Contains triggering material.

My concept of my body and of body image evolved at a very young age. I have a sister who is eight years older than I am and struggled with body image issues and bulimia when she was in high school, and I have a mother who constantly yo-yo dieted and tried her best to lose weight fast. My own concept of my weight in relation to others, I remember vividly, came in fourth grade when I was sitting at the lunch table and two girls sitting a little ways from me were talking about their weight. “I’m 90 pounds,” the one complained. She was taller than I was. “I’m at 104, so you’re fine,” I commented, feeling down about myself.

I can’t remember when the movie was released, but the movie Josie and the Pussycats (with Rachel Leigh Cook, Tara Reid, and Rosario Dawson) also had an effect on my body image and the idea of my weight. While it seems like an innocuous movie, I recall Parker Posey’s character asking Josie how much she weighed, and when Josie reluctantly admitted to being 114, Posey’s character (taller, and therefore visibly skinnier) said something to the effect of, “Ha! I weigh 113.” I remember standing on the scale in my mother’s bathroom watching the numbers tick higher and higher every day until they passed 113, 114, 120.

I was very susceptible to bullying about my weight, which was more than most girls who I went to school with. Everyone seemed to be in a sport or otherwise keeping fit and thin, whereas I was a tomboy who played it off like I didn’t care about my size. I was teased through middle school about my clothes, my hair, my aggressive personality. And my weight. I made a food diary and my mom praised me for being so health-conscious even though I was trying to limit my food intake to only a few hundred calories a day as a middle schooler. Into high school, I had problems with how I looked and choosing clothes that fit; when my chest had me growing out of a medium-size in juniors clothing and moving up to a large, I think I about cried with the realization.

When I had my worst fight with depression a couple years ago, I was cutting myself. I hated my body, I hated my emotions, I hated what was going on in my life, so I would cut myself. My thighs and my hips mostly, because they could be covered, but I remember breaking down at one point wishing that I could be fit and thin and beautiful and I carved “F A T” into my stomach when I ate “too much” one day and felt extremely guilty.  I cried and cried and told myself to be beautiful, told myself to stop eating, told myself to exercise and get skinny or no one would want me, and cut myself to punish myself. No one in my life knows, because I’ve never told anyone. The word is only slightly raised, only a little lighter than the rest of my skin, and otherwise unnoticeable unless you’re looking for it.

So, when I have body issues, and people around me scoff and roll their eyes when I voice my complaints, it makes me feel like shit, simply put. Like I don’t have a right to feel the way I feel. “You’re not fat!” my mother loves to say. “You just need to lose ten or fifteen pounds.” Yeah, because hearing that makes me feel so much better about my size. Or my friends, who have different body shapes than I do, laugh and roll their eyes to try to make me feel better, as if thinking I’m overweight or fat or whatever is a joke. That me having a negative self-image is a joke. It’s painful because while I’m not their size, haven’t been their size, they don’t know the kind of harassment I received, they don’t know about my home-life being surrounded by fad diets and by a mother and sister who hated their bodies.

Because their struggles were “more,” mine are therefore less. When people look at me, I think they see a normal-sized person. But I don’t see a normal-sized person in the mirror, and it’s hard to explain that to people who only know their own struggles with weight, size, and body image. And it’s difficult being the size that I am, even if no one would think it; it’s difficult to find clothing that will fit because while I have a normal-sized rest of my body, my chest makes fitting into anything such a damn struggle. And I’ve thighs that don’t match my hips, so any jeans or trousers I try to wear end up being too tight on my thighs but too loose around my hips, so when I wear a belt, because my jeans will slide down otherwise, I get concerned about the fat pouring over top my jeans.

Everyone is shaped differently, and every body is beautiful, but even with my own perception of other bodies, my perception of my own is undeniably skewed. I have moments, I think as a lot of people do, where I feel more comfortable with my body and moments where I want to vomit at the sight of it.

So, yeah, it definitely pisses me off when people say I’m not fat or when they roll their eyes when I make comments about my weight. I don’t think I’m the next half-ton woman, but I guess it makes me think… who has the right to that word? Who has the right to reclaim it or keep it from others?