Chipped Polish & Wornout Jeans

The ugly honest truth is that from a young age women are taught to be at war with our bodies; we are taught to hate their appearance and to want to be prettier, thinner, and more perfect. We are bombarded with images of rail thin women, shamed for being overweight, and told that feeling fat or unhappy about our appearance is a silly problem that can simply be handled by eating less and working out, even if it isn’t that simple. If we don’t conform to a certain image we are often shamed and mocked. Worse than that, we are taught to judge other women by their appearance; we are taught to hate those prettier than us, seeing them as competition, and mock those who do not conform to the predetermined and predefined concept of attractiveness. It makes for difficult for women to form relationships with each other, and it’s a recipe for eating disorders and self esteem issues.

It’s something I struggle with constantly; I am nearly twenty-five, and I have severe body image issues. I’ve had them since I was perhaps sixteen, and they’ve gotten progressively worse. They can be absolutely crippling, and there are days when I can’t stop myself from crying for hours; I have trouble looking in the mirror, and I rush to get dressed so that I don’t look at my reflection. I’ve had days when I’ve fallen apart because of my weight, and nights when I’ve cried myself to sleep. It’s exhausting, and the longer it goes on, the worse I feel. The sad thing is that society sets us up to feel dreadful about ourselves, and instead of fighting it we fall in line. It’s hard to fight back, especially when you feel worse everyday.

It’s easy for people to crack jokes and say it’s a ‘first world problem’ to feel fat and ugly and want to hide your body because you hate it so much. Especially when they don’t feel that way every day. It makes it hard to go about your life when you can’t stand to see your own reflection. I don’t want to look in the mirror or get dressed because I don’t want to see my body. I wear giant hoodies that three sizes too big so that you can’t see how big I am, and I literally cry myself to sleep some nights because I’m so afraid I will never be pretty enough and that I will always be too fat and too ugly to be wanted. And then you hear or read things where people say that you’re being too sensitive about your size or a fat joke or that you’re just upset because you’re not skinny enough to wear something made for someone so much smaller than you as if that means you’re just jealous and that you should just eat less and stop being a fat ass.

Hating your own reflection is like carrying around a massive weight on your shoulders, and everyday it gets heavier until you collapse under the pressure. That is the ugly honest truth. I wake up in the morning and when I look in the mirror all I can see are the flaws. I see fat and stretch marks that will never go away; I can’t see anything else, and it breaks me a little more every day. I have never felt pretty, never felt beautiful, not once, and I'm exhausted. I’m so sick of being fat; I’m so sick of hating my reflection and never feeling pretty enough. Anytime I lose weight, I just gain it back and then some. I can never wear cute clothes.  I’m sick of my reflection making me cry; I’m sick of finding new stretch marks on my thighs and stomach every day or seeing them get worse. I look like I’ve been pregnant or something, and those things may never go away. I’m fat, and I have ugly marks all over my body. And this is what I deal with on a daily basis.