I’ve always been a good student and did what I was supposed to do, but I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because my mother was strict and didn’t tolerate anything less than academic excellence under her roof, or maybe I was actually smart, or maybe I wanted it for myself. I’m not sure.

Elementary school was hard for me. I had a lot of challenges. I would have temper tantrums so bad the principle could hear me from her office, and there were times my mom had to be called from work. She was always so mad, and sometimes she would say the meanest things. I didn’t understand then, but I get it now. As a single mom immigrant working to take care of two children, things were always tough, and it seemed as if I made it worse. I could never pay attention in class, and would be deemed as “talkative” or “eccentric”, even “cantankerous” (that last one was courtesy of my mother and father). After a little bit, my crying had gotten to a level where one day they threatened to call child protective services, something I didn’t find out until this year, so my mother had to sit with me for a year in class everyday, and that was the only time I would stop crying because she scared me, I knew she wouldn’t tolerate it.

I had always been a cryer, but I remember vividly when the moment hit me that no one in the world cared. Everyone always had stuff to deal to with, and my issues were no one’s priority, they just wanted me to be well behaved, so I was. I became quiet, and if I cried it would always be under the protection of my blanket late at night. It seemed as if I had gotten “better” to everyone else, but on the inside I was still struggling. It wasn’t until late middle school that certain subjects like math and science made sense to me, I remember I was sitting in Algebra when everything finally started to make sense. Eventually, I figured out that each classroom had it’s own set of rules, like a board game, and as long as you figured out said rules, you could win, so that’s what I did. I was getting A’s and B’s around the clock which continued throughout highschool.

Fast forward to college and everything went downhill my first year. I had a 2.4 GPA, and had no idea how I had fallen so low. Maybe it was freedom for the first time, or maybe it was the imposter syndrome, or the feeling that I belonged nowhere in this environment. My mother was disappointed but she didn’t yell, it was the first time I truly felt comfortable around her, or didn’t feel the need to lie. She told me she wasn’t surprised, and thought I should take a break from school, I didn’t want to. Not because I loved school or anything, I wanted my semesters of freedom where I made my own decisions. I couldn’t go back home.

I got my shit together and I started getting A’s and B’s, and eventually getting all A’s, raising my GPA from the ashes. I was proud. Then there’s this semester. This semester was the first time in about 2 years where I had fallen so low. I always had anxiety and stress when it came to school, fits of crying and rage where nothing made sense, and a feeling of helplessness because a letter and calculated number determines how valuable future employers see you, and failing was not an option. So I sucked it up and persevered. It always worked until now.

Right now I feel as I did back then. I’m struggling, bad. I was drowning and I thought I could save myself, but this time I couldn’t.

I always hear people saying, “reach out for help” as if it’s so simple. I grew up with a culture that frowns on that. A culture that doesn’t believe in mental health, that shoves things so far down you forget they are even there. I tried explaining to my dad, but he said that I don’t know stress, I don’t know struggle, and he’s not entirely wrong, but that doesn’t make my pain go away. My mother is disappointed, again, and she thinks I am lazy, with no ambition.

It took trying to write a research paper, at 5am in the morning with 27 missing assignments from the same class, me being behind in other classes, and damn near failing this one to realize I really was drowning and this time I couldn’t save myself. I tried to gasp for air but it was too late, I was already under water.

I reached out for help. I’m not yet afloat, just keeping my head barely above water

Let me start this off by saying I hate Instagram, I absolutely hate it. I have no graduation pictures from high school, or prom pictures. I also have very limited pictures of myself standing up. I remember when we were talking about video chatting during online school and how it affected how we saw ourselves. That was Instagram for me.

I am by no means ugly, at least not to me, but pictures have never been able to truly capture me. I just look better in person. When I first got an Instagram I didn’t think too much about the pictures I posted, I just posted whatever I wanted to. Then I saw that people had different aesthetics on their page, and their pictures looked so nice, but whenever I took pictures I never looked like that. My body never looks right and if it’s a picture I take with my friends, they always look better than me.

I was talking to a guy once and he said to me “ I’m not gonna lie, you’re hot as fuck, but your Instagram is so weak.” He wasn’t wrong, my Instagram was weak, but the process of taking pictures is a tedious one. You have to take a bunch, then sit there and go through every one. Meanwhile going through them you subconsciously pick yourself apart, and by the end, if you don’t hate yourself you post the picture, but every time you see that picture it gets uglier and uglier. So I do not take pictures. I take selfies sometimes but that’s because I can see what the end result will look like.

When I go do an event with my friends like go on vacation, or go to a formal event where we all wear long dresses I dread when they ask me to take pictures. One time I even ended up crying because I was so mad because my friend kept trying to convince me to take a picture even though I didn’t want to. Another time I left my friends because they spent 30 minutes trying to take pictures and at that point they were wasting my time.  I understand that pictures are living memories, but the stress of looking at other people’s photos and comparing them to mine, analyzing my body and picking it apart is something I would like to avoid all together.

Sometimes I would like to take pictures because those memories are something I would love to keep or show my children some day. But on every app there is a reminder that there are no natural pictures anymore. Tik tok has filters, same with snapchat, and Instagram. So even if I do like a photo, it still isn’t a photo of “myself”. How is it that the world became more accepting of different types of people in terms of body type and beauty standards, yet still manages to push some unrealistic ideal of how we are supposed to look? Maybe one day I will learn how to take pictures, but for now I am content with keeping my face and my body to myself.

As a child I was always told that I was too thin by family members. In fact my cousin had once mentioned how a broomstick had more curves than me. The only one who praised my skinny-ness was my mother. In freshman and sophomore year of high school I started to do Cheer and track and noticed that my body was changing, I gained more weight and developed more muscles. My mom had bought a scale and told me to step on it and when she saw my weight she told me I was eating too much and that’s why I had gotten bigger.

I hated my body, I wasn’t unhealthy, and there was nothing necessarily wrong with me, but I was a black woman with a muscular tone, and a small chest and bottom. Back then muscular bodies weren’t popular, so I honestly felt like I looked like a man. That summer after sophomore year I swore that I would lose all the weight I had gained. Initially I started out fine but then it snowballed into something else.

At first I would just cut back on eating fast food and drinking more water with a little cardio. Eventually that became doing cardio for about 4 hours a day, eating only one meal a day consisting of fruits and vegetables and water. When I started to see the changes in my body I became so proud and so did my mom. She would tell me good job and comment how she could see a weight change. A diet like this however is not something realistic. I realized I was always so very hungry and tired all the time. I ended up sleeping for multiple hours of the day just so I couldn’t feel the hunger, it was almost unbearable but I pushed through because I was actually seeing results.

I got to the weight I wanted but I didn’t look how I thought I would look and so I decided to keep losing weight. It was becoming harder and harder. One day I was constipated and my mom gave me a laxative, I noticed that afterward I had lost a couple pounds. So, when my mom went to work I would sneak in her room to steal her laxatives. I think she started noticing because eventually I couldn’t find them anymore, but she never said anything to me. By this time I had lost a lot of weight but my body was still toned, I still felt like a man.

I then watched a video about this woman who went to the gym but didn’t own a scale because she said that a number tells you nothing. You can lose weight and your body still won’t look how you think, same thing with gaining weight. So she just focuses on what she sees in the mirror. I then realized that the body type I had was a muscular one. I could loose all the weight in the world but my toned body was something I was born with. I stopped exercising but that diet changed the way I saw food forever. Even now I still don’t have a healthy relationship with food, or my body but it isn’t as bad as it was back then. I think it’s funny how parents will comment things about their child’s appearance without thinking twice.