She learned early how to fold herself smaller.
Not sure at what age it started, she just knew she wasn’t good enough, she wasn’t thin enough,
she wasn’t pretty enough – leaving her with thoughts and feelings of not being ENOUGH! She
felt like she was taking the same test over that she kept failing. Her eyes never landed on her face
the way other girls’ eyes seemed to. They went straight to her stomach, her thighs, the soft places
that refused to disappear no matter how tightly she crossed her arms.
At school, thinness moved through the hallways like a quiet rule everyone understood. The girls
who floated instead of walked, who laughed without covering their mouths, who wore clothes
that skimmed instead of clung. Compliments followed them effortlessly, like rewards for doing
something right. She watched closely, studying them the way someone studies a language they
don’t speak fluently yet.
She tried to translate herself.
She sucked in her breath before walking into rooms. She tilted her body away from cameras. If
she had to be in a picture, she learned to tilt her heard so her double chin wouldn’t show. She
learned which sweaters hid her shape best and which jeans made her legs look less like they
belonged to someone who took up space. When people said, “You look fine,” she heard, you
could look better if you tried harder.
At night, her thoughts grew louder. She lay in bed bargaining with versions of herself that didn’t
exist yet—the thinner one, the prettier one, the one who would finally be chosen. If I change this,
she thought, everything else will fall into place. Friends. Confidence. Love. Beauty felt like a
door she just didn’t have the right body to open.
Food became complicated. Not an enemy exactly, but something to comfort her, to replace love
with, to fill the void within herself. Every bite carried weight far heavier than calories. Food was
the way to feel loved, cared for as well as to show love to others. Most days she felt hollow in a
way that had nothing to do with food or acceptance. But the mirror never hid the truth. She
would never be beautiful.
No matter what she changed, it shifted the rules. If her waist seemed smaller, her face looked
wrong. If her legs looked thinner, her arms were too big. The finish line kept moving, and she
kept chasing it, convinced that stopping meant failure. She didn’t realize the voice criticizing her
wasn’t her own—it sounded too familiar, too practiced, like something she’d absorbed from
everywhere.
It was the voice of family members telling her that no matter what she did, she would never be
pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, SHE WAS NOT ENOUGH! It was the voice of
everyone who looked at her, laughed at her for being chubby and not good enough!

Sometimes, she caught glimpses of herself laughing with friends, unaware, unmeasured. In those
moments, she felt almost beautiful—not because she looked different, but because she wasn’t
looking at all. Those moments scared her. They suggested that beauty might not be something
she could carve out of herself through discipline and denial.
She wanted to belong, to be liked, to fit in. To be seen without being sized up, by herself most of
all.
One afternoon, standing in front of the mirror again, she pressed her hand against the glass, right
over her reflection’s heart. It was still beating. Still carrying her through days she survived. For
the first time, she wondered what it would feel like to stop fighting it. The thought didn’t fix
everything. It didn’t silence the voices. But it cracked something open.
Maybe beauty wasn’t about becoming smaller. Maybe it was about taking up space and learning
not to apologize for it.
And maybe fitting in didn’t mean disappearing at all. Just maybe she was meant to not fit in, and
she was meant to just be her authentic self in her own way.
She is still learning to love her curves, and her imperfections but most of all learning to love
herself just the way she is.