TO MY YOUNGER SELF (AND THOSE WHO FIND PARTS OF THEMSELF WITHIN HER)
Published in Your Magazine, December 2022
Read the story in Your Magazine here, page 40
“Hey, where’s your swimsuit, aren’t you swimming?”
I asked one of my closest friends, Hannah, on the last day of school pool party we had every year, we had just completed sixth grade.
“Oh… no I, uh, I’m on my period.”
“Oh okay,” I replied. We were eleven and I knew Hannah like a sister, so I knew she hadn’t started her period. She was lying and I felt betrayed. Hannah was the only other fat girl in our friend group. She was my confidante and she betrayed me. Now, I was the only fat girl in a swimsuit and I felt humiliated amongst the rest of our friends. Hannah sat with her feet in the pool for the rest of the party.
I would later find myself sitting on the edge of someone else’s pool, feet dangling in, blaming my absence on my own period, using the same, false, excuse six years later.
A few years later, now in high school, Hannah came back from the summer with a new quality: thinness. She shed the skin we shared and conformed to societal standards and once again, this feeling of betrayal and abandonment filled me.
I immediately noticed the way our classmates and friends awkwardly pointed out her weight loss and complemented her beyond excess. The sudden way she was accepted by the rest of our high school’s dance team. The way boys at school started taking interest in her. She was the same person, just a different body. Yet, so much had changed in one summer.
I wasn’t necessarily shocked to see the way people treated her. I knew what it would be like if I could also shed my skin and re-enter the gates of our high school wearing Brandy Melville pants. But, I was envious of her. She achieved everything I had ever wanted, yet I still felt betrayed just like that day in June many years prior. She was no longer my confidante the way she used to be.
I always felt this internal battle of nit picking every corner of my body, stuck in a never-ending cycle of guilt. Looking back on this now, still reckoning with body dysmorphia and going through phases of despising or praising everything I see in the mirror—I mourn for my younger self.
The body positive community has praised mid-size and plus-sized women for their bravery and confidence for merely existing and this sends the message that there is something inherently wrong with them to begin with. The ultimate truth is that there is nothing wrong with any of our bodies. This reinforced societal beauty standards and takes away from the body positive movement, and that movement, as I would like to define it, is just knowing that your existence is worth something by simply being a human. There is nothing you have to do or say or eat or wear to make you worthy of kindness.
Looking back, trying to undo the damage done, there are many moments I’m taken back to my memories as if I’m still living it. I remember picking up my sister from dance class, maybe seven-years-old, taking notice that I looked different than the rest of the girls in their black leotards and pink tights. I remember my aunt pointing out a girl’s stomach in the mall and how ‘disgusted’ she was by her wearing a crop top. The ‘Are you hungry or bored?’ mentality taught to us by mothers’ raised in a culture that promoted disordered eating, is still stuck to me like gum on the bottom of your shoe.
I think in many ways I’ll never change. I’ll never outgrow this mindset. I’ll never find myself at peace with my body, but I will be sure to not pass this onto anyone else. Not my friends, nieces, nephews, children—not a single soul.
This past summer I was spending the day with a close family friend of mine, who is seven-years-old. I had recently learned that she had been crying over how fat she was. In comparison to her classmates, cousins, and the sixteen-year-old girls who are her brothers’ friends. It stunned me—how could she, so young, feel such shame towards herself?
I can’t entirely blame any of her feelings on one particular moment or comment anyone made, but all I know is, it isn’t that shocking because I used to be the exact same girl. But, I can try to undo the harm already done. The pain of hating the one home that will never leave you is a curse. To those who have found solace in any part of my story, know you’re not alone.