Why do I hate my body?

I don’t get it. I don’t understand why I hate my reflection. I don’t understand how I can be so many things, so many brilliant things, but that sometimes it feels like the only thing that matters about me is how I look in a fucking crop top. I don’t get it.

I guess, intellectually, I understand it. Media. Beauty standards. Magazines. Advertising. Greed. Hollywood. Photoshop. It all makes sense in my head. I see it. I get it. I understand how that kind of shit can just sneak its way into my brain and start camping out in there, dictating my thoughts and behavior like it owns the place. I see that.

Like, intellectually and logically and rationally, I understand how I can get to the place of viewing my body in a very negative light, considering the kind of nonsense I am unaware of digesting on a daily basis. That being said, I’m conscious. I don’t just consume without thinking. I don’t buy magazines. I watch the shows I like on Netflix and that’s it. I’m not bombarding myself with all these unrealistic images of women.

And yet...

Even with that, even with a conscious effort to not be exposed to the kinds of shit which sneaks its way into my brain, I still hate my body. I still go to sleep with exercise plans in my head. I still see eating bread as the ultimate sin. I still avoid my own reflection. I still hide away parts of me I don’t deem as acceptable. I still flip past pictures of beautiful women on Instagram and automatically assume their lives are better, that they are better. I still look at myself through a critical, harsh lens. I still have this tiny lingering belief that my shinier, happier life happens the moment I fit into a size 0.

I’m accomplished. I’m successful in many ways. I’m intelligent. I’m ambitious. I’m kind and compassionate and thoughtful and witty and funny and passionate. I care vdeeply about helping when I can for who I can. I try to be genuine. I’m trustworthy and I think most people would have a pretty high opinion of me (humble brag!). I’m a self-taught graphic designer. I'm a published writer.

But...

I am not skinny.

I am not hot.

How the latter two characterizations completely overshadow my many former achievements and virtues, I will never know. I will never quite understand why being a woman and being beautiful and thin deserves more recognition than anything else that I could possibly do in my life. I will never understand female admiration that is doled out simply because of the way a woman looks. I will never understand why talent, fortitude, perseverance, intellect, compassion are less virtuous than being hot.

To be hot is to be everything. To be hot is to be afforded the luxury of having not be anything else. Female hotness is the ultimate aspiration. And. I. HATE. it. Maybe I would hate it less if I were hot, if I was profiting off the system, the game. But, you know, I think I could be hot. I could devote my life to being hot. There are means. There are ways.

Maybe this is a rebellious stance to take, but fuck off. I don’t want to spend my life trying to be acceptable enough. To try and pass as "good enough." Good enough is the prison women are kept in. I think, if I can be good enough, passable, enough of something, then I will be fine. I will be okay. I don’t consistently aspire to be brilliant or great or accomplished. I aspire to good enough, as if being good enough affords me much of anything. If I can just look like how I’m supposed to look, then I will be fine. If I color in the lines, follow all the rules, be a good woman, I will be fine.

Good enough is a trap. Being good enough is NOT good enough. It’s not enough of me! It’s a passing grade, a consolation prize, a participation trophy. And I want none of those things. I’m not trying to hit the limit of who I am by being good enough. Fuck good enough. I want to go straight past good enough and right into being brilliant. Straight to genius. Straight to change, growth, potential, passion. Good enough is the "meh" of life. And I want none of it.

I don’t want to cave or cower to a pervasive belief that says a woman’s ability to be hot is more valuable than her ability to be literally anything else. What kind of world is this? What kind of disempowering bullshit is this? And, why do I stand for it?

Why do I hate my body? Because I think I should. Because I’m punishing myself for not being good enough, for not being hot, for not being thin. I hate my body because I have nothing or no one else to hate. I hate my body because I am angry and it is an easy thing to focus that anger on. I hate my body because it has defied me, because it isn’t naturally thin, naturally hot. I hate my body because it seems like the thing I should do. It is what I’ve been taught. It is what I know and it is what everyone around me does. I hate my body because I choose to hate it. Because I think hating it will inspire me to change it, which will give me the acceptance—the good enoughness—I think I want. I hate my body because I haven’t decided to feel otherwise. I haven’t decided yet that my body is worth loving, that I don’t need to earn its favor, that it can be anything it wants to be and I will continue to love it. I haven’t yet chosen this.

