Growing up, we hear about how body image gets skewed. We know that the media sets impossible standards by presenting us with models who are Photoshopped to perfection. We’re shown what “beauty” is, and people struggle to attain a look that may never be physically possible for their bodies.

Furthermore, we hear about how far people are willing to go in order to meet this standard. Some will diet, some will take medication and some will exercise to unhealthy extremes. Then there are even the people who develop eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, which affect their mental health as much as their physical health.

We grow up knowing about all of this and how most people cannot meet this standard. One would think that we could use logic in order to separate ourselves from this idea of how we should look, but it’s much more difficult to apply this logic than would be expected. At a certain point, you hear and see so much of what you should look like according to society that even your own perspective gets skewed. It took me a while to understand this.

For years, I was a very skinny kid, and then suddenly I wasn’t. I was never an unhealthy weight, but I didn’t look the same anymore, which messed with my mind. In my mind, the changes that happened to my body were wrong and gross. They were something to be ashamed of.

At first, the change in my weight didn’t bother me, but issues arose when I started comparing myself to my peers. I would go to lunch, and pretty girls would spend the entire lunch period talking about their diets and exercise routines. If these pretty girls were so flawed, then what was I? (Because of course I didn’t view myself as pretty either!)

Eventually, I reached a point where I separated myself from these kinds of girls, but that didn’t mean the influences of body image stopped. I definitely still received backhanded compliments about how I was looking good now that I was starting to “thin out.” Additionally, I experienced the thoughtfulness of family friends not buying me cookies or non-diet soda because as a young woman I was “probably watching my weight.” (The best was how they were looking for a thank you for being so considerate.)

To be fair, a lot of those kinds of comments came from people of an older generation than mine, so maybe they thought they really were being kind or thoughtful. However, that doesn’t make the comments sting any less or have any less effect on my self-image. If anything, knowing that the people were being genuine makes it hurt more because they honestly believe that being thinner would make me prettier.

To make matters worse, I joined the wrestling team. Don’t get me wrong, I loved wrestling. It made me feel strong, healthy and independent, but weight is a huge focus for wrestlers. Every day, you watch and track your weight down to the decimal point. You calculate how much you can eat without cutting it too close to the weight that you’re supposed to weigh-in at because you’re letting down your team if you don’t make weight. Whether or not you’ll be wrestling that day, you still have an obligation to be in your weight class so you can be ready to wrestle at any moment. The constant fixation on my weight and the lack of eating didn’t help with how I viewed my body at all.

Even though I lost weight during wrestling season, I eventually gained it back because I was eating like a normal person again and not exercising every day. Once again, I was never an unhealthy weight, but the fluctuations kept messing with my mind.

Then I went off to college. I went into college with the expectation that I would probably gain weight because I had heard plenty about the dreaded Freshman 15. However, my eating habits, walking around campus constantly and being sick for many months caused me to lose around 20 pounds. I was happy that I lost weight instead of gaining it, but part of me wishes that some of it would have been lost in a healthier way.

Anyways, this was when I truly realized that I had a skewed perspective of my body. For years, I thought that I was justified in thinking that I was gross no matter how my weight fluctuated. However, now I realize that I’m probably always going to be hypercritical of my body.

Most days, I look in the mirror, and I look the same as I did 20 lbs heavier. When I say that I look the same, I don’t mean that I only look slightly thinner and wish that 20 lbs had a greater affect. No, I mean that my mind is telling me that my body looks exactly the same as it did.

I finally realized that I wasn’t perceiving my body right when I looked in the mirror one day and looked completely different. I looked a lot thinner. I looked like how I logically should look after losing around 20 pounds. As I focused on it more, I changed back to my “normal” self before my very eyes because I started finding all of the imperfections.

Logically, I know that the brief “thin me” was how I really look. I know this because when I have to wear a radio for the Emergency Medical Squad, I also have to wear a belt now because the weight of the radio makes my newly loose pants start to fall down. I know this because all of my clothes are a lot looser now and because people have commented on how it looks like I lost weight.

So here’s what I’ve learned about body image. Even if we know better than not to believe the societal standard, the people around us can have a huge impact on how we view ourselves. It’s easy to lose the reality of how we look when we’re exposed to the constant pressure of being thin. Even though I know how warped my self-perspective is, I still view myself as flawed because I’m not accurately seeing myself every day. I think with time I’ll have more days where I see the “real” me than the “other” me, but it’s going to take time to reverse how I view my body. At least now I know how wrong my understanding of body image was.