One Hundred

Silence sticks in the air like the inside of my thighs on a humid summer morning.

The silence only lasts a few moments, and yet in those moments, my heartbeat pounds one-hundred times,

One-hundred pounds. She is only eighty pounds.

At eight, my biggest concerns were finding new books to read and which shorts would match my favorite blue shirt.

At nine, I couldn't take my mind off the number I read on the scale. I couldn't bear to look at my uncovered legs.

The silence lingered after "eighty pounds."

It was my turn.

Until this moment, I had done all of the right things to fit in.

I hid the parts of my body that looked different than eighty pounds.

I stopped eating, drinking, and breathing to meet the eighty-pound standards -

"Pretzels and gatorade for lunch every day, the rumbles in my stomach are better than the judgy looks directed towards my plate."

"If I just push a little more air out of my lungs, they will see me for the eighty pounds I should be instead of the stomach I'm sucking in."

The silence lingered for too long after she provided her number.

My number was twenty pounds more.

If this were one of my teacher's grammar tests, twenty more points would be a large, red-circled number I would show off with pride.

But up until this point, I have done everything in my power to change the perception of one hundred,

using my pencil to shade the ugly parts of the large number, to combine the "1" with the "0" and pass it off as an "80."

All eyes were on all one hundred pounds of nine-year-old me.

After the long few seconds of silence, I jabbed the dagger that was my weight into my eighty-pound dream's heart.

“One hundred.”

The baggy clothes of denial hiding my true identity were ripped off me before I was ready.

I was still trying to determine if I could get away with eighty-five or if I should accept the fate of ninety,

when my mouth opened and admitted the very shame I carried every day.

One hundred was out in the open, stitched to my sleeve.

The flutter of eyelashes as the girls looked to each other for an appropriate reaction,

the smirks peeling from the corners of their mouths.

Waiting for a response felt like I was reaching out for a hand to grab,

to save me from falling into hating my body forever.

There was no response, just more silence.

Louder, painful silence.

I saw my body morph in the reflection on their pupils.

I was no longer one of the girls. I was one hundred pounds.

My body felt like a life sentence, the very worries that made me turn away from mirrors were approved and signed off by my friends.

I spent that night,

many nights,

most nights,

crying over my weight.

I would squeeze and twist my stomach rolls, as if I could wring them off me.

I was a nine-year-old girl trying to fit in the female cookie cutter society uses to objectify women.

Society replaced my childhood with eighteen years of diet ads and SEVENTEEN magazine articles offering a better, skinnier life.

Society collected every birthday cupcake I passed up in school to build a wall around me, separating me from my skinnier friends so I could focus on hating myself.

It took me many years to realize I have the power to eat away at those cupcakes,

tear down those walls,

wrap my arms around my body,

and love myself.

And I learned it from friends and role models who cared about more than the number on my scale.