If you fall in love with me

If you fall in love with me I can’t promise you it will be pretty. I can’t tell you I’ll make you breakfast on lazy Sunday’s. I can’t pretend that I won’t love you too much some days and not be able to even love myself others, when you wake up you may find me in a pool of my own tears or you may not find me at all.

If you fall in love with me, I won’t fall too fast, too hard, or endlessly, I have tried to love like that before and the results were nothing short of tragic. If you fall in love with me, I won’t change myself for you. I won’t give up parts of myself to make us work. I won’t plan a future with you that doesn’t include all of the things I want to do and be. My feelings for you will grow and change as they are supposed to and I will only be able to hope yours do the same.

If you fall in love with me I will show you how independent women love others. I will show you off to my friends. I will encourage you every day and help you achieve every goal that you are working towards, there is nothing more attractive than a partner with aspirations the same size as mine.

If you fall in love with me, I will share my interests with you and will hope you do the same. I will hold your hand in and kiss you goodnight. I will listen to your favorite song even if I hate it. I will try to hug you often. I will tell you my secrets and listen to yours, you will only have memories of the girl with every defense strong and steady.

If you fall in love with me, I will not be your everything. I will not tell you lies. I will not say that it will never end because I know it more than likely will. I will not beg you to stay if you no longer want to. I will not fight for us if you are not fighting for us. It does not matter how deeply or truly you love me I know when things must end.


If you are brave enough to fall in love with me I will try not destroy you.

When a writer falls in love

When a writer falls in love, her writings can either make you fall or will break your heart. When a writer falls in love, she may actually stop writing.

Ideas about love, relationships and heartaches are reality to some but for the writer, it is only but a dream she has yet to experience. For she is the writer who only learns about dates, kisses and break ups through the stories she heard. And when she writes, she tries to sew it all in the most perfect way. In ways like how movies and songs are made, with happy endings. She can only imagine.

Behind every chic flick, novels and songs are writers who works hard in portraying the emotions and feelings that people have felt- a feeling that she have not even experienced at all. She writes stories about her parents unconditional love or her friend’s break up but she has never written her own. It is an ironic event where one tries to make everyone feel something that she herself have not yet felt.

But then she fell in love and she stopped writing. She did not only stop writing, she stopped doing everything. She spent less time with her family, with her friends, with her studies and even to herself because she only had time for them.

Late nights out, dinner for two, movie nights, warm hugs and deep conversations. The writer fell in love with the simplest thought that she can also be loved. That she is capable of being loved, that she can be seen as a potential lover and no longer just the friend, the younger sister or the storyteller. The writer has become a reality of her own.

When the writer fell in love, she loved so hopelessly and very deeply. The writer who wrote fictional characters and imagined episodes became human. She became an actuality of her own, with someone whom she thought can only be found in her dreams. She was not conceptualizing drafts for others anymore- for she was making her own.

Of all the stories the writer has made, she always questioned as to how can people be so senseless when it comes to love. How can people become so helpless when they are in the state of being in love?

The writer sees it all now. One can not have a single definition of love, for love is universal. For love is experienced in different ways and in different levels. For the writer, she has accepted the fact that when you fall in love, you are not yourself anymore. You are a person blinded of love.

The writer no longer thought about herself but instead the welfare of her love. She no longer had time to write for she would rather look at reality- for this is real and words are not. The writer no longer writes because she’s afraid that if she would let even a minute pass, her reality might disappear.

And true enough, like the ones she have heard and seen, there will come a time when everything will fall apart. It was all gone as fast as it came. They disappeared leaving her breathless and perverse.

No more late night conversations, no more dinner out, no more ridiculous doings- no more them. There is no happy endings unlike what the other writers made everyone, including her, believe.

When the writer fell in love, she was sure that what she gave was pure and genuine feelings. But because there is no better expert of heartbreaks than a writer, she knows that she will no longer love the same. She knows how to restrict herself now for she already recognizes the feeling of falling back first and not looking if there’s even someone who’d catch her.

When the writer falls in love again, she’ll no longer expect pixie dusts, exciting glows and firework shows. When the writer falls in love, she’ll expect both an eternity of happiness and pain all at the same time.

When does love happen?

Is love the result of the first night spent in the same bed? Or maybe that night is a result of the love. Perhaps it happens the first time you meet their parents – maybe you fall in love with them first, sort of as a prerequisite to falling in love with the one you’re really with.

