I am not skinny. Nowhere near it. BBW better describes my physique but that was not always easy to admit to myself or anyone else. Mostly because I hated my body with such an unbearable intensity. Partly because I did not always feel as big as I was. Having so many skinny friends sometimes made me forget that I didn’t look like them. Maybe that’s why the other kids made sure to remind me of it.
I never really told anyone about it. Not my teachers, not my family, not my friends. I was embarrassed and I didn’t want anyone’s pity. I wanted to protect my family and erase any probability of them worrying about my state of mind or safety. For those reasons alone, I kept it to myself and dealt with it on my own. I cried a lot, questioned myself a lot and hated myself a lot. I understood why I hated being fat but I didn’t understand why others did too. That is exactly what it seemed like; these people hated my body size as though it inconvenienced them somehow.
This happened throughout my first three years of high school. Some instances were smaller than others were. Little by little, every judgement and insult I had ever been told molded together, forcing me to loathe every part of myself.
I remember a group of girls in my grade wrote me a note once that said they had a video of me eating McDonalds. They threatened to share it with everyone and post pictures of it all over the school. I don’t know if that video ever existed but I do know that I stopped eating McDonalds for a long while after that.
Another time, I was on the 109 bus heading home after school and sitting behind me were a few guys. Getting closer to my stop, I remember smelling something weird. You know that distinct smell of burning hair? It was that and it was me. They lit a piece of my hair on fire. I put it out, ran off the bus and walked home crying my eyes out. Not wanting my family to know, I wiped my eyes and walked in the house with a fake smile across my face as though nothing ever happened.
I think the hardest part was feeling like they were right, that I was not worthy of being treated any other way. Keeping it to myself just seemed like the right thing to do but it wasn’t. Maybe if I hadn’t done that, someone would have been able to get through to me and convince me that I was letting their negative interpretations of me influence my interpretation of me.
When I hit grade 10, all of that changed. I grew into a version of myself that was more confident. I think it was because I grew into myself. People who know me now know me as someone who is very outspoken and unafraid to stand out from the crowd. It must have been during that summer that I became that person. Other kids seemed to notice too because they stopped picking on me.
I will say this. My weight has always been an issue. It still is but I am making strides to change that. I am also making strides to cultivate as much self-love and self-worth as I can, still to this day. I will not hate myself over anyone. Not ever again.
dxf
demonsinflux 