All my life, I’ve hated shopping with a passion. I thought it was because I wasn’t much of a girly girl, so it made sense that I hated getting new clothes and walking around the mall with my sisters. However, as I grew up I realized that there was something else keeping from shopping. Shopping made me feel obese.
I was never the thinnest thing around, and my body type was definitely not petite considering the fact that I am 5’11, but I didn’t feel like I was extremely overweight. I always saw myself as average for my body type, but shopping made me hate my body. I walk into these cute little stores wanting to buy cute clothes, but realize I can’t because they don’t carry my size.
I won’t try to be dramatic and say they don’t carry ANYTHING that fits me because that would be a lie. But the pants – oh my god, don’t even get me started on the pants. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but different stores tend to interpret size differently for some reason. I will be one size at Express, but then a completely different size at Charlotte Russe. This inconsistency makes me feel like I gained 15 pounds within the twenty minutes it took me to travel from one store to the next.
Oh, and I’m pretty positive mainstream stores hate tall people because I have yet to find a store that accommodates my lengthy legs, and when I do it’s usually because they offer a service online that will allow me to customize my jeans to my height – which costs extra, might I add. It is not fair that I have to pay extra because I was created with legs longer than a spider’s!
Jeans aren’t the only problem. Let's talk about the so-called “plus size” sections. I recently was looking through the plus size section at Forever 21 because the regular section made me feel like a whale with a weight problem, right? So, I picked up a dress that was a 2XL, I tried it on and I was extremely disappointed when this dress was skin tight against my body, far too short and too small on me.
I will repeat, I have never considered myself extremely overweight, but trying on clothes from this “plus sized” section made me hate myself. I started crying in the dressing room because I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I kept going up in sizing, but nothing was fitting me nicely. I was convinced that these mainstream stores are made solely for the ideal western body type - stick thin and without spider legs. My hate for shopping was just strengthened.
I know so many people that have problems shopping and it’s not because their body type isn’t beautiful. Instead, it’s because their body type doesn’t match the typical western-female body: petite, thin, and not curvy.
I realized the only time I feel bad about my body is when I’m compared to these so-called models and their so-called "perfect" bodies. We’re expected to look like them, but they don’t even look like them, so where does that leave us? We don’t have photoshop to edit our bodies every time we see something we do not like. We are then found shopping around in stores that sell to the women in the magazines – not the real women that we encounter every day.
Take a look at yourself in the mirror. That is real; that is what a beautiful body looks like. Don’t let these mainstream stores tell you what you should look like, and I promise I won’t let it get to me as much. We are beautiful whether or not we fit other peoples’ molds of beauty.
