Body Image.

I remember when I was around age ten (so many things happened when I was ten), I received a box of hand me downs from my cousin. Though most kids wouldn't have been, I was really excited. I always looked forward to these packages. Sometimes they happened to be big cardboard boxes, and sometimes they were knotted white trash bags, but they were always busting open with pre owned clothes. It made my mom happy and it made me happy. It meant I didn't have to go out to a store with her and fight over our distinctly different tastes in clothing. It was like shopping for free, right? Little did I know that that particular box would mark the beginning of my long winded struggle with my body image.

In the box, there were the normal articles of clothing that a teenage girl would possess, though because my cousin was a few years older than me, most of the pieces were a little too mature for my moms taste. There were a few OBX t's, some pairs of shorts, maybe a dress, but what I remember the best were the pants. I was always worried about pants. No pair of pants that I ever tried on in stores ever fit me properly, and my mom was never very... encouraging. They were either too long or tight around my waste, which was expected seeing as I am currently 4'11" and slightly pear shaped. My weight tended to stick like an inner tube around my tummy and hips, especially in my preteen years, so finding the perfect pair of pants always felt, and still feels like, searching for the holy grail. In this promising box my cousin sent me there were very few pairs of pants, in fact, there were only two and they were almost exactly the same. They were both the same style of cottony cargo-ish pants, but one pair was a size five and the other was a size seven. These are juniors sizes, not children's. So, I tried on the size fives first, thinking that because I was shorter, they would fit me better. That was hardly the case. I couldn't button them, and if I'm remembering correctly, I could barely get them up over my legs. So, my ten year old self pulled on the size sevens, which were also slightly tight, and stared at myself in my moms bathroom mirror and cried through the door to her about how I was "fat".

But was I really fat? I wasn't thin, that's for sure. I was very aware of my weight after that day, not the number but the size. Did I have an hour glass figure, was my tummy to round, were my arms flabby? No, I didn't look like a super model, I was ten years old. I was homeschooled, I didn't get as much physical activity as the average ten year old of 2003. I was home all the time, so I ate all the time. I also had next to no interaction with children my age, so the only things I had to compare my body to were the girls on television and the women on the covers of magazines at the grocery store.

Then, to top it all off, my mother enrolled me in private school, of which one of the requirements was a school uniform. I had the choice of wearing a button down Oxford or a white polo, paired with either a khaki skort (a skirt with shorts built in for those that don't know), a pair of khaki pants, or a plaid skirt. All of these items of clothing had to be ordered out of the L.L. Bean catalog, which slimmed my chances of actually getting the proper size down to zero. I kid you not, we had to send back five different orders before we got tired of it and tailored my pants ourselves. Because all of the school uniforms were in children's sizes, I had to get extra-larges in everything. My pants were too long and my shirts were too baggy, but that was that, my mom had had enough. All I could think about from age 12-14 was how I was wearing extra-larges. I wanted to be thin and pretty like the other girls in my class. Instead of sandwiches and cookies, I brought salads. And by salads I mean a Tupperware container of literally just lettuce. Nothing else.

At that point I was worried about boys liking me. I started to notice that the girl that got the most attention was beautiful and sporty, tan and thin. It was almost like the recipe for the hottest chick. I began tallying things in my head. My forehead was too small, check. My hair was too short, check. My tummy was too big, check. My uniforms were huge and terribly unflattering. Instead of being skinny and sporty, I was curvier and heavier than the other girls. In my mind I was the ugliest thing, fat and extremely un attractive.

Then came the problems. As the end of eighth grade and my time in private school began to draw to a close, I rapidly began losing weight. Most of it was due to my steady diet of nothing and the occasional bowl of just lettuce. My hair grew really long, and instead of looking like a bigger, frumpier girl with huge uniforms, I looked like a slightly curvier, thinner girl with unfortunately large clothes. Que high school, and multiply the amount of walking I was doing by a trillion. I also developed a weird reaction to stress. Whenever I was extremely anxious, which was practically all of the time, I would become violently, disgustingly ill. Suddenly, my weight disappeared, but that doesn't mean my insecurities did too. They just quieted down for a bit.

Now I'm in college and its back to the same old same old. I'm not going to blame my terrible body image on the media like everyone else. I should have enough common sense to know that most of the pictures in the magazines are photoshopped and normal girls are not a size zero and crazy thin. They're just that, normal girls. But my weight still collects around my waste and my hips and all I see is fat. My forehead is still too small and my hair is still too short. But what I and the rest of the worlds population need to realize is that we are comparing ourselves to something fake. How do I know my waste is too wide? Because I don't fit a size zero. Why do I think my forehead is too small? Because the photoshopped pictures of beautiful women say so. But we shouldn't be trying to mold ourselves to a cookie cutter beauty recipe. The most beautiful person we know should be ourselves, we should love ourselves that much. We all have things that make us beautiful, wether it be our smiles or our senses of humor. We just need to recognize them. My wide hips? They aren't a flaw, they're unique to me. My super round face? It makes for a really big smile. My narrow eyes? They sparkle when I'm happy. So who cares if you're bigger or smaller, ultra thin or ultra large. No one deserves to sit in their bathroom and cry because they don't fit into a standard size of pants. No one should ever do that to themselves. Everyone deserves to love every single one of their unique and equally beautiful differences, they're what makes us all special.