This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/softmothgoff on 2023-06-27 01:01:35+00:00.

I’m a fat influencer.

I figured it was best to say it up front, so you’d get it out of your system. Yesterday, if someone told me I’d be posting on Reddit–you know, the former home of subreddits with names like “fatpeoplesuk”–I would have told them about the time a fellow influencer had her wedding photos reposted there. She’s not on Instagram anymore because of that, but I know what happened to her isn’t what happened to Devon.

I think. Oh god, I should probably call her.

Anyway, I heard from a friend of a friend that, fatphobic reputation notwithstanding, this was the place to post about…weird experiences. And this was definitely weird.

…I’m really struggling to anonymize this. I mean, what’s the point if you don’t know enough to avoid it? But at the same time, I don’t want you chuckleheads being able to find ME. Maybe some of you are still mad about your other favorite subreddit being shut down.

But Reddit, much as I hate to admit it, still has a bigger reach than any TikTok video I’ve ever made. And, weird as it may seem, I still feel responsible to my community. And when I say “my community,” I don’t just mean the influencers. I mean other fat people. And I know some of you have to be fat… or really, any of you could become so, considering the constantly moving target of “fat” vs “thin” in our culture. Any of you might be desperate enough to do this.

Like I said, I’m a fat influencer. I do clothing hauls of alternative fashion and tell people how well they fit fat bodies. It’s a more difficult task than you think–a lot of places claim they have “extended sizes”, when in reality they’re actually a size 12, not a 1 or 2x. And while a lot has changed in the past decade–there are now brands that carry only plus sizes that aren’t Dress Barn or Torrid–for a truly plus sized person, we usually still can’t go into most clothing stores and buy underwear that fits. Not underwear that is ugly, or underwear that is slightly too big or too small–underwear that will go over our thighs and asses. Or bras that can fit up to a 40” breast band, and G cup breasts. It can be soul-crushing to go into an entire store and realize none of it will fit–

Do you care about any of that? Probably not. But that’s probably why I stuck with it, even when I’ve never been able to quit my day job. I felt like I was giving back to the fat online community, the one place I went where people respected me and my opinions. Where people taught me how to talk to doctors, how to stand up for myself… and stop wearing long sleeve tops in the summer.

I feel so stupid writing that out now. Like I genuinely thought of myself as some kind of fat Captain America figure, bringing clothing justice to the survivors of the 90s war on weight. It seems like such an incredibly small thing now, freeing people to wear shorts in summer and coats that fit in winter, but at the time that’s all I wanted from life.

That’s probably also why he found me. When I met him, I was at the level of online influencer where I still had a day job and it was 50/50 as to whether I was going to give up or go into fat people porn, and I wasn’t ready for the second one. So of course when I got a generic email inviting me to the opening of a new “Instagram destination” in my city, of course I went.

I can’t think of a good name that won’t eventually hint back at him, so I’m going to call him John, which is the most boring name possible. When you imagine him, think of the biggest person you follow online… or whoever you think the hottest member of BTS is. Or Sephiroth.

I know, I know. But there’s a reason why I’m a Millennial doing alternative fashion, okay? I showed up at this event, and an incredibly beautiful man with waist-length hair told me his name was John the Super Mega Influencer, and he took my hand like we were in an episode of Bridgerton and I giggled. I fucking giggled.

Of course, Devon was there too. I think, if I remember correctly, Devon was actually standing next to me the first time I met John, looking polite but wary. Just the week before, Devon had told me that he was at a point in his life where he didn’t trust thin people, that he never wanted a thin friend, and that went double for thin white people. And thin white people was exactly what John was.

He didn’t shake John’s hand–or did he? I don’t remember! But maybe that’s not how it’s spread? Did he eat something I didn’t that night, or was it after? I just cant believe Devon would do something like this voluntarily…but if I’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that I don’t really know much about anybody’s motives.

