If you were anything like me, growing up, you got boobs in the second grade, and were basically a woman by the time you were 11.
Does that sound awkward?
Because it is.
The general difficulties of maturing were magnified by the timing of my growth. I know it doesn’t sound so bad in the big picture, developing breasts before everyone else I knew and having hips by the age of 10, but from my perspective as a young girl, everything that became a part of my body became a definition of me and was just as mysterious and taboo to me as it was to everyone else my age. It set me apart from my peers in so many ways.
I had an obvious womanly figure before my friends were even out of children's clothing, and I wore the same clothes that my mother did by the time I was in third grade. There were many trends that I wasn't able to participate in (which, in hindsight might not have been such a bad thing). I was never able to wear clothing from Aeropostale (nor could I ever figure out the correct way to pronounce it), while that seemed to be all my classmates dressed in.
It took such a long time for me to figure out how to dress myself. I couldn’t just throw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt because my body just simply didn’t fit in the clothing that was made for kids my age. But when I wore women's clothing (because that’s what fit my figure), it aged me by years and years. I could never look how I felt, which made it extremely difficult to find and sense of identity or definition that wasn’t associated with my body.
So, slowly, that’s what I became. Until the rest of my peers caught up to the premature development of my adult body, I was objectified, and became more of a spectacle than a peer. I remember the early days of middle school, when I came across anonymous discussion forums on the internet that explicitly discussed my body. Anytime I dated someone (as much as you could “date” anyone in sixth and seventh grade), they’d receive extremely forward questions about my body from their friends, and even from strangers.
This carried on throughout high school. I also received inappropriate attention from people who had no business expressing interest in me. This came mostly from older guys who didn’t understand the discomfort they caused 12-year-old me when they openly portrayed me as a sexual being.
Body image is so much more than your perception of size. It’s about managing the pressure to feel or think certain things about yourself based on the way you look.
It took me a long time to realize that I had much more to offer than my curves. Because I’d received different treatment due to my body type at such a developmental point in my life, it influenced me to think I wasn’t much more to people than my breasts, hips and thighs; that my size and shape somehow indicated my worth.
After a long and difficult struggle with my body image, I’ve learned that I’m much more than what other people can see. I’ve learned that my kindness, love, independence, assertive nature, humor, and all the other attributes that make up my own personal light outshine the physical things by miles, and the people worth giving those things to will see it that way too.
