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.

Mia Mingus’ piece on Access Intimacy describes a sense of comfort brought about when you and a stranger share an indescribable bond that stems from an unspoken understanding of each other’s needs. Interestingly, the people you have the closest bonds with don’t have to share your access needs for you to have strong access intimacy.

From personal experience, I find this to be true. One of the people I feel most comfortable about discussing transness with is actually a cis friend of mine. Sure, other trans people will have access intimacy with me by default, but for whatever reason, this friend is able to meet and then surpass this implicit understanding. It hurt to loose many friends and family over something that made me happier about myself. But it was almost equally euphoric when people I hadn’t thought would be accepting actually were. That sensation was a physical reaction to feeling those sudden changes in access intimacy. Oh, you’re already super supportive of others in my group? Oh you’re closeted yourself and you’re happy you have someone to talk to now? A lot of these interactions made it much easier to deal with the negative ones. An argument I hear a lot is that you can never truly understand someone’s lived experience, and this frustrates me when it’s used as an excuse to avoid trying, because a lot of the time, the person who experienced it may not truly understand it themselves. Just last week, I realized that when I was made to feel socially uncomfortable by my male peers as a kid, I was really experiencing dysphoria. This revelation was only made possible by years of personal growth and reflection. So, no, you don’t need to truly understand to try. To support them. To listen to them. To appreciate them. Empathy goes a long way. I believe that empathy is a large factor in fostering access intimacy between people who don’t share circumstances, and those that do.

Let’s just get to the nitty-gritty, I want to go bald. I want to shave my head and feel the breeze on my scalp. Although I want to go bald, I find myself panicking and overthinking every time I try and do it because of how attached I am to my hair.