-I've created a Playlist that complements my words. Please listen while you read.- “Your friend needs to lose some weight.” This is the first experience I had with someone commenting on my weight. I estimate I was about 6 or 7 at the time, somewhere around first or second grade. I was playing outside with my best friend, Julie. We were entering the door through the garage to go inside and passed by her older brother and his friend on a bike. I had never met the friend before; this was his first and only time he ever spoke to me. I have no idea what would possess someone to comment on a child’s weight. Well, I do now, as an adult-I live in America, where there is one beauty standard and that’s skinny. But at 6 years old, I didn’t know about beauty standards yet. All I knew was that I was just humiliated in front of my best friend and two older kids, and it cut me so deep. I just ignored it, which continued to be my tactic for the rest of the life. I didn’t k...
I shoulda never listed to your woeful stories The ones I'm sure you told a thousand times before me THE FIRST TIME you traumatized me, I was 29. It was my initial year of graduate school and I had just moved back to the city. I was adapting to a new body; a better one, I thought, than the one that had given me so much trouble growing up. The one that made me hate myself. (But you didn’t know that girl, and never bothered to get to know her.) You got to meet the new me, the one that shed both the physical and metaphorical weight of my past. Our first date, I was disappointed. You looked like your pictures, sometimes, in certain lighting, but I didn’t feel any immediate attraction. You told me later it was love at first site for you. I found that so strange we had such different interpretations. I know now, that was a sign for me to not continue a romance with you…but this new me was attracted to your attraction to me. You weren’t like the other guys I had dated ...