Aaaaand, welcome back to another edition of my newsletter!
By now, you know how I operate—I’m always trying to find the narrative threads in what people say.
Today, I want to share something I learned from the writer, speaker, and activist Miriam Lara-Mejia, also known as La Gorda Feminista. Miriam, who started producing content around body diversity, fatphobia, and fat liberation in 2020, has a large following across social media. At my last check, her IG account alone had over 131K followers.
I interviewed her last year, after her Audible audiobook, Como Ser Una Gorda Libre (How to Be Fat and Free), came out. We discussed her approach to content creation and why she started. Her answer? She was tired of being asked the same question in every interview: "What is fatphobia?"
Tired of our lack of… knowledge, she made it her goal to create a definitive resource for the rest of us to find answers to the question she no longer wanted to answer. She wasn’t just motivated by that, though. Creating a resource also meant she could educate people who were interested in the topic and our collective societal issues around body size.
So, she answered that dreaded question with 18 hours of deeply researched storytelling, and in the process, made herself even more of an expert.
And you know what happened?
The questions kept coming.
