I used to know a girl, lets call her F, who was a friend of some friends. F was gorgeous – tiny and petite. She dressed in designer clothes and was always immaculately groomed. She had many groovy friends who swooned to be invited to her birthday party at a Greville Street bar and told her just how fabulous she was. Whenever she was invited to dinner, she’d bring along elaborate confections she’d made herself –of mousse and praline and sculpted chocolate - as pleasing to the eye as to the palate. It never mattered how much she ate because she just couldn’t put on weight. F was quiet and calm without being dull and never had to make any effort to get attention. She knew when to dress up and when to dress down. She knew who was cool and what bars to go to and what drinks to drink.

F was everything I wasn’t. I hated her.

I hated her and envied her and wanted her dead in that way that only a fat girl can hate someone who has EVERYTHING. Because, as you know, a perfect body and good looks and expensive clothes and being able to eat without ever worrying about it – those things are everything. They are the difference between happy and sad; between success and failure and, sometimes even between good and evil (fat is ALWAYS evil, by the way). With these things I'd be happy. It was true because that's what I'd been told all my life.

At this time, F and I tended to be the only girls in a group of gay guys. Well, except her husband. Okay, maybe NOT except her husband but that is a whole other (although in some ways related) story. Thrust into each others company, I’d always feel like the raggy doll, the reject. I’d simmer and stew; competing with F was like running against an Olympic champion, a gold medalist. So I’d accept another slice of her chocolate mousse cake and pretend to smile while everyone complimented her on the cut of her sunfrock and how it hung so well.

I invited F to my birthday party but she had disappeared from social group for a while and I hadn’t expected her to turn up. She did, albeit late. She was listless, spending much of the night in the corner talking with a friend of mine.

The next day, I wanted to bitch about the seemingly perfect F to said friend, the only friend with whom I could bitch about her. But he stopped me. He stopped me with a question – had I noticed that F was wearing long sleeves? It had been a hot night.

It took a while for me to grasp what he was saying. F’s life was far from perfect. Her husband was leaving her, she’d lost her job. She was destitute, in debt and suffering from depression. Her husband had returned to their flat in the middle of the afternoon, believing she was at work, and found her in the bathtub with her wrists slashed.

A few weeks later, we were invited to F’s place for dinner. When we arrived, she was delighted to see us, funny and full of humour. Before we’d finished the main course, she’d mentally unravelled before our eyes. Whether it was the depression or the anti-depressants, I don’t know. She mumbled in incoherent sentences and dropped things and slumped on the couch. We helped her to bed and cleaned up the house.

We really didn’t know what to say to each other and left without mentioning what was going on.

The lesson, I guess, is pretty obvious. There is no point in envying anyone else, no matter how good their lives look from the outside. You don’t know what’s going on inside, you don’t know the hurt they feel, the pain they suffer. I’d like to get all twee and say that F later sat down with me and told me that she’d always envied me, that she found things in my fat, dishevelled life that she wanted. But seriously, that was never going to happen. She was still thin, she still had the designer clothes and she still had the perfect metabolism. She could make a dessert that looked like it came from a French patisserie.

Anyway, I’ve lost touch with F now. I’d like to think that she got it all back together and that she’s happy now. She was a nice girl and she deserves happiness - you can’t fully hate someone who makes a killer chocolate mousse cake. I’d like to think her life glows with all sparkly things she lost along the way. Evenso, deep down, I’d like to think that her metabolism ground to a halt and she’s stacked on 20 kilos. I might be wiser now but I'm no saint.