March 6, 2019
I’ve thought I was fat since I was twelve. I remember it clearly. My best friend and I were at the mall near her dad’s house. It was summer. I tried on some clothes and nothing in my size fit anymore. It wasn’t just that the size didn’t fit, but the styles I could have thrown on not months before no longer fit my body. I was horrified. We went straight back to her father’s house and planned my new diet, which I distinctly remember including tuna fish sandwiches. We didn’t know how to eat well.
Later that summer I got my period. I wasn’t fat. I see pictures of myself from then, and I was stick-thin. I was just changing from a girl to a woman. But I never got over it. That moment in the dressing room is etched in my brain, and I have struggled with my body image and my relationship with food ever since. I was curvier than other girls—I still am—but when I see pictures of myself I can’t believe how normal I look. Not hideous as I imagine. Just normal like I see everyone else no matter their weight. But when I’m pulling on my jeans after a particularly delicious weekend with friends, or I am going to meet someone new, or I have to buy an outfit for something important, I am still that twelve-year-old standing in that dressing room horrified at what I have to work with.
That same best friend, after getting a picture from me asking her opinion on an outfit for an important meeting, texted back, “It looks great. And if you ever say you’re fat again, I’ll punch you in the throat. I can see your clavicles!” Sometimes you just need your best friend to threaten to throat punch you to see things a little more clearly.
I am exhausted from over thirty years of worrying about what my body looks like and I know I’m not alone. The beautiful women I know are not twenty-year-olds anymore but we are still looking to that standard. I am almost forty-five, with a beautiful history of growing, surviving, and thriving. It shouldn’t matter anymore. I won’t say, after having this particular epiphany, that my old thinking just magically disappeared, but it did help me shift into beginning to embrace my body instead of thinking of it as the enemy.
~
Stop sucking your stomach in
just to look good
in those jeans.
Let it loose
with the joy
and the experience
and the years
that overflow from your badass self.