Here’s the thing I know none of you will believe about Devon: he was beautiful too. He was just as symmetrical as a thin person, and he had a gorgeous bone structure. He did some kind of magical 12 step skin program, so he was always glowing–when I started seeing people say “Lizzo’s face card never declines”, it made me think of Devon.

His fashion sense was also worlds better than mine was. Devon did suits, primarily, and he somehow managed to “bring forward the colors of the diaspora while satirizing menswear’s colonialist roots,” which is a real line from a podcast he was on once. He was the kind of man who could wear rings on every finger without it looking cheap, had an emerald green silk suit, and taught me how to properly tie a scarf when I was wearing pearls. He was also probably 400 pounds, so I knew better than most people how hard he had to work to find those clothes and how much effort he put into his accompanying tea reviews in order to make up for the fact that there just aren’t that many men’s suiting companies willing to make items in his size.

What a fucking eulogy. How is it that the only things I can think to say about Devon are that he was good at tea and that he had a good bone structure?! The fucking things you say about people when they’re dead… I should be saying that Devon was a great friend, that I knew all his secrets, but I can’t say that because I spent the past year getting further and further away from him.

Anyway, I don’t even know if it started at that particular event. All I know is that I was expecting the typical Instagram destination things–flower walls, old time phone booths painted pink, etc.–and instead I saw mountains of cake. Imagine a ballroom with a black-and-white checked floor, and then fill it with every kind of cake imaginable–multi-tier wedding cakes, birthday cakes, those Japanese strawberry cakes, Costco sheet cakes–all of them stacked wildly on top of each other and their icing splattering and pooling onto the floor in a runny rainbow chaos. Devon leaned over and whispered to me, “Is this fatphobic?” and I honestly couldn’t tell.

The cake was a lie, of course. It was all made of sponge and sculpted caulk. At one point, when I was asking John if the cupcakes on the plate next to him had edible jewels, he turned the whole thing upside down, showing how they were affixed to the plate itself. Both of us laughed, awkwardly, and I wondered if I’d somehow messed up everything.

You know, when I set out to write this down, I thought “Sugarland” was some kind of weird “gotcha”–the influencer wasn’t eating, just making it LOOK like he was eating! But then I remember this event was, ostensibly, for taking pictures of yourself and people don’t like photos of half-eaten food on plates.

Does it make it better or worse if John didn’t plan it, any of it? He did make an effort to make sure I was seated next to him for the dinner portion of the evening, and yet both of us struggled to make conversation until finally, out of desperation, I started talking about high school. John replied that he’d once been busted for playing D&D during the height of the Satanic Panic in his hometown, and then the ice was broken and we ended up talking all night.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think that anecdote says more about John than anything: inside, he was as big a dork as the rest of us. Sometimes, people give you respect just based on how you look, and you either accept it as your due or you’re unable to accept it and are constantly asking yourself why no one notices your essential nerdiness. Or rather, why your essential nerdiness is no longer an issue when you look a certain way…

I have to stop thinking of John like that, though. It doesn’t excuse what he did.

But what did John do, at the end of it? Or rather, what did I see him do? In stories like this, there’s usually a bit where you find a box of photos in the attic, or I’d get a string of text messages from Devon where it doesn’t sound like him, and I’d make connections. Neither of those things happened, exactly.

This is what I do know:

First: even after all the nights I spent at John’s apartment, I only once saw a member of his family. He was wrapping up a Facetime call with an older woman when I came in the door. He smiled at me, said “Bye, Mom!” and hung up. But to me, as much as I could see in the screen anyway, the woman looked very, very fat: a completely different body type than her son’s.

Second: I never fully understood exactly what John sold as part of his lifestyle programs. In part, that’s because a lot of influencers don’t actually make anything that they’re selling. Even makeup influencers don’t sell their own makeup, they just buy pre-mixed stuff and put their faces on it. So there’s a chance that John maybe didn’t actually know…

Content cut off. Read original on https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/14jz0f9/i_know_why_your_favorite_influencer_stopped/