pretty people

hot summer feelings

Francine Van Hove

I’ve always wanted to be liked. To be noticed without the effort of actually putting myself out there. To be the pretty girl. And for as long as I can remember, pretty girls were thin girls. And I was not a thin girl.

I used to sit next to a girl with a gap tooth who was thin. She was very popular. I’ve had PE with the girl who ran mile after mile after school. She too was popular. But I’ve been on the receiving end of a sneering thick thighs comment. I have spent most of my life rotating through some culture of diet with a series of calculated calories, starvation routines, and exercise binges, and then, eating binges when the scales refuse to acknowledge my hard work.

When I was seventeen, I had a terrible bout of food poisoning on a trip to Morocco, right before I went to college. I lost a ton of weight, but in doing so, I hit my goal weight. My legs were the perfect thinness. I could wrap my hands around the fattest part of my knees. Like many women my age, I exercised, a lot. I ate grapes for a snack, I gave up soda, I didn’t drink and it wasn’t ever enough. I wish I was kinder to myself, that I wore the jean shorts and spaghetti strap top. But like any woman who has ever existed, I focused on the pudge that rolled over the top edge of my pants, the tiger claws of stretch marks bandaging the back of my legs. I was going to college, college had boys, and boys could be very mean. It only served as a reminder that I have spent a very long time with the lingering desire to be thin. Because to me, the darkest thing I know about myself is that my body, the one thing I cannot replace, is not enough.

I was around for Abercrombie tiny t-shirts and even smaller jean shorts, for the height of Victoria’s Secret Angels skimpy thongs and toned stomachs, for the one-size-fits-all that is Brandy Melville. I spent the majority of my teens being a large or extra-large, hitting the high end of the scale. Not necessarily because I was fat, but because I also grew up in Asia, a continent of tiny-sized women. I have felt big all my life.

On every TV show to ever exist, the thin girl, the one with the chopstick legs and the round breasts and the slender neck without a hint of a second or third chin, gets the boy. I was the girl with a round face, bad posture and cargo shorts to hide the thighs and curved hips. Thin, or anything that I could get close to it, was all I wanted. I wanted to be noticed, to be liked, to be adored, and thinness, to me, was how I was going to get there. I remember in College thinking about how I should lie on a bed. I feared the way my chin would appear. I thought about how I should suck in my stomach when I lay on my side because nobody wants to see rolls, even if it was natural.

Women’s bodies have been at the mercy of society’s eyes for decades. And it’s not hard to wonder where the insecurities have come from. As I’ve grown older, I listen to how my mother treats her own body. How she comments about her ageing skin and the shape of her stomach. How she eats one meal a day or buys oversized clothing to hide her small sixty-year-old frame. It feels awful to know that society’s perfection on older women has gotten to her. Nobody can escape its wrath. I compliment as much as I can. Among my list of worries, I concern myself with whether I’ll end up like her; obsessive and trying to chase eternal youth.

I wanted to blame society because isn’t it always easier to blame some outward factor that you can’t control? It did play a part in how I felt about myself, but then the body positivity movement exploded onto the internet and curvy became the new thing. Thighs and cellulite and the curl of back fat were acceptable and seen on the covers of magazines. Think Ashley Graham, Tess Holliday, Iskra Lawrence. They’re beautiful women, without a doubt, but I couldn’t embrace my body in the way they had. There was no switch to suddenly say, curvy is in and so am I. And I was suddenly left having to confront the reality that perhaps it was me I had to blame for how I’ve felt all these years.

I support this movement because I know what it means to hate yourself so deeply, and I will champion a girlfriend if she ever questions her self-worth based on her dress size. You are not fat, you are perfect. There is no one like you. But I couldn’t do it for myself. The stronghold beliefs that I held in private didn’t reflect what I outwardly projected to anybody else. The rules didn’t apply to me, I told myself.

I’m not seventeen anymore. Curvy girls have become the norm, as have a range of other actual human sizes. The fashion industry has woken up and realised that we can’t all be a size two. I try not to obsess about the number on the scale or if I can squeeze into a smaller jean size. That’s a lie. I still do. I still feel a bit giddy when I find that empty pocket of space at the front of my jeans; when I can grab a dress one size smaller than usual. There’s a quote that goes something along the lines of “You are worth more than the size on a clothing tag,” and that’s true, but I accept it with just a slight wrinkle of the nose. It doesn’t apply to me.

The juxtaposition of how I felt is not lost on me; I say one thing, and believe another. But I couldn’t let it go. I still haven’t. I carry these feelings around like a shadow and some days it’s easier to loosen the reins on how I feel, other days, the feelings come in full force and I avoid looking in mirrors.

When I last wrote about my body insecurities, I did so very carefully, fully aware of what it means to talk about your body so publicly. And I’ve been itching to write about it again. Perhaps because it is summer and stretches of bare skin and beautiful bodies are on display, a reminder of my insecurities laid before me as I walk to work, as I try to shop for new clothes, as I stand in line to order food and squint to see if the menu says anything about the calories in a dish. I asked myself why I wanted to write about this again, surely one time is enough. But it isn’t. My perspective, my feelings and that achy rawness that comes from a decade-old wound can’t…won’t…disappear that easily. I’ve been trying not to shy away from the hard truths because I don’t think it does anybody justice.

I’m not here to champion some sort of women’s comradery on the internet, to fish for compliments and have you tell me that I’m pretty. I’m saying this because I want to tell you that I exist too. That two truths can exist simultaneously —that I can cheer for body acceptance and not accept the shape of my own. Not yet at least.

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