self love

Hello everyone! This post has been in the works for a long time now and it's something I've shared bits and pieces of over the course of the last year, but I've finally made it all one post and am excited to share it with you now. It's going to be a bit long, so bear with me!

I have always been a small person. I am short - five foot two and a half, five foot three on a good day. Growing up, this made me incredibly sad. In the second grade, I came home from school one day and cried the afternoon away because I was the smallest in my class and one boy told me I was going to have midget babies. Bit harsh for a second grader. In middle school, my best friend hated her body and was constantly trying to watch her weight and she would nag me for how skinny I was. Truthfully I wasn't skinny, I was merely average weight for my height and she was quite a bit taller than me, so I suppose I looked very skinny to her. This was in middle school, so we were maybe 12 or 13 years old. I remember coming home from school and looking in the mirror and wondering why I didn't see anything wrong with myself - and how horrible is that? I was being put down by her because I was okay with my body. I would look in the mirror and wonder why I never put on weight, wonder why my best friend thought she was so hideous when I thought she was beautiful, and mostly I just wondered if maybe there WAS something wrong with me and I was just missing it. Despite this, I had pretty high confidence in middle school and the first years of high school, and during a time I know a lot of girls go through phases of self-hate, I just never paid that much attention to my body or how it looked.

After I moved to Germany at age 15, I was in a relationship for the entirety of junior and senior year save maybe three months in between two boyfriends. This meant that I had someone by my side for nearly two whole years telling me I was beautiful every day and insisting there was nothing wrong with me on the rare occasion I pinched a bit of belly fat or ran my fingers through my unruly hair. Both boys I dated in high school were too good to me; they both loved me probably more than I deserved and I was and am still very thankful for that. During this time, I still felt pretty good about my body (good meaning I didn't feel bad); what I'm trying to say is I honestly never paid any attention to my weight or anything like that. I played soccer so I was pretty active, but I also was able to eat a lot of food and drink alcohol as well and nothing ever happened to me. I was also surrounded by girls who were less than interested in how their bodies looked. I was never put down as I had been in the states for my small stature. My friends just seemed to care about things other than their bodies or their weight. I was never exposed to the self depreciating culture that surrounds high school girls in the states. I had no one to impress - I didn't know I needed to impress anyone, to be blunt. I just never knew any of this even existed except in the media, and even that I rarely saw anything that related to me or my body.

Then I moved back to America. I was quickly thrown into a whole new way of life unlike anything I'd ever experienced. (Here I interject that I grew into an adult in Germany and much of my way of thinking and perceiving was solidified there, even if it was only two and a half years of my life. Feel free to assume that because the majority of my life has been spent in America I should think like an American, but I don't.) Two and a half years was a long time for me to miss, more than I had expected. Suddenly I found myself in a whirlwind of habits like tanning, highlighted hair, minimal clothing, and lots of makeup, so many things that aren't necessarily wrong but things I was just not used to at all. It didn't take long for me to fall into the patterns of American college life and the partying that comes along with it, and the mixture of binge drinking and disrespecting my body began to take its toll. I lost sight of myself.

During Christmas of 2011, for the first time in my entire life I began to hate myself. No one told me I was fat. No one rejected me openly or talked shit behind my back (at least if they did I know nothing of it). I was receiving more male attention that I knew what to do with, but for some reason I simply looked in the mirror one day and hated myself instantly. This terrified me - for so long I had been so comfortable and so happy and how could I have been, when I looked like this?! All I could see was fat, everywhere, I couldn't believe how fat I'd let myself get. (I had gained probably about fifteen pounds since I started university, so I weighed around 140 lbs.) I'm honestly not sure whose expectations I thought I had to live up to or whose standards of "beautiful" or "perfect" I was trying to measure up to, but it did the trick. I felt an insurmountable pressure to be skinny and I didn't know where it was coming from or why. I began eating less and working out more, and not in the healthiest of ways. I became a vegetarian in April 2012 at first with no reason really, but eventually I figured it was a way to mask that I was eating less and no one would question it.

