Dear Prudence,
I’ve always been fat, from childhood to my 30s. Athletic, fast, strong, but a fat kid. People were mean about it (it was the 2000s), but no one was meaner than my younger sister. I was jealous. She was always skinny, despite hating exercise and eating anything she wanted. She teased me for what I ate, what I wore, and what I looked like, and the idea that any boy could ever like me looking “like that.” My D1 sports scholarship and romantically blossoming at college didn’t shut down her commentary but gave me space to ignore it.
I stayed several states away after college. I’m still very active but still fat. I have a soft round face and a 26.5 BMI that never budges up or down. After so much, I’m mostly neutral on my body. The people closest to me, my husband, my friends, they know I don’t want to talk about it.
Well, in adulthood, my sister gained weight gradually and is now very visibly larger than me. I would be happy to never talk about or acknowledge weight in my family again. But every time I see her, my sister makes mean comments about my weight, or backhanded compliments, or suggests I’ve lost weight in a snide way so she can justify … something?… about her own body. It’s exhausting. I don’t want to be mean about her weight, but that’s my horrible first impulse, so I stay quiet instead. I’m preparing for a family reunion in September, and I don’t know how to shut this down for real.