Sixteen

The girl in this photo is fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, and in no way whatsoever is she comfortable in her body. She doesn’t think she’s pretty; she doesn’t think she’s allowed to, and anyway, it’s not true. For her height, which is 5'9, she’s achingly thin, not because that’s her natural bodytype, but because she exercises compulsively through fear of weight gain (she regularly walks three kilometers between train stations on her way home from school to compensate for snacking on a muesli bar). Not surprisingly, she is always hungry, and though she eats like a horse when finally presented with food, she always worries about it. Her hip and collarbones jut sharply through her skin; she doesn’t see this, however, and instead obsesses about her (percivedly) massive thighs and double chin. Her height contributes to self-consciousness about her size: she feels massive compared to other girls, broad-shouldered, long-armed and disproportionate, and so tends to hunch in an effort to look smaller. Almost every day, she stares at her reflection for minutes on end, mesmerised by her flaws. She can’t understand why people insist on telling her how thin she is, and her cognitive dissonance is such that, when she eventually goes to university and gains ten kilos in her first year (before then, she weighed the same from age eleven to age seventeen), she doesn’t notice, even when friends start to comment on it, because in her eyes, she’s always looked like that. She’s never heard of white privilege, cis privilege, thin privilege, straight privilege, and given the fact that she’s years away from discovering intersectional feminism, it’s a coinflip as to whether she’d understand her possession of them even if you explained it to her; all she knows is, she feels awkward in herself, and can’t bear to suffer the weight of compliments she knows must be either insincere or inaccurate.
This girl is me, and there are so many things I’d like to go back and say to her. But I can’t; instead, I can only look at this photo, and shake my head at who I used to be.
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