I often wonder if I am lazy or if there is something wrong with me. I’m in college studying one the hardest majors with the goal to attain a well paying job in that field. However, I have no desire to work at all. I’ve never had a desire to work ever in my life. I would much rather spend my life exploring my interests, deepening my intellect, and connecting with people. Unfortunately, money makes the world go round, and money is an object I cannot do without. Therefore, I’ll graduate with my degree and hopefully obtain a six figure job. 

I absolutely hate the thought of working. I can barely focus on doing homework or studying for longer than 20 minutes, let alone attempting to work for 8 hours straight at my tech job one day. Just thinking about it brings me a little anxiety and mental exhaustion. I don’t want to age prematurely due to the labor my body would harbor due to working. I don’t want my body to deteriorate over a period of time because of the physical and mental stress that comes with having a job. These thoughts have pushed me to not desire work. I often feel inferior because of this desire, because I feel useless in a sense. 

We live in a society where “hard” work is glamorized. We are basically taught that working hard is what we are meant to do as human beings and that anyone who doesn’t work hard is lazy and will amount to nothing. I would like to think that maybe society glamorizes work that is simply too much for the capacity of the average human being, but on the other hand, I wonder if I’m making excuses for myself. 

I carry the emotional and mental labor of inferiority because of this desire not to work. My peers have aspirations to do big things such as owning businesses, making a lot of money, or climbing the corporate ladder. Meanwhile, I’d rather just exist. 

I was five years old when my mother smiled at me and told me that I was losing weight. She expressed her excitement about this to me and told me that I should keep doing whatever I was doing that made me look smaller. At the time, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing but I wanted to do exactly what she told me. Unfortunately, I have never been able to exist outside of my weight since then. 

There has never been a time where I felt that I was at an adequate weight. I was constantly reminded by family how big I was and still am. Adding to this, family and family friends also expressed how abnormal I was in comparison to the rest of my family seeing as I was the only overweight child my parents had. I was continually told that I needed to lose weight because it’s not good for me to be overweight as a girl. My weight also affected the family image as I was the only one with a visible flaw in my appearance. 

As I look back at old photos of myself, I realize that I actually wasn’t overweight in high school. I just had a bigger build in comparison to other girls my age because of the sports I played in combination with my genetics. I wasn’t overweight, I just wasn’t skinny. My perception of my entire being was completely skewed during that time.

I associated my weight with everything. I thought about every step I took and wondered if it sounded heavy. I was aware of my breathing, in hopes that it didn’t sound too loud as I didn’t want to sound like I was panting. I would suck my stomach in on days where I felt like I looked bloated or bigger because I didn’t want anyone to think that I had gained any more weight. I would starve myself so that I could feel and appear lighter. I would purposely wear oversized clothing to give the illusion of a small body hidden under clothing. I would make sure to keep my opinions to myself to avoid being verbally attacked in case someone may have been offended why what I said. 

I often felt physically weighed down by my body because of the amount of weight I believe I carried. Learning that I wasn’t overweight in high school, often makes me reflect on the different perceptions, feelings, and experiences I have had of my body. I often wonder if the feeling of “heaviness” I often felt was something that was entirely in my head. I thought to myself that people didn’t like me or find me attractive because I was too big and thus, undesirable to be around. I now wonder if the negative perceptions people had of me even had anything to do with my weight at all as a teenager. I wonder if the size small that I so desperately wanted to fit into was ever a size that was and would ever appropriate for my body then and now.