caitiesramblings

[caitiesramblings]

Girls who walk onto dancefloors with slender, long legs delicately slipped into a piercing heel. Girls who wear bodycon dresses that mould to their bump-less shape. 

I’ve struggled with body image for as long as I can remember. I went to a small school of just over a hundred people. The maximum number of girls in my year only ever reached eight, and of the eight I was the biggest. I’ve always been a healthy weight, teetering on the higher end of what’s deemed a “healthy” BMI. When I think about the thing that pushed me over the edge, I distinctly remember being about twelve and seeing a post on an anonymous ask-me-anything style website by a girl in my year who had been asked to list all of the pretty girls in our year - everyone was listed except for me. The word “fat” being thrown at me in an argument when I was about fifteen also stung a bit. It wasn’t until I turned seventeen when I started to restrict my eating and count calories. Influenced by a friend at the time who would openly talk about the bodies of other girls, dreading to wonder what she thought about me; I turned vegan (for the wrong reasons), woke up at 6am before college to exercise and chop up veggies for my lunch, track all of my calories, tell people I’d eaten when I hadn’t, obsessively research “thinspo”, and hope no one looked at me too closely.

Girls who drape themselves around poles, aerial hoops and ballet bars as their bodies bend backwards and forwards effortlessly. Girls who have bony, yet soft fingers that tangle in your hair.

Lots of WLW make jokes about “Do I want to date that girl? Or do I want to be her?” Which is fine, I don’t think it’s harmful to make those jokes, but I do think it perfectly sums up body insecurity in the LGBT community. You find yourself lusting after people you both want to date and look like, which for me, and I’m sure many other people, resulted in a “not good enough” mindset, which became a “not skinny enough” mindset. 

Things changed when for the first time in my life, I was putting myself out there in terms of dating. Dating apps were difficult when I hated myself. I never thought I hated myself until I saw beautiful women with abs, small boobs and small thighs. Girls who wore pretty floral dresses and looked like heaven. Girls who could never look at me the same way I looked at them. This is the thing, I know everyone is insecure. But the difference is, when you’re a woman who likes women, the comparison is not that of competition with other girls, it’s of being enough to someone who has the same body features as you. We’ve all had body envy - of wishing you had the thighs, hips, stomach of someone else - but when the body envy is of someone you’re trying to win over, your insecurity heightens. I guess it’s also because girls you want to look like as well as win over spend so much time looking at their own, smaller bodies, you’d wonder why they’d want to take a second to consider your slightly larger one.

Girls with lacy bikinis on golden beaches. Girls with golden hair that falls perfectly over their exposed collarbones. Girls with defined jawlines and cheekbones to cut