Image

I have struggled my whole life with image. Whether this be body image, who other people think I am, or who I think I am, I always worry about it. I am heavier, so I have found it easy to compare my body type to others. I feel like everywhere I go I see beautiful, skinny women who are confident and proud. That hurt me a lot when I was younger. I never understood why these girls around me looked alike and I didn't. It made me feel like an outsider. I wanted to know if people saw me as "the fat girl" because that's how I saw myself. It made me so paranoid because I always assumed when people looked at me, all they saw was fat and ugly. It got to the point that I would look at myself in the mirror and cry because I hated what I saw, and I thought everyone else hated the way I looked too. I never once thought that I was just making it up. I became convinced that everyone was disgusted by the sight of me. I also started to think that my weight was who I am. I was consumed with the fact that I was heavy, and because of that I developed many self-concept issues.

It gets better, though. I don't know what changed, but as I got older I learned that no one really cares. And even if they did, they don't matter to me. A person who cares enough to look at someone and see how "disgusting" they are is no one I want to associate with. As soon as I realized that other's opinions of me do not matter, I started to grow. I learned that the only version of myself that mattered is the one that I saw because when I was so obsessed with what other people thought, I lost who I was. We have to learn that we are more than just a number on a scale, a rumor at school, or the number of likes on a picture. We are human beings, and we deserve to love and be loved by others. We are all beautiful in our own ways. To make this change, we need to make a change within ourselves. We need to decide that we are worth more than other peoples' distorted versions of us. We are worth more than our own distorted version of us. Once we learn that we are the amazing people we are, we can start to lift others up.

-L