I love reading body confidence posts. Be it on blogs, social media, Odyssey articles… you name it, I love it.
I feel a sense of pride when reading about a person's journey to self-acceptance and learning how to love their body at any weight because I genuinely believe that everyone should be able to have that kind of confidence in themselves and what they look like.
As much as I love reading these success stories, after I close the tab or go back to scrolling, I feel a little crushed. The point of these posts is to encourage others to love the skin they're in, discourage fat-shaming, and simply share their stories, but these stories only tell one narrative: that you don't have to be skinny to love yourself.
What about the skinny people?
I've always been tiny. I was three weeks premature, so of course I was underweight as a newborn, but even as I grew, I was always in a lower percentile for weight (my friggin' doctor told my sisters and me to have a milkshake every night to try and gain some weight. God, I miss that guy). As a kid, this never really bothered me until people started pointing it out.
The first time it bothered me was on the bus ride home from school one day, probably around fourth or fifth grade.
There was this girl in my class (that I didn't really know very well) who came up to me from the back of the bus and asked (very rudely) if I was made out of cardboard. A lot of people identified this particular girl as a bully, but because she'd always been pleasant toward me, this took me by surprise. A few weeks later, she spread a rumor around the school that I had an eating disorder; that made me self-conscious about the way I acted at lunchtime and how often I went to the bathroom.
I started dressing differently, refusing to wear anything but skinny jeans, because I had read somewhere that people with eating disorders tend to wear baggy clothing to hide just how much weight they'd lost, and I didn't want anybody thinking that I was trying to hide something, but I also tried to hide myself.
At school, I shut down and tried to fly under the radar as much as possible so things like that wouldn't happen again.
It worked, but it also made me insecure in who I was as a person. I struggled with my self-image, wishing I could just gain some weight so I wouldn't look like the identical twin of a toothpick with arms anymore.
As I got older, I continued to fly under the radar, and as a result, was relatively ignored by my peers.
In the absence of ridicule from my classmates, however, came the adults, saying things like, "Order this girl another hamburger! She definitely needs it! Ha ha," and "My god you're so skinny! I wish I was that thin again." My response to this was and is always: "It's not all it's cracked up to be" — because it's not — but without fail, I always get hit with the, "You'll be glad to be as thin as you are now when you're my age."
While most might take this as a compliment, I view it as a complete disregard to my feelings.
These people, while usually full of good intentions, trigger this angry being inside of me that makes me want to scream, "Stop using my weight is a conversation-starter! You have no idea what this is like for me!" and make a scene that embarrasses them just as much as they've embarrassed me. They have no idea what I've been through to be OK with what I look like and what I weigh. They don't know what it's like to be asked twice whenever I see a new physician if I feel safe at home because my BMI categorizes me as underweight. But that's just it: they don't know. They don't know because nobody talks about what it's like to not like your body when everyone else does.
It's important to remember that it's okay to not like your body, no matter what it looks like, or even if other people think you should.
I've struggled to come to terms with my body type over the years, and I've finally reached a point where I'm okay with what I look like. It wasn't an easy journey, and yeah, I still wish I could change my body, so much so that it hurts sometimes (because let's be real here — I have the body type of a scrawny teenage boy). Am I happy with it? Not always, but I'm proud of it and what it's brought me through, because my body and I? We've been through a lot together, and I'm definitely happy with that.