In May 2012 I was not significantly skinnier (or happier, really) and I was eating only foods I thought were healthy - mostly fruits and vegetables, eggs, some whole wheat products, and really not much else. I was terrified of eating anything that wasn't healthy by my standards. I was displaying signs of orthorexia nervosa - something an anon on Tumblr alerted me of, but I didn't think I could have an eating disorder. (And I didn't in the end, but the thought was always in my mind.) I went to the gym one morning with my best friend and while doing my normal elliptical routine, I began to feel very sick and I had to run out of the room to the bathroom. I barely made it in before I fell to the floor, collapsed in exhaustion. Luckily one of our friend's moms was there and she saw me go in and followed me, then helped me regain a bit of consciousness and called my mom. I was incredibly embarrassed when I realized what had happened, and I just didn't understand why my body would do this when I had been working so hard to make myself "healthy". My mom was incredibly upset and tried to make me eat meat again, thinking I just wasn't getting enough protein. I skipped my period in May and June as well and for the first time in six months, I finally started to realize what I was doing to myself. During this time, I lost hardly any weight - maybe 5 lbs. - because I was destroying my metabolism by not eating enough calories to get my body through the day.

In the months of June and July, I travelled all over Europe, to Paris, Belgium, Italy, and Amsterdam. I tried to focus more on having fun with my friends rather than fretting about my weight, and for a while I was pretty content. However August was hardest of all the months - for some reason, I was just an emotional mess. I was back in the states again, and I immediately felt the pressure return. I was terrified of going back to school and letting people see how my weight had gotten out of control (it hadn't - I weighed about 135 lbs at this point, so it was all in my head) and I would text my best friend the most horrible, depreciating things about myself only to shake my head and text her again, telling her not to worry, that I was fine. I refused to shop with my mom and when she forced me to go, I would cry in the dressing rooms as I looked at the sizes of the clothes I was fitting into (size 4.. so obviously I was just insane). I was exhausted, I was unhappy, and most of all, I was unhealthy. I knew my best friend was worried about me and wanted me to get help but I insisted nothing was wrong. I don't know what I would have done without her honestly, she kept my feet on the ground through everything.

Around my birthday in September, I began to realize how crazy and messed up everything I'd done to myself was. Earlier I mentioned standards of beauty and perfection - I kept wondering WHO I was trying to impress, who I was trying to live up to. All the time I'd spent trying to perfect myself hadn't made anyone like me more or less. No one had honestly noticed the changes in my body - no one but me. I had a revelation in the middle of October, and it went a little something like this: no one matters but me.

No one matters but me.

I realized that I had a choice. I could continue to hate myself, to cry myself to sleep, to work my body into exhaustion, to deprive myself of food I loved. Or I could appreciate my body for every single thing about it. Suddenly, my opinion was the only one that mattered. I hadn't been trying to impress anyone in particular - I had been trying to impress everyone. Once I realized that I didn't owe anyone anything, I could feel my old self start to come back. This was a very private thing, as had been my phase of self hatred. The people I am closest with at university have no idea that I went through any of this at all. I started eating more, still healthy foods but enough to actually satisfy the needs of my body. I began treating my workouts as something fun, something to make me feel alive again. I started dressing exactly how I wanted to instead of like every other clone on my campus, and I finally began to see the bits of me that had escaped for so long, the girl from a long time ago who once had understood that nothing was wrong with her.

Nothing is wrong with me. I am not skinny, and I am not fat. I am not perfect. In this realization, I am happy. My appearance is the last thing I worry about as it relates to impressing anyone else. I dress how I want for me. I wear makeup for me. Everything I do is for me. I have worked so hard since August to fall back in love with myself, to see the me that my ex boyfriends tried so hard to get me to see, the me that my best friend loves and supported through all of my bullshit self-hatred, the me that my parents are so proud of. Absolutely nothing is wrong with me. I am amazing. I am beautiful. I am strong. I am smart. And you know who made me believe that? Me. No one else had to tell me, and no one else will ever have to tell me what or who I am, because no one has that right. I am the only person who has the right to decide who I am. This is not arrogant or conceited, and if it is, then I am proudly arrogant and conceited. I would rather be that than allow myself to let the petty opinions of others break me down ever again.

Not all of my days are perfect now that I have finally accepted myself. I still have insecurities, but I know that their roots and remedies can only come from within me. I wake up every single day thinking about something other than my weight or what I'm going to eat or who's going to notice my stomach fat or the size of my arms. I worry now about what sort of things I'm going to bring to the world, whose face I am going to put a smile on, or whose words I am going to hear and how they are going to change me. Once I realized that the only person who I owe anything at all to is myself, I became a truly happy person. I couldn't have done it alone, and I will forever be in debt to my best friend and my parents, who know me better than I know myself. And not all of my days are sunshiney, but I know better than ever that the only way to improve what needs to be improved can be working my way up towards positivity, rather than grinding and tearing myself down. I'm done with that. I nearly ruined myself, and I won't ever let it happen again. The only person I owe anything to is myself. My self worth is determined by how I treat myself, because how I treat myself is how I want to treat others, and I want to do that with the most respect and love possible. I think I deserve the same.