My guilty pleasure has always been romantic comedies and even though a lot of them fall in the girl and guy meet, they fall in love, something goes wrong/ misunderstanding occurs, they separate for a little bit and then they reconcile and live happily ever after, one of them stands out. 500 Days of Summer(spoiler warning even though the story isn’t even linear) is a story about a guy who meets and then falls in love with a girl who likes him back but doesn’t really want a relationship. It goes through a lot of different scenarios where eventually it doesn’t work out and he finds someone new at the very end of the movie. This movie is a perfect example of how the culmination of lived experiences can shape how you view love.

I am absolutely a romantic. I’ve been surrounded by love my entire life, my parents, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles all seemed to be in love and I wanted a piece. My first watch, I completely agreed with the main character. How dare this girl who expressed her feelings of not wanting a relationship with him end up not wanting a relationship with him. The whole point of the movie went over my head and they even tell you at the beginning. After a few more rewatches(I enjoy this movie a lot) and a little bit of growing as a person, I finally start to understand. And the whole reason I was able to understand why what happened wasn’t just one persons fault is because I’ve had more experiences with love since then. Perception of love can be so different from person to person and it’s most likely why love is so difficult.

The opening of the movie is of the main character and the girl’s upbringing, showing how the main characters perception of love was shaped from movies and music, stemming the hopeless romantic mindset while the girl’s perception of love was shaped by how her parents divorced when she was young which stemmed the cynical mindset and we see how their mindsets clash during the movie. It is just so interesting how much experiences and very little or subtle changes in a life can change so much about someone. Always keep a open mind and a open heart.

I can’t remember the last time I truly felt comfortable in my body. I’ve always had a lot of issues with how I looked and how my body was. I was very skinny in my early years in elementary school where I did Tae Kwon do which had a lot of conditioning and exercise that kept me “in shape”. After that, middle school and quarantine were spent sitting in a chair for what felt like days on end just eating and eating. I never even realized it until someone mentioned it offhandedly and I looked down and didn’t like what I saw. One of the quotes that really stood out to me from Roxane Gay’s “My Body is A Cage of my Own Making” is when they say “Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. It’s about how I feel in my skin and bones”. After gaining a lot of weight into high school, my body ached. Everything was slower, I felt like my feet were so heavy and every step I took hit the floor harder than I wanted it to. With activities, I started to feel better about myself and my body, losing the weight that I had put on before but injuries riddled my life until I was practically forced to quit. See, I’m hyper flexible but what they don’t tell you about hyper flexibility is that it just means you can be comfortable in a position that puts your body at risk of injuring itself. At every moment, I was either not happy with how my skin folded over itself and how I looked in the mirror or not happy that I couldn’t do any more because of my injuries. At one of the meets, I was slammed so hard on the ground that my lower back muscles spasmed and I was couch ridden for two days. It was getting harder and harder to become comfortable in my own skin. I never even realized that at the end of the day, as hard as I worked and worked and overworked my body into the ground, I was never going to be happy.

I trapped myself in this cycle of hating my body so I try and work until I’m finally happy until my body gave up on me and then I hated it again. I like to think that I’ve finally learned how to accept and love my body but to be honest, It’s still a process for me. I still wake up and look in the mirror to see my progress and I still always skip breakfast, even if it’s bad for me. Until I finally free myself and love my body the way that it is, I will always look in that mirror hoping for this perfect body that I don’t even know if I can attain. Day by day, I will work towards loving myself and my body but until then, breakfast is overrated and it being the most important meal of the day is a lie.

Quarantine was hard for everyone but I already knew the drill. For my 6th grade, me and my family went in an RV around the country for a whole year. I won’t say I was ungrateful but 6th grade me definitely was not happy. No friends, barely any wifi and just with my family 24/7 was not what 11 year old me wanted. And it kinda sucked. It made me distant from my friends back home and even when I got back, there were only a few people who actually treated me normal or like they did back when I was home. 7th grade was really rough for me. A funny thing that happened at the time was another friend of the friend group I was in who was the same race as me moved away so I kinda just felt like the stand in. The replacement. And right when everything started to hit its groove, everything hit me at once. Family losses, quarantine, no more in person and it hit me like a truck. Everything I was starting to actually get used to was taken away from me in an instant.

In Quarantine, I used to be the friend everyone joked about. Sometimes nowadays I still am but I learned to live with it. My sense of community back then was that if I was the only one they picked on, then I was the glue of the group and I should just take it. I was a pretty sensitive kid growing up so this was no easy task for me but I persevered the best I could. Eventually it got so bad that I was even kicked out of the group by the ringleader who I found out was spreading rumors about me crying wolf to the rest of the friend group. Being kicked out, I reached out to one of my best friends who wasn’t in the group for solace and in that conversation I realized, community isn’t a massive friend group, it isn’t people genuinely bullying you for no exact reason but community is those few select people that you choose the be closest with. Now, while I only have a few friends, I can say with absolute certainty that I chose the right people. They’ve stuck by me through thick and thin and I have for them as well. So even if the title of this post is “No Community For You”, it’s only because you can’t have community thrust upon you, you need to build it around you.

Through all my life, the sport I did was wrestling. I did it as a kid in elementary school where I was very skinny and didn’t weigh much and I did it in high school where I was not the size or weight that I wanted to be. Weight has always been sort of an issue for me because of how I would see myself and compare me to the people around me like my brother who has a similar body type but is skinnier and more athletic or my best friend who might be shorter but is far more athletic. I went from skinny in elementary school, to heavier in middle and start of high school and then back to skinny and then back to heavy where now it’s sort of in the middle. Wrestling is an amazing sport and an amazing way to get in shape but it is also the easiest way to get an eating disorder. When the main focus of a sport is to be as low of a weight you can to get the best chance at winning, even if the coaches tell you not to, you try to lose a lot of weight and that’s what I did. In two years of doing the sport in high school, I went from about 185 to 160 to 170 and then all the way down to 150 and I know for a fact that I did not do it in a healthy way.

Now the reason why I went through these fluctuations was not just because of the demand of the sport but the culture and the people around me. I’ve once seen a person whose weight class is 113 get called fat for eating lunch and that’s just the norm. And with personally experiencing this culture, I became very accustomed to it. I would laugh along, make jokes to other people and even start joking about it with my friends outside of wrestling but inside, it just hurt. I truly lost my appetite. During that time, I lost myself in the culture. I wouldn’t eat for extended periods of time, I would over work myself and then I would eat as much food as I could in this constant cycle where I lost my love for food. I had conditioned my stomach and myself to not need the food anymore and it truly was my brain telling my body that we needed this. Until finally senior year, I was just done. The impact of the sport and the culture on my body was too much so I felt that to make a union between my body and my mind, I had to take a step back. And even though sometimes I may still focus on my weight and I may still have these feelings in the back of my head, I still keep trying and that’s all that matters.