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How I Made Myself Feel Better About My Body

It's still a struggle.

By Jess PerryPublished 6 years ago 5 min read
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I never thought that I would get this far. I had no future plans. I really thought that by the age of 16 I would kill myself. Here I am today now 21. I still struggle with things but I'm not as bad as I use to be. For the record the picture featured is not mine. I don't own it.

My name is Jess and for a while growing up I weighed less than 100lbs. I hated myself. I wasn't anorexic or bulimic. I was naturally just small and ate quite a bit. That didn't stop people from saying things about me and spreading rumors. I want to write about a few things that I did throughout my pre-teen and teenage years to cope.

For a while I wouldn't look in the mirror at my body. All I saw was a skeleton looking back at me for the longest time. I was disgusted. So I read a few things online to see if I could find things that would help. One thing that I did was put up inspirational quotes all around my mirror. "You're doing just fine!" "Beauty isn't everything!" "There is no rush." Sayings like this. I would read each one every morning to myself as I got ready for school. I would also put pictures of things that made me happy up. Pictures of cats, dogs, flowers, artwork, etc. I did this for a few years... I even had flashcards I would carry with me at school with the same quotes.

"It's okay, you're doing great!"

"Just calm down no one is staring at you."

"You'll be okay if you get through today!"

After a few weeks of doing this I then started to take pictures of myself. With and without clothes. That sounds weird, I know. I would force myself to look at the pictures of me. Slowly but surely, I started to become comfortable with the way my body looked. I hated it, but I realized there is only so much that I can do. I should mention to you all reading this that I have a rotated chest... My rib cage on my right side sticks out more than my left. Usually the left side is bigger because that's the side with your heart. But my issue isn't just my breast that's bigger than the left, it is my bones. So when I looked down at my body that's all I would ever see... All I could think about when I wore a bra or a shirt. Someone could see that it's uneven. I had a special small pad that I would put in my bra on the left side to try to make it look even and for the bra to actually fit. That is the worst... bra shopping when the bra only fits one side. How do you find a proper bra when your right side is a solid B cup and your left is an awkward A/B cup? An A is too tight on the right side. B sized bra fits the right side but leaves an uncomfortable amount of room on the left side. There is just no win here...

So when I say I was taking pictures of myself with and without clothes, this is the part of my body I was trying to learn to love. It is bone, after all... nothing can really be done. I was also trying to get myself to realize that it's okay if I'm skinny. The one thing I hate about telling people this is that they always looked at me weirdly... They couldn't believe that I would take nude pictures of myself as an exercise to become comfortable with who I am and how my body is. I would take the pictures, point out all that I hated about myself and then talk to myself about why I hated it. Which honestly is the weirdest part about this, haha. I would put myself down and then try to bring myself back up because if there is one thing that I have learned it is that no one hates me more than me and there is no one who will pick my spirits up like I do. I was all I had. So I needed to make the most of it.

Did it work?... A question I get asked every time I tell someone about this. It did. For a while, at least. I still hate how I am, but doing that, with reading the quotes to taking pictures of myself and talking myself into realizing that it is okay how I am... it helped. While I hated how skinny I was and I hated that my chest was uneven I came to terms with it all. I accepted me. Yes, I was disgusted with how I looked, but I accepted that there was nothing that I can do about my chest and told myself that I won't always be so skinny. I will change what I can and accept what I can't. Now things are different. I am no longer as skinny as I once was. Like I said before, for a while that did work... But depression hit me hard when I was 16 and I stopped eating as much as I usually would. I wasn't starving myself on purpose. I just lost my appetite. I was living with my dad and stepmom at this time. It was summer. My dad and stepmom made a lot of jokes about how skinny I was. They did it so much that my younger sister and younger stepsister started to do it, too. Mind you, at the time before becoming depressed, I weighed about 98 lbs at the age of 16, being about 5'3" tall. When this started and I stopped eating, I dropped down to 80–85 lbs. I have struggled for the past 5 years to get my weight up and be healthy. I am happy to tell you all that this year, 2017, is the first year that I have reached 100 lbs. That was in the beginning of the year, though. So now it is December 2017, and I now weight 125 lbs.

You would think I would be happy... but weighing this much has brought on new struggles. I still hate myself and my body, but now for different reasons. It is an uphill battle, that's for sure.

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