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.

As many other students can agree, the school year has snowballed from bad to worse in terms of stress and school work. Whether the cause is due to adjusting back to in-person classes or it’s just the regular amount of course work. We are incredibly stressed out. We have exams, essays, labs, study groups, projects, etc. We are stressed out, we are tired. And of course, I myself have projects and essays that take a bunch of time and energy.

That being said, I say I don’t have a bunch of time, but love to spend time doing something else. As someone else said, human’s have the desire to be busy and to have tasks. Being a human, I have this need to being doing something important and a task that needs to be completed quickly. And obviously, as a student, it is a requirement to be busy, that is the reason I am here. But when I have moments when I should be doing work, I’m doing everything else.

During one of our classes in the past week, in a passing question, we were asked about down time, and how we should manage time to decompress, and relax. I thought about this a lot. The short answer: I don’t, I have horrible time management. But as I thought about the question more, I feel like I personally have a skewed sense of the line of procrastination and decompress/break time. This is something I need to sort out myself, I’m sure that other people have this sorted out.

Whenever I sit down to work on a project, I have everything I need laid out in-front of me. I have time, I have materials, I have energy. But from result of having other work, being tired or stress, I would like to have time between projects to relax. I find the breaks I take between projects are so long, so long to the point where I push too close to the due date of an assignment. When I’m taking that time to take a break between projects, I feel immense amount of shame, self-hatred, and disappointment in me not doing my work. When this wave of feelings come by I have a panic or all those feelings, and then it dissipates as I try to go back to the decompressing activity that I’m doing.

It’s just a frustration that I have as a student and an individual. Having so many projects to do that I get stressed out. This is also where I have a problem with procrastination. I have assignments to do, I wait until the last minute to do a problem, because I want to do things that are fun and relax me. This makes me wonder if I’m actually taking time to decompress or to just goof around and waste time because I don’t want to work. And I guess it’s technically both at some points? But I know there are moments where I can’t control that I got whisked away by something. I guess mentally, I want to be so far removed from stress, that I can’t think about it until I have those sharp moments of stress and panic.

What ever I’m actually doing. I hope I can figure out this problem of mine soon. I have two more semesters, and I would have to have anymore pangs of stress.

People say that little kids never have a filter and will always tell you the truth. Let me tell you that this is the truth. Growing up as what my children peers perceived as “chubby” was absolutely ruthless. I was always told how I looked in outfits whether I wanted to or not. I felt like there was no place to hide from their comments. 

I remember vividly being told in the third grade, “Haley, maybe you should go up in that shirt size” when I was wearing my mom’s shirt. While at the time I did not want to show them that I was hurting, I ran home and cried anyway. 

I was so embarrassed by everything that I did not want to tell my parents. I hid it from everyone. 

This always made me second guess what I was wearing . This was a daunting thing that haunted me growing up. 

I think these occurrences can be faulted to several things. Body Image as well as the way people perceive each other. 

Body image is something that I will always struggle with. But as the years pass, I get better with my mindset. 

However, the way people perceive each other have a long way to grow. I think in general people in this world categorize kids and adults being heavier as a negative thing. People seem to pray on those who are bigger than themselves. 

Weight should not be perceived as anything other than a personal choice. 

I just wish I could teach some of the world to be kinder. 

How do you meet someone new without automatically labeling them and them labeling you? We create these labels and categorize people into them, even if we do not tell them that we are categorizing them. Everyone does it, whether they realize they are doing it or not. Labels make it easy to remember someone, but it also makes it easy to forget that the people we are labeling are more than just the box we put them in. I don’t want one thing to define me. I am more than that. I am more than just what meets the eye. Because I don’t want to be known as “that girl”. No one wants to be known as “that girl”. But we let one trait define people. It’s an easy way to remember who they are. We use their physical traits, or one specific thing that they did or said, whether good or bad to remember who they are. And that’s what sticks. It how we describe the person to others. “that girl with the red hair”. I know that’s how all my teachers remember me, how my peers remember me. It’s an easy descriptor. Something that stands out, controls who I am. They’ll remember my red hair before they remember my name. And it’s fine for people to remember me in that way. It’s the first thing that people notice about me. I’ll always be easy to spot in a crowd, easy to pick out. That is not a big deal. But it’s the perceptions that people create that come along with it. As crazy as it sounds, people create this idea of who I am as a person, just based on the color hair I have. They think that my hair color is what makes my personality, how I act. I have many people ask me disgusting and creepy questions that I would wish I never heard come out of their mouth. I shouldn’t have to worry about how people define me, as my opinion about myself should be the only one that matters, but when there are so many people that come up to you and expect a certain thing just by the way you look, it makes you question your worth. And my label is just based off of my hair color. I know that their labels are far worse. They have worse perceptions, and have much judgment and hate surrounded by them. So, even if labels make us remember people and make it easier to be apart or something, are labels really good?