I am an
Aries. I know, you’re thinking ‘what a basic way to start this post’. Yeah, I agree.
But the character traits of my sign are spot on, and relevant to why I am the
way I am and why I decided to write about my point of view on beauty standards
and such. I am stubborn, my temper runs very thin, and while most of the time I
have a way with words, no matter what I will tell you what I am thinking.
However, I am also very loyal, caring, and stand up for what I believe in. If I
have no other reason for writing these posts, it is because I am a huge
advocate for women and their right to feel beautiful. In other words, these
posts are to help girls understand a few things about worldwide beauty
standards, and so I can keep my sanity.
I should start by telling you about
me. I am a college student studying fashion. I am six feet tall, and I hang in
the balances between normal and plus size. I have struggled with self-esteem
issues because of this, but have learned to embrace it. With the recent focus
on the plus-size market pushing to become considered normal sizing, I thought
this would be a good time to give my two cents on the issue, and to hopefully
inspire someone to believe they are beautiful. I, for the life of me, cannot
figure out why, in 2015, there is still a debate on sizes in fashion. I guess
it’s just the way the world works. But I’m going to share a not-so-well-known
fact with you before my spiel begins: women’s sizing is made up. There is not a
single size regulation system- every brand comes up with their own sizing
system. This is why you’re a two in one store and an eight in another. So
please, keep this in mind when you read this AND next time you go shopping. As
for reading this, I am going to break down for you my struggle, how I overcame
it, why I wrote this, and why it is important. With that, let me begin.
Please Don’t Pity Me
It is so
important that I start this segment with that statement. I don’t want pity; in
fact, it’s the last thing I need. This is merely to give you an idea of where I
am coming from and why I stand where I do on this topic.
To begin
with, I am a hair under six feet tall as I mentioned before. That is tall for a girl. I also have a bigger
frame. I am not fat or anything, I just don’t have a wirey model frame to back
up the height. No, this is not a ‘I’m not fat, I’m big-boned’ argument (which,
by the way, is not okay to make fun of.). I really am just not a small person,
and I never have been. It doesn’t affect me so much anymore, especially since I
really started to take care of myself. But when you’re a 10-year-old kid, this
is a difficult build to be okay with.
From first grade on, I was called
fat. A lot of times, and by a lot of people. I would act like this didn’t
bother me, but those are words that scar a little girl. Being made to think
that she was ugly and unwanted by her classmates can be alienating. This
treatment got more intense as I entered middle school, to the point where I
dreaded going to school. I would cry on the way there so my dad would turn the
car around on the way to school and take me back home. No one bothered to
monitor if I was eating breakfast usually. I would skip lunch every day, just
so other people wouldn’t see me eat in an effort to make myself look like I
wasn’t a pig, and as a way to try to lose weight. At dinner I would eat with my
family and decide whether I would eat only a little, or eat and then throw up.
In my middle school mind, this plan was flawless. My parents didn’t catch on,
and my friends were concerned but never said anything.
This behavior carried on into
freshman year, where I began running cross country. I ran in middle school too,
but the running was much lighter and less competitive. In high school, our team
had two of the best runners in the world on the team, and everyone was expected
to train equally as hard. We were put on strongly-suggested strict diets, and
my eating disorder era came to a quick end. I began to properly feed myself,
and in doing so, I lost a ton of weight. I was not skinny by any means, but I
started getting comments from extended family and other adults about how I
looked good, and my confidence grew a little bit more. I finally confessed to
my parents about my eating disorder, but due to my change in diet and physique,
they just kept a closer eye on me instead of hospital care. Things really
started to get better from this weight loss. My mood changed, I cared about my
health rather than my weight, and I felt like I belonged a little more.
Everyone wants to fit in in high
school. I don’t care who you are, even if your ‘thing’ is to be the kid who
doesn’t care what anyone thinks, on some level you do, otherwise you would be
sad and lonely. Anyway, before I began to slim down, I had trained my mind to
think I was a giant. Not in like storybooks or anything, but big enough to be
undeserving of love from any guys, and big enough to be excluded from groups of
people. It was mostly in my head. In reality, I wasn’t much bigger than my
average classmate, and there are probably a few people I could’ve dated had I
broken out of my shell, and honestly, I could’ve made way more friends. But I caged
myself into my misery. And it tortured me until senior year. Even though I
slimmed down, the mindset never changed. I still felt undeserving. I had never
been told I was beautiful by someone outside my family until the summer of
junior year. I didn’t get prom-posed to for either of my proms. And so with the schools permission, I decided
to graduate early. I was ready to leave the school behind, and honestly, I was
only attached to one or two people in the building of almost 4,000 anyway. I
worked full time and got a trainer to keep working on my physical fitness. I
still go see him, and while I am still not and will never be of VS model
proportions or body weight, I look good. I feel good, physically and mentally.
