I gave you my body - You destroyed my self image

You made me hate me.

I was seventeen when I met you, and I already knew how to be insecure.

I knew which parts of myself to hide in pictures. I knew how to stand in front of a mirror without looking for too long. I knew how to pull at the fabric of my clothes when I thought they made me look bigger than I was. I knew how to compare myself to other girls before anyone else had the chance to do it for me.

At seventeen, I was still learning what it meant to be comfortable in my own skin.

Then I met you.

At first, you made me feel beautiful.

You told me how gorgeous I was and you made me feel wanted. I was your first girlfriend, you were my first boyfriend - it made sense that we made a lot of mistakes with each other, we didn't know how to do the whole relationship thing because we were so new at it. But at some point, you gave me even more reasons to feel insecure. You had a hidden expectation of me, completely unrealistic. You had no idea that it crushed me. I had been thinking I was your dream girl, because you were my dream guy - I was a disappointing reality check that your dream girl was just a fantasy.

I justified your hurtful words to myself. "He means well..." I loved you and so I trusted you.

That was the part I never understood until later: I didn't just give you my time or my affection. I gave you access to the most vulnerable parts of me. I let you see the body I had started criticizing in private. I was still learning about myself and I didn't know there were things I should be ashamed of until you. I let you hold me in places I had been taught to hide. I let myself believe that your hands were safe.

And slowly, the way you looked at me began to change.

It wasn't always one cruel sentence.

Sometimes it was a comparison.

Most of the time it started as something you would say carelessly, and if you noticed that it made me feel uncomfortable, you would make it seem as if I was being too sensitive because after all, it was just a "joke".

Sometimes it was the way you talked about another girl's body, casually describing what you found attractive, as if I wasn't sitting beside you wondering whether I measured up.

You had expectations of what you thought I should look like. When you shared one night with me that you watch adult video content -- something you were deeply ashamed of, but then it clicked in my head: that's what made you ask yourself the question, "how come my girlfriend doesn't look that?"

The problem was that those expectations weren't real.

They came from edited pictures, edited videos, and people performing for a camera - these impossible and fake standards, bodies that weren't mine, and an idea of beauty that seemed to have no room for the girl standing in front of you. Someone who was your friend first. We were both so young, still learning to accept our bodies. And you tore me down.

I began to believe that something was wrong with me because I couldn't become the person you imagined.

I started looking at myself through your eyes.

That was when everything changed.

The mirror became an interrogation.

I'd stare at my stomach and wonder if it was too soft. I'd look at my legs and wonder if they were too big. I'd remind myself of all the things you pointed out that were "wrong" on my body. I'd change outfits several times before seeing you because I was terrified that the wrong clothes would reveal whatever flaw you might notice.

I stopped asking myself, "Do I like this?"

I started asking, "Will he like this?"

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from being made to feel undesirable by someone whose love you desperately want to keep. At as a teenager, I took everything to heart and I felt things very deeply.

I thought if I could change enough, I could make you stop comparing me.

Maybe if I lost weight.

Maybe if I dressed differently - after all, you suggested that I start wearing more preppy style clothing because that was the type of girl you liked.

Maybe then I'd finally be enough.

So I turned my body into a problem I needed to solve. I didn't have the confidence to tell you to get real - do men forget that women are human beings? That we are not completely airbrushed to perfection in real life?

I didn't realize that I was trying to earn acceptance from someone who should have never made me feel like acceptance had to be earned.

The saddest part is that I was a teenager.

I should have been learning who I was.

Instead, I was learning how to hate myself.

I became smaller in ways that had nothing to do with my body. I became quieter. I questioned myself more. I apologized for taking up space. When the next guy came along and pressured me into doing things because of what he also had watched on a screen, I shut off my feelings and gave in to make him happy. So I became hyperaware of how I looked, how I ate, how I dressed, how I existed beside you.

The cycle started with you.

Every time you made me feel insecure, I somehow blamed myself for being insecure.

I thought I was too sensitive.

I thought I was overthinking.

I thought maybe this was simply what relationships were like—that loving someone meant constantly wondering whether you were enough for them.

But love isn't supposed to make you feel like you're competing against an imaginary person.

Love isn't supposed to make you resent your reflection.

Love isn't supposed to make you believe that your body is the reason someone can't appreciate you.

Eventually, I realized something I wish I had understood much earlier:

Your expectations were never a measurement of my worth.

They were a reflection of your ignorance and what you expected from me.

There is a difference.

I know parts of you were very naive, because you were a teenager too. I felt sorry for you for a long time after things ended for good with us - your idea of a woman was ruined by what you were looking at in private, and the fact that you thought that's how women in the real world look...then I felt bad that you had been that sheltered.

I was a child who was growing and changing. I wasn't defective because I didn't look like your ideal and I wasn't unattractive because my body didn't match someone else's.

I was learning to live inside a body that would continue changing long after you were gone.

And you didn't get to decide whether that body deserved love.

For a long time, I thought you destroyed my self-image completely.

You taught me to see flaws where I once saw a person. You took insecurities I already had and gave them your voice. You made me question parts of myself that never needed fixing.

But you didn't get the final word, and you know this.

Because eventually, I began taking myself back.

I looked in the mirror and started to embrace so much about myself, slowly over time. I wore certain styles of clothes because I liked them, not because I thought they would make me acceptable by you - or anyone else for that matter.

I stopped measuring my body against other women's bodies.

I started understanding that my worth was never located in my waist, my legs, my stomach, my face, or anyone else's definition of beauty.

One day the mirror stopped feeling like an enemy.

If I could tell that seventeen year old me anything, it would that love should not require her to become someone else. And if a guy truly loves you, he would not pick at all of your insecurities and point out all of the ways he thought you were flawed - then gaslighting you that you took things the wrong way.

I'd tell her that the person who truly loves her will never make her feel as though her body is an obstacle standing between them and happiness.

I'd tell her that she deserved to be held without wondering whether she was being compared.

She deserved compliments that didn't come with conditions.

She deserved tenderness without criticism.

She deserved to feel beautiful without having to prove it.

Most importantly, she deserved to know that her body belonged to her.

You may have changed the way I saw myself for a while.

But you didn't create my worth, and you never had the power to take it away.

I gave you my body because I trusted you with something vulnerable.

You destroyed the way I saw it then.

But I am the one who rebuilt that image.

I did not rebuild it through someone else's eyes.

My confidence comes from somewhere deeper and outside of myself. I know who I am all, and overall, I like me. Imperfections and all. ~