Becoming a woman was never easy for me. I was always a tomboy growing up and I never wanted to be a “girl.”
I played with all the boys and I wore boy clothes. I remember running around the beach without a shirt on and wearing boys swimming trunks; I was a rebel even at the age of three. I wanted to be like my older brother and show off my chest and that was fine because I was a young child. But when I would grow breasts that would all change. I never wanted to be a woman. Like I said at the beginning of this blog post I just wanted to be a person, not a gender, and I still feel like that. There are times when I feel sexy and there are times when I feel beautiful. There are moments when I don’t feel so beautiful, I feel ugly or tired or scared or weird looking.
I think it’s very common for women to have body image issues. Look at the society we live in! I definitely had some growing up. When I started to develop breasts they got big very fast. And I had friends that were jealous of the fact that I had boobs. I did have some friends in high school that were very cautious about what they ate. Some of them were dance majors because I went to a performing arts high school. I remember one friend sitting at the lunch table looking at the back of food containers and counting calories. I didn’t understand what she was doing but later I figured out that she had an eating disorder. Another friend heard her puking in the bathroom after consuming massive quantities of some other junk food.
It made me sad to think about. I didn’t want her to suffer. But I didn’t know what to do. Seeing her read the back of a grandma’s cookie package and obsess about the fact that it was over 300 cal or I don’t even know because I don’t count calories, it made me feel sad for her. Like she couldn’t enjoy her life.
Sometimes being a woman sucks because society wants us to look a certain way. It wants us to have boobs or be curvy or be too skinny or we’re not skinny enough. The rules change on a daily basis and it’s not fair. Being a woman in our society today is inherently not fair. That’s the summary of it and people develop eating disorders in order to maintain this surreal image of what a woman actually looks like. But there’s no actual manifestation of a woman. Because women look different from one another. There is no ideal woman.
If I were to stand in front of a group of teenage girls, I would tell them to love themselves. I would tell them that whoever they are is a beautiful person and just because they don’t have the same body type as their friend doesn’t mean that they aren’t a wonderfully beautiful soul.Forget what society says a woman is. You decide who you are and what you would like to do with your life. Your body image should not impact how you succeed in the world.Womanhood is up to you. Your identity is up to you. And don’t let anybody tell you differently.
