My mom has at her disposal a bouquet of uncomfortably specific hillbilly phrases. While someday in the future I hope to spend an entire post extolling the virtues of “tapdancin’ and fartin’” and its finer descriptive qualities, today is Fat and Sassy’s day, and fat and sassy shall rule it.

Fat and sassy is a mood, or rather a state of being. Like most of my emotions, fat and sassy can best be understood through food, though food is not a requirement. Imagine you’ve just made and devoured a big dish of salty pinto beans (since we’re talking about my hillbilly roots) with ketchup on top. You’re proud, satisfied, and more than a little puffed up on your accomplishments. Your belly is out and that doesn’t bother you. You are, in that moment, fat and sassy. Now remove the food from the scenario. You’ve just finished painting your bathroom pink and your houseguest seems happy for you and a bit jealous, and you can’t help but to swing your ample hips and strut your fat and sassy self around.

Fat and sassy is round and happy. It doesn’t have to be fat, but it damn sure feels good that way. If fat and sassy danced, it would start with a toe tap and a grin. If it was watermelon, it would have a dash of salt that inexplicably makes it sweeter. It’s me, in my finest moments, and I’m it.

This blog has been in my soul for some time. Writing about my life as an unapologetic fat feminist is what I can never stop doing and what I refuse to start. It’s an identity I hold close while I push it hard until it’s a safe arm’s length away. I am, at is happens, full of contradictions. I contain multitudes. They’re here somewhere under layers of soft belly that I have often wished I could cut off — savage and final. I don’t always want to destroy my fat. Sometimes I want to cultivate it. Sometimes I bop it about like a round rubber ball or fall asleep with it cradled in my hands. Mostly, I just want to love it always the way I love it when I forget to remember to hate myself.

This tiny corner of the internet will be safe for fat acceptance. It will be safe for body love and bravery and poetry and pride and shame. It will also be a safe place for weight loss when it needs to be. I won’t be a part of a war waged between fat acceptance and weight loss because we all know that dichotomy is reductive. But this is not a weight loss blog and it is not a safe space for the phrase Goal Digger.

I am a goofy sap who meows loudly along to pop songs, a train wreck whose grief overpowers her from time to time, a caretaker who pushes food-shaped love onto all who know her, a font of determination who is always itching to give up. So that. This will probably contain some of that. Welcome to the party.