What I Want You To See

I’ve had a lot of experiences in the past few weeks that I will be posting and writing about.  But this week, I stumbled across a photo on Instagram that I just had to share.  It stopped me in my tracks and it has haunted me for days.

Photographer: Meg Gaiger (Happyimages), via Instagram

This photo gives me mixed emotions everytime: sad and horrified but I also understand the girl in this picture.

All through my childhood I felt like this girl. No matter how active I was or what I ate, I always felt bigger and fatter than my peers.  Even when I look back at photos of my young self and see that I was pretty normal, it isn’t how I felt. I don’t remember idolizing models or movie stars in my Tiger Beat but I remember looking at others.  I always wanted to be as thin as my sister.  I wanted to wear a bikini like my friends at the local beach.  I wanted to be a starter on the basketball team instead of second or third string.

BUT I did not know how to do it in a healthy way and didn’t know I could ask for help.  I remember having body issues as young as 4th grade, maybe sooner.  Things only got worse through middle and high school.

In 6th grade, I got bullied by one girl in particular.  She would make me feel fat and ugly all the time.  She and her friends would laugh at me from across the hallway or in the back of the room.  I never understood why she choose me or why she bullied me.  I’ll never know, but it effected how I started to see myself.  I started to notice more and more how I was different.  I was taller and a little heavier. By the end of middle school and going in to high school, I did not have a healthy self image.  I was constantly judging myself against others.  When I was in high school, I realized I could change how I looked.   Throughout the four years of high school I experimented with anorexia, bulimia, water pills, diet pills and weight loss bars or shakes.  No one seemed to notice that I was struggling.  I never stuck to one method for long enough for it to be that noticeable. My friends didn’t even know.

My senior year of high school was the hardest.  My family experienced quite a lot of stress that year and it was easy to hide in the back ground.  I lost over 30 pounds by starving myself.  I would eat one or two diet bars a day and diet soda.  When you’re at school all day, have an after school job, and then musical rehearsal until 9 pm, it’s easy to hide your eating habits.  I could drive myself everywhere and my parents were always at an appointment or work.  It wasn’t their fault, no one really knew.  I don’t remember why I stopped. My focus shifted to moving to college I suppose.  While I feel like this was one of the hardest times in my life, my confusion about health and eating continued until just recently.

When I look at the photo above, I am that girl.  But what I truly worry about it is young girls seeing me now.  I don’t want ANYONE to ever look at me and feel bad about themselves.  Every day I get the “Skinny Bitch Face” from someone.  I always want to stop them and explain my story and who I am.  I wish I could wear a shirt that says “Healthy NOT Skinny”.  This was my goal all along.  I want young girls to see me and think “I want to be healthy like her!” I want them to see me running down the street and want to be able to do what I can do. I NEVER want a young girl to see me and feel bad about themselves or make the kinds of choices that I did when I was young.

But how to spread this message……..