My relationship with my body and body image has been a...journey. How I view myself and how I feel about how I look is influenced by a myriad of factors, most of it was external for a very long time.
As a child, your looks are the least of your concerns. Everyone looks the same and playing outside is priority number one. Of course, this all changes as one becomes older and becomes more aware of the value of fitting in. One of the things that LITERALLY turns everything inside-out is puberty. Puberty started out for me at the very young age of 8. I was always taller than my age-mates and looked older. But hitting puberty really put everything into perspective. An unwanted yet uncontrollable result of puberty were boobs.
At first I didn't care, we had already learnt about puberty and the changes that come with it. What made me care, was the fact that I was different. I didn't fit in with the others. And for the longest time I wore jackets, sweaters, shawls basically anything that was bigger than me. And God knows it was always hot. It could be the hottest day out and i would still not take it off. I was ashamed that I had boobs and stretch marks. I was ashamed that i didn't look "normal". Which in itself is absurd and completely false. But that did mark my beginning in the career of an insecure human being.
During this journey I did have a goal: become SMALLER. That was what I was aiming for. It was preached to me, whether it was by my teachers, literal strangers or just social cues, I knew that I had to reduce myself. And seeing yourself as you are and not as the image you would LIKE to be, it's tough. Anyone who's never had a changing room breakdown should consider themselves lucky. It's hard breaking your own heart. Curbing those breakdowns involves a higher form of self love.
And those breakdowns would explain why I didn't look in a mirror for one and a half years. It's actually insane that I have no recollection of how I looked from class 3 to class 4. What's even more insane is how young I was. But then I couldn't help it. It was a mechanism to prevent consistent heartbreak. Every time I'd pass by a mirror or even a window, I would completely just look away. Looking back at that, it was a perverse way to live life
But the pressure of fitting into what others want, eats at you everyday. We like to preach that we dress up for ourselves but deep down a part of us knows that it also involves how people view us. We judge and get judged by our looks everyday, and just like all the other disappointments of this world. It is a harsh reality.
And in the fashion of reality which forces itself on you the older you become. The pressure of getting smaller became my whole source of humanity. Eventually I did boycott food. Started it failed, started, failed until once I realized my want to be skinny was bigger than the natural biological instinct of nourishing the body. And it worked, 4 am workouts and endless hunger with a tinge of " Jesus Christ, when did walking become a sport?", was just what I needed to lose a few kgs( lost 6 kgs in one week, if those scales can be trusted).
The weird thing about it was getting compliments about. Like wow the world really does suck. Someone telling you to keep doing what you're doing to keep the weight off is odd seeing as you're thinking about how that afternoon would be the first time you're having supper that week. That ordeal amplified what I already knew to be true: People are goddamn
a**holes.
Eventually I recovered from it but the truth majority of the time is that, every time I'm having a conversation with someone, I'm actively thinking of how my body looks. Where I position my hand or how my stomach looks.
I believe that the seed of insecurity, once planted, is one difficultly uprooted.
Honestly the way to reach complete self-love is by working on it everyday. I've gotten better at it of course( even though I occasionally check to look if my stomach looks like Kendall Jenner's). It's still a journey, but it has a destination, and that's enough hope.
So if you do feel like commenting about someone's body, I leave you with Ariana Grande's pearls of wisdom: " Just shut up".
SONG:
SZA - Supermodel
👏👏