounds in the past year, but I've never been thin. Thin-adjacent, maybe, and definitely not subject to as much societal pressure as people bigger than me.

No one has ever made a negative comment about my weight to my face.

But that didn't mean I ever passed mirrors without noticing my size. Or that I didn't constantly compare myself to other girls—real and Photoshopped alike—who had smaller waists or narrower thighs than me. I daydreamed about being one of them someday, in a mythical future when I was also somehow athletic and cured of stress eating. My real-life diets and exercise regimes were short-lived and always devolved into disappointment. Pursuing the body I wanted only heightened my already-critical view of the body I currently had.

All along, I enthusiastically championed body positivity. Of course, "fat" shouldn't be a bad word. And of course, fat people should be treated with respect. I supported fat people, and bigger-than-thin people, and people with rolls and cellulite and stretch marks.

But I didn't want to be one of them. I wanted to be an ally, someone who could shout encouragements from the safety of a society-approved body.

And then one day, I looked in the mirror and thought the usual: This dress makes me look wider than I am. Except this time, I thought something much less typical: Actually, this dress just reveals the fact that I am not thin. The dress wasn't warping the truth at all. It just wasn't hiding the truth.

And then I thought: How much would my fashion choices change if they didn't revolve around making me look as thin as possible?

I wasn't thin. I had never been thin. I probably wasn't fooling anyone, and I certainly wasn't fooling myself.

I had always encouraged other people to embrace the word fat as an adjective instead of an insult. Some bodies are bigger than others. And the fact that we have decided the bigger ones are the worse ones is purely arbitrary.

But I had never extended that logic to my own body. And now I did.

And that shift in thinking has been monumental.

It's been a month or so, and while I still struggle with instinctive jealousy seeing another girl's flat stomach in her bikini, I also love my own body—and its resident stomach pouch—much more than I ever have.

I ventured away from the high-waisted bikini bottoms this summer and put that stomach on display, a swimsuit first for me. I bought short shorts and liked the way they looked on my thighs. And I wore the dress, the one that first triggered this revelation, to an event and accepted compliments instead of contradicting them.

I am done wasting time waiting to be thin.

I am done wishing to take up less space.

And I am finally at peace with my body.

This is what I look like. It's what I've looked like for a long time. It's who I am. And I'm done buying into the narrative that who I am is a tragedy or an obstacle to overcome. It's just who I am.

I know girls who have elaborate weight-loss plans charted for themselves, who eagerly anticipate shedding twenty percent of their body weight. I know girls who are much smaller than me but still lament their size. I know girls who post before and after pictures of themselves in gym clothes with captions about how proud they are of their progress.

And none of that is wrong. It's okay to be self-conscious, and it's certainly okay to eat right and commit to fitness. It's okay to lose weight, and it's okay to want to, and it's okay to celebrate doing so. Making healthy choices isn't always a desperate bid to escape fatness.

But I know plenty of people for whom it is. I used to be one of them.

And I wish we didn't live in a world where that mindset is the price for being larger-than-thin. If you aren't a single-digit size, you must hate yourself to compensate for it. You must be working to change the situation, or else you deserve to be scorned and shamed.

It's not acceptable to be fat and content.

And that mentality is so insidious that you don't notice it. Until you do.

And I want more people to notice it. I want more people to question it. I want more people to fight it.

I want more people to be unapologetically fat—and unapologetically free because of it.