I am not fat. I have fat. I also have eyelashes and fingernails. But I am not eyelashes and fingernails, either. I am a human. I am a musician. I am an educator. I am a daughter, a sister, a best friend, and an honest person. I am smart, hardworking, and funny. I am not fat. I have fat.

I can remember always having fat. Stepping on a scale in my elementary P.E. class was mortifying. So mortifying, in fact, that I remember it 20 years later and I’m writing about it for all of you to read. I’ve dealt with body image issues for as long as I can remember. It wasn’t until I was in college that I was finally OK with what I looked like.

But this article isn’t to make you feel sorry for me. I write this so that maybe I can inspire that “ah-ha!” moment for someone else, so it doesn’t have to take them 20 years or longer to finally accept themselves. I am not going to list the plus-sized models that we should all look up to. I’m not going to tell you that I love every part of my body and will display it without fear. I am going to tell you that you are worth your own self-love. It’s OK to have parts of your body that make you cringe. Those things might never change, and if they do, you’ll find something else to obsess over. You can want to change the way you look and still love yourself. Sometimes loving yourself means being honest and realizing that there are things to change.

My “ah-ha!” moment came when I was a junior in college. I was a drum major of the university marching band and with that responsibility came a pair of very tight, white pants. They fit, but they did not look good. I pulled out my calendar and saw that I had just over a month and a half to make them look the way I wanted them to. I felt overwhelmed and like it was an impossible task. So I set myself on a crash diet. I ate plain lettuce for almost every meal and I worked out until I felt nauseous, which, let’s be honest, wasn’t very much because I was starving myself. But it was working. I was dropping the weight and people were noticing. People would compliment me for “working so hard to get healthy” (little did they know, I was less healthy than before), and I loved the look of my slimmer face. I could finally wear my favorite clothes from high school that I had outgrown the first two years of college and I felt unstoppable. Except, of course, for that constant feeling of hunger and light-headedness. But it was only going to last for a couple of months. I had to lose the weight and maintain that weight for the duration of the season. Yeah. I could make it to Christmas. That’s a doable goal, right? Wrong. My boyfriend knew what I was doing and did everything he could to sabotage me. He just wanted me to eat. He was perpetually worried that I was going to get sick and he felt helpless. He loved me and wanted me to be happy, but he also saw how dangerous the whole situation was. He saw the personality changes that come with major diet changes. He saw my obsession with losing the weight and saw that my diet was snowballing. He would show up with fast food dinner and, being that I was a starving, angry, sad shell of a human, I would give in. I would eat the bad food and immediately regret it, resulting in an extreme over-correction that usually had me in the gym 15 minutes later.

I put on the pants for our first show and they fit so much better. I didn’t look perfect, but it was such an improvement from a month ago and I was on cloud nine. After our performance, I was talking to a staff member about the uniforms. I expressed my hatred of the dreaded white pants and that in the future, they should choose a different color. I told them that I had worked my butt off, literally, just to make these look decent and that it could have all been avoided with different color pants.

And then it happened.

I heard the most crushing words I had ever heard in my entire life up to that point.

He said, “You worked that hard and they still look awful.”

Devastated, I just walked away. I didn’t say anything back. I got to my car and burst into tears. I didn’t understand. I did everything I could to improve the way I looked and people were still being mean. It didn’t seem fair. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

Boom! Ah-ha! There it was.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it because it was absurd. It was absurd that I had suffered as much as I did for other people. It was absurd that I put that much importance in another person’s opinion. And it was absurd that someone would be so hateful to another human. I couldn’t make sense of the situation because there was no sense to be made of it.

The question I’ve always had for people is, “Why does the shape that my body grows in bother you?” I used to think that my body shape was somehow inconvenient for other people. That I was in their way, annoying because I didn’t fit their beauty standards, or maybe I was actually upsetting for them to see. But then I realized that I wasn’t any of those things to reasonable people and that the people who felt this way had the problem, not me. I wasn’t going to be able to change the way someone looked at me without major, life-altering changes to myself. And why would I change my life to improve theirs? No way. Not happening. I’ll improve my own life in the areas that I feel need improving. Like making time to read more, because I like to read and I don’t get to do it enough.

You are not too skinny, fat, tall, short, hairy, pale, or flat-chested. You are you. You are a human.

Self-love is important.

You are important.