Real Beauty

This video is amazing. Every time I read an article like this one about how girls are starving themselves to fit into skinny jeans with midriff-baring tops I shake my head and wonder... I feel like we should have gotten beyond this obsession with thin and beautiful years ago. It will soon be two decades since I was in high school and it seems like nothing's changed.

I remember the first time I thought about my weight. I was in elementary school. I'm not sure which grade, but I remember the classroom, I remember sitting against the wall with my friends, all of us in our (not yet designer) jeans. One of my best friends, the one I adored and looked up to, said that she was fat. I don't think that she was ever fat, ever in her life, but I looked at her and thought, wow, if she's fat then what am I? And that was the beginning. Years of ballet classes, scrutinizing myself in the mirror, agonizing over every bump and curve, took their toll. My first teacher, who chastized us for being too big to fit into her old dance costumes. My second one, who – the first time my friends and I went to her studio – immediately told us we needed to lose weight and offered us a diet plan. I don't know exactly how old we were, but we were under sixteen. I can't imagine ever talking to my child – or any child – like that.

I was borderline anorexic at one point in my life. I didn't ever get to the point where my weight was unhealthy, but my attitude and lifestyle certainly were. I would exercise two or three times a day, doing aerobics before and after school and usually following that with a dance class around dinner time. I didn't eat much, and started drinking two huge glasses of water in the morning (and throughout the day) to feel full, a diet tip I learned from a women's magazine. I had to leave first and second period every day to use the bathroom I drank so much water. But perhaps the worst thing was the self-hatred, a feeling I didn't really recognize until years later when I read Jennifer Shute's Life Size and recognized myself in the twisted mind of the main character. That book spoke to that sick part of me so directly that eventually I had to give it away, because I couldn't handle reliving those feelings.

That self-hatred lingers on, even though I have left most of these image issues behind. It's left a permanent wound on my self esteem. Do we really want to do this to our daughters? How do we break this cycle? We all seem to have more questions and concerns than actual answers. The voice of society, of mass-marketing and advertising, this image-centered world that we live in, is just too damn loud.