But remember that all of us are trapped inside bodies that aren't perfect. Mine is also superfat, and I've been acutely aware of being fat since I was 5.

For the past 21 years, I've also had fibromyalgia, and ofc spent 8 years blaming my fatness, just like every doctor I saw did (when I even bothered to mention the chronic pain and fatigue and sleep issues that all developed out of nowhere, shortly after 9.11.01).

Like you, I have lost a lot. Limited mobility sucks, but I would have that at any size.

I'm not at all going to tell you that you have to like or even love, let alone feel positive about your body because I know all too well that this is challenging enough living in a fat body in a world that reviles us. Add in chronic pain or medical conditions, and there are many days when the most I can feel about my body is, well, acceptance in so much as, this is my body. It is my home. Hating it never made it healthier, smaller or less sick. It never made anything better.

As for feeling positive, well... Those days are few and far between.

But I'm also all for celebrating the body I have, as it exists. I've done this with tattoos. With fun colored hair. With makeup. With sex, whether solo or with my partner at the time.

I've done this by traveling, by wearing a swimsuit for the first time in 3 decades this summer. If things go as planned by the end of next year, I'll have been to all 50 states.

I have privilege. I'm white, cis, straight passing, if I want to be, by virtue of having fallen for and marrying a cis white man. We're financially comfortable (though I have been all over the spectrum on the financial end of things, and was often very poor growing up).

I carry a lot of trauma, too, though. Much of it ties into my weight, and how I was put on my first diet at only 8.

On my worst days, I obsess over death because virtually everywhere I've been over the years, someone, often a friend or lover or family member has predicted my early demise. Sometimes that has come from a so-called medical professional, and very often from total strangers who don't know shit about me, other than I'm fat. Since I also have OCD, ADHD and GAD, it's pretty hard for me to not obsess at all.

I met my would-be husband when I was 22 and 380 lbs. I married him 5 years later, and my weight had fluctuated a good bit, but when we got married I was just about 380 again. He has loved me at my lowest adult weight of around 325 and he's loved me at my highest known weight of 515.

I'm sorry you feel so isolated and alone. But I've seen so many fat people, even superfat people like us, in happy, loving, healthy relationships. I know it's possible.

I also know, however, that it took not being willing to settle (something my fat father did repeatedly) and it took finding some sense of self-worth, if not exactly self-love or positivity, to be in a place where I was ready and healthy enough emotionally to fall in love and maintain a relationship.

You're body size doesn't have to continue to define you. It's not easy, and I won't lie and say it is. But there is a certain amount of choice involved in whether or not you decide to try to develop hobbies, cultivate friendships or other relationships, or just stay isolated and alone.

It might feel like your body is a prison, and because of how our culture treats people who look like you or me, there's absolutely so much external hatred and limits that it's not without justification and truth.

But I'm not going to give in and let that consume me, either. My father did that. He let his wife (the third one) and his size suck all of the joy and happiness out of him. And that, more than anything, is why he died at 59. He had not cultivated a life worth living anymore. He let all of his dreams dry up. He abandoned his hobbies because of my stepmother. In the end, I'm sure people thought it was his body size that killed him. He had health problems, some of which he might've had anyway. But more than anything, he just gave up on living.

Maybe I won't live any longer than he did. But I'm sure as hell not giving up on life until life gives up on me.