You Are Not Your Thoughts
Make it stand out
For the longest time, I thought I was ugly.
Truthfully, I still do. It’s just that I now look back at the girl I was then, who thought she was fat, who hated her body and wanted more than anything to be thin.
Growing up in the early 2000’s was rough. I have to give some credence to the influence that the culture had on me, through the collective unconscious. I was, like anyone, internalizing the preferences that were shown to me, through the media, peer relationships, and my own experiences in public and private spaces.
All of that is to say, being thin was the beauty ideal and I was not that.
For so long, I thought of myself as fat. Really, for almost my entire life, I’ve had a conceptualization of myself as being larger than other people, too curvy, and have had an active desire to make myself smaller. It didn’t help that I was adopted and many of my genetic relatives shared the body type I had. Research has shown that one’s weight and size is often heavily (no pun intended, actually) determined by your genetics. How you carry your weight, even more so. Because my adopted relatives didn’t share my physical traits, it led me to feel insecure, especially because of how my body was such a big focus in my father’s household. They would treat me almost as a second class citizen, because of my body. My younger step sister, who was naturally very, very thin, would wear bikini’s and denim shorts all summer, while my step mother would only buy me one pieces and looser fitting or longer shorts, because the types of clothing my step sister wore weren’t “flattering” on my body type.
When I look back at pictures from my younger years, I’m stunned at the normal-looking size girl who is staring back at me. I really wasn’t fat, at all. Sure, my stomach was never perfectly flat and my thighs always touched, but I look like a completely normal kid. I don’t see any reason that I would have looked unsightly if I’d worn denim shorts of a bikini; not that that’s even something people should think about kid’s bodies. We sexualize girls from such a young age that even something as innocuous as a bathing suit is judged according to how ‘revealing’ it is, as if a young girl who is showing her stomach as an attempt to be comfortable at the pool is something that could be provocative. All of this though is a reflection on them and so many of the other deeper, painful, and traumatic experiences I’ve had at their hands and on their watch.
Now, as an adult woman, I’ve suffered from negative body image and probably some level of body dysmorphia, as a result of this negative attention. I’m often hyper-fixated on how I look and can be very critical of my body. I’ve also had disordered eating and have had fluctuating weight for the last 10 years. Sometimes, I am probably considered by some to be ‘fat’ and others, only to my critical eye. Regardless…it doesn’t make it true.
I’ve been caught in the trap of ‘once I lose x pounds, I’ll feel good about myself,” enough times to know that that apex isn’t real. A number on a scale doesn’t create self-worth. I remind myself of that now, every time I critique myself in the mirror or long to lose 20 pounds, or look at pictures of myself from times when I was thinner, longing for my body to experience time travel.
I am not ugly. It’s hard to type, harder than I would like to admit. But the only way out is through and the only way to put to bed the myths of the past is to create a new reality going forward.