Screw the Standards

Growing up, I just wanted to be “skinny.” By high school, I was regularly dissecting every part of my body. I hated my thighs and hated the wideness of my hips. I just wanted to be small.

I remember a girlfriend going into the hospital because her appendix burst. When she returned to school, all I could see was her dramatic weight loss. I was so obsessed with “thinness” that I started hoping that my appendix would burst so that I would lose weight too.

If I’m honest, there is a part of me that is embarrassed to admit that thought. The more significant part of me, which is so much bigger than the embarrassment, is disgusted. Not at myself, but at the fact that it wasn’t just me thinking this way. So many of us are stuck in that battle of self dissection, self-loathing, and anxiety over body size and image.

Looking back at myself, there was nothing overweight about me. I had a natural shape, and when I worked out, I could easily put on muscle. But I couldn’t see this is in myself then. What I saw was created from a combination of constant comparisons of myself to others and from the barrage of comments received from family and “friends.” Statements like “your hips are spreading,” adult men saying that I had “baby-making hips,” or boys at school constantly commenting on or trying to touch my butt.

Thinking of this makes me wonder how many of our body image issues were shaped by the opinion of others? Moreso, how many of us are constantly running towards or away from how we believe other people see us?

Years later, I have no desire for “skinny,” it is maddening that I wasted so much time chasing after an ideal that was never mine—years of disordered eating and self-devaluation for an unrealistic standard.

Maybe, it would have been different if I stood up for myself then. Perhaps, I should have loudly stated that my body was no one else’s concern. I don’t know what would have been different, and hindsight is always so much clearer. I know that my beautifully curved body will never be rail thin, and now I prefer muscle and meat over skin and bones.

We didn’t create this standard of beauty, but we all choose to follow it. It’s a choice that follows us throughout life, whispering in our ears, tapping on our shoulders, and distorting our view. But when we realize that flawed people have created a flawed standard, it becomes so much easier to let it go. Let us break the mold. Let us make our own standards of beauty.