When Life Gives You Body Dysmorphia

I liked grocery stores as a kid mostly because when my parents weren’t looking I would sneak things into the cart. I would sneak in all sorts of junk that a kid would love like chips, candy, and much more. My mother didn’t care what we put in the cart and let us take control of our appetites, but my father was a stickler for what was brought into the house. So when we would get to checkout with my father, as he angrily realized what we snuck into the cart, I would distract myself by looking at all of the colorful magazines. Filled with celebrities I had never seen having affairs with everyone in their lives. But what caught my eye all of those times trying to ignore my fathers tirades, was these mens shirtless bodies. And as much as I admired these strong and godlike men, I noticed pretty early on that my body wasn’t like theirs. My fathers body wasn’t like theirs, none of the other kids' parents had abs of steel either. But then puberty hit for kids in my grade and they began to lose the baby fat. They weren’t given strong bodies, but they were slender like these models. Their body was right and mine was wrong. When I went to stores I began to buy shirts two times too big, and wear shirts in the pool to hide myself. I was big and my weight was shameful. I began to be less social in classes and my energy levels were on high alert because I felt like I was constantly aware of who was looking at me. How much space I took up in elevators or in seats on a plane. I pulled at my shirt's bottom in hopes that stretched cotton could hide my biggest insecurity, myself. And as I grew older and began to thin out naturally, I began to notice people flirting with me and talking to me in the hallways of high school. But the old me still existed with damaged self esteem. The kind that makes you believe the world made you big to make you small, to plunder your voice and take from you. I still don’t think I have fully healed from being fat as a kid as it now manifests in my anxious attachment styles and a need for validation on dating apps that I am attractive. And there is also this feeling that this is an area I shouldn’t take space in as women deal with body shaming on a daily basis. But these body images portrayed in the media are hurtful for all kids growing up as they begin to attach their worthiness to celebrities with bodies that will never be like ours. That these beauty standards are set by men in advertising and it would only take a couple of years of positive body models, especially what Fenty is doing right now, to change the perception of the body and to give people who struggle with their weight know that we can have the perfect body in itself. One that isn’t webbed in insecurity but shown like a beacon of relation. One that exists on playgrounds and after school hangouts. That our bodies are not shameful, they are what we were granted with. That our own development is an understanding all in its own. I wish I could tell my eight year old self that there will be people on this earth who will love your body, and it takes now to accept that it's yours.