Fat Farm is a personal memoir about my childhood experience at a fat camp I wrote it in a creative nonfiction class after years of promising myself I never would. For most of my life, this was the story I avoided telling. But when I finally wrote it down, I realized I had way more to say than just “I went to fat camp.”

This piece is less about the camp itself and more about everything that stuck with me after I left. It’s about the way shame travels with you, the way it shows up in your family, in your body, in the stories you tell yourself. Writing Fat Farm let me look at that shame head-on—and, honestly, laugh at it a little. It taught me that sometimes the story you’re most afraid to tell is the one that frees you the most.