I guess one could argue that it happens all at once, in one moment. That maybe you go to bed after a night of binge watching Doctor Who and wake up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this feeling. And there was no exchange of words or sex or cupcakes to explain this sudden, extreme change of heart. Maybe it was just a really good night’s rest. Maybe it happens during your late-night Doctor Who session. When their eyes are glued to the screen with their mouth open slightly and they reach to grab a handful of popcorn, and it takes three tries until their hand finally finds the bowl and not your pant leg. Maybe this is the moment that the lightning strikes.

Maybe there is no lightning, but a steady flow of sunbeams that have always been present. Maybe there are only triggers, and that overwhelming feeling, that panic attack-esque feeling of being in love for the first time, is really us just realizing we’ve been in love all along. Maybe there is no one moment we fall in love, or we just don’t feel it anyway, but we feel the moment that we realize we’ve been feeling the way we have because we’re in love.

I tend to believe that love is similar to grief, and happens in stages without our knowledge. And it happens at different paces for different people – for some it may only take a few days, for some, weeks or months, in some rare cases it may even take years.

Maybe the stages are the same as grief; maybe in the beginning we are in total and complete denial that we are in love, and we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe it’s denial because this feeling is too great, and this person really knows how to tell a story, and they clean up too nice, and their hair is too perfect, and they’re too kind to others, and they work out too much, and they are asking you too many questions about your job, and your major, and your feelings, and your mother, and your passions for you to actually be in love with, let alone for them to actually be in love with you.

Maybe by the end, we do really learn acceptance – maybe in the sense that we accept them for the little things; leaving the volume on the TV a little too high, the occasional hair on the soap bar, the fact that they don’t wait until the commercials to start telling you about their day, and by the time the commercials do come on, the story is over, it was anti-climactic, and now you have no idea who opened up the scoring in the game and the period is almost over and you know they'll talk through intermission so you won't be able to see what you missed.

But maybe we learn acceptance on an even deeper level. Maybe they’re not the ones we really need to accept. Yeah, they do clean up nice. But that tie wasn’t straight when he first put it on. Sure, their hair is flawless. But before you left the house, he had one strand sticking straight up and you think you’re dating Alfalfa. And maybe they are a really captivating storyteller. But it’s charming the way you take a year to tell a story, needing to tell every detail, stuttering and tripping over words, getting so animated, and ultimately forgetting where you’re even going with it, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve either lost everyone or they’re completely underwhelmed and it wasn’t really worth the effort it took to tell, or listen to. Maybe he can run a 5K and barely break a sweat, but I can sit in a coffee shop and write a novel about his kiss when he walks in the door from his run.

So maybe love doesn’t happen the first time you wake next to each other, or when you admit to them how old you were when you got lost on the way home from school and rode in a cop car to get home when you were in the first grade, or when they finally have your friends’ stamp of approval, or when your father tells them over dinner how you wanted to be a mermaid when you were younger and you cried when you realized you couldn't, but when we finally accept about ourselves the things we try so hard to force upon others to accept. When we’re finally in love with ourselves – that’s when love happens.

Depression is a journey and you can make it through

There’s no quick fix to depression. You won’t wake up one day feeling weightless. You will remove stones from your chest one day at a time.

It’s a slow process and some days you’ll feel just as heavy as months before. But one day you will wake up ready to face the day. It won’t be a perfect day but you’ll find yourself overcoming the gloom much easier.

It won’t rule your life anymore. You will sense it coming but it will leave just as fast. You will feel the darkness but the light will be there, too. You will hear yourself laugh when something is genuinely funny. It will be an unfamiliar sound but soon it will become recognizable again.

You’ll catch yourself smiling and it will reach all the way to your eyes. You will sleep through the night and wake up feeling well rested. You will go hang out with your friends or family and not make an excuse as to why you can’t make it.

Slowly you will begin to feel like your old self. You’ll have more energy. You’ll revisit your old hobbies and discover new ones.

People will tell you that you look different. You will think to yourself that you feel lighter. You lost the weight of the broken relationship. You lost the weight of the death of your friend.

You carry pieces of this time with you but it won’t pull you into the hole any longer. You will no longer feel as if you’re drowning.

You can finally breathe.

You will become worried that this newfound feeling is fleeting. But I assure you that it isn’t.

You have made it. You have found a way. You found the light.

It won’t always be easy to hold onto but you know it’s here. The light will never truly leave you.

Some days will seem dark but you will hold onto the flicker of light and it will persevere.

It’s only after you feel as if you’ve lost everything that you’re finally able to free yourself.