It took much longer for my brain to catch up with how good my body felt. But
that is the purpose of why I am writing this- I am writing this all in hopes of
inspiring someone else who has been told by herself or others that she isn’t
beautiful.
The Best Advice I
Ever Received
The best piece of advice I ever
have received is from my father, and then it was slightly altered by a TEDtalk.
My dads original advice was given to me at some point my junior year in the
midst of a mental breakdown. A lot of outside stress was added because junior
year is just a hard year anyway, but I really hit a low point in my
self-esteem. I really, really hated myself and the fact that I hadn’t had a
boyfriend yet and that after almost five years of running cross-country, I
still didn’t have Ellie Gouldings’ body. Anyway, in the middle of this crying
and quietly telling my parents that I could not give them a rational reason for
my breakdown, my dad looked at me and just said “fake it til’ you make it”.
That’s all. But that sentence changed my perspective. It wasn’t a magical, mind
blowing moment—it was just enough of a perspective change that I wasn’t
depressed. But matters like these need to be taken one step at a time, and this
was the first one. So, I took this advice and expanded it a little bit. I
started writing down quotes that empowered me in a little book and carried it
with me. I also started writing things I liked about myself on my mirror. It
was a small list to start. ‘I like my eyes,’ ‘I like my nose’. ‘I have full
lips, which I guess are nice’. Simple things. And then, slowly, my list got
longer. I started to pay more attention to these features and noticing others.
My list kept growing, as did my confidence. I was still wary of school and
other social situations with kids my age, but my fear shrunk a little more
everyday.
I carried
this advice with me to college, and by then, I loved myself sometimes a little
too much most days. I still had my moments, but for the most part, I felt like
no one was ever gonna love me more than I did. Now, I don’t mean to make this
sound like it was a quick and easy transition. It wasn’t. It was a year of
consistently reminding myself I was not ugly, fat or unworthy of attention of
the world. I also began fashion school, which in itself is hard because it
deals 100% with appearance, all the time. No, it was a very hard year with a
lot of setbacks but even more progress. I skipped ahead in this story because
of the TEDtalk edit to my dads’ advice that changed my perspective a little
again. This talk was about a scientific study that found that good posture not
only makes you look more confident and professional, but also makes you feel
this way. As the speaker put it, you were ‘faking it until you BECAME it’. And
this is where I really started to love myself unconditionally. It isn’t enough
to fake it forever. I had to become confident. I had this epiphany only a few
months ago, and I’m still working everyday on improving my health emotionally
and physically.
Playing Therapist
So, the real inspiration for this
post stems from this segment of my story. My friends at school are some of the
most beautiful girls I know, and they are all different shapes sizes and
personalities. I know this sounds cliché right here. I really do.
But they are genuinely the most thoughtful, funny, crazy people I have
ever had the honor of knowing. And yet they all had serious issues with their
self-esteem. Now, I am not a qualified expert, but I am another girl who dealt
with that and still deals with that every once in a while. They were in the
same boat I was a few months ago. They were so bogged down by the pressure to
be beautiful college girls that all the girls envied and all the guys wanted to
get with, that they forgot that they were still worth something. In fact, they
were worth way more than the guys’ attention at our school was worth. I
understand, getting attention from guys, no matter how much we say it doesn’t
matter, it does. But it still hurt me to see my best friends hurting in a way
that I had been before. I wanted them to see what I saw. So I started writing
what I envied about them on their mirrors, and encouraging to them to wear the
clothes they felt hottest in when we went out. And it started to work a little
bit. But I honestly wanted to know what they hated so much about themselves,
because I saw nothing wrong.
They gave
me typical responses-too fat, bad skin, hair that never does what you want it
to. In the end though, it comes down to this- you have one life, and one body.
There are no trade-ins on the body you have. There is plastic surgery, or the
cheaper option- loving and taking care of the body you were given. They told me
this was one of the pieces of advice they had ever gotten. Its not even really
advice though, it’s the truth.
Take Care
And with that, I will begin to wrap
up my spiel. I am not one of the people who believes that there is a correct
body, just a healthy one. I am not into skinny shaming, or fat shaming. I just know
that if every woman embraced her body, and built up others, we could move past
the pettiness and actually tackle important issues. I am so sick of seeing
media bash women for gaining a few pounds- those won’t matter in ten years,
because by then the standard of beauty will hopefully have changed to be more
accepting of all body types. It really kills me to see anyone be shamed for any
flaw, celebrity or not. Especially when there is no regulation on sizing for
women’s fashion, and when women aren’t meant to be built like boys. But that’s just
my opinion, and one that I needed to get off my chest. I genuinely hope someone
reads this and feels like they took something away from this. I am still
working, so I don’t want to say that one day you’ll get over your insecurities.
I just hope you know it takes an active, conscious effort everyday, and no one
will be able to make the change except for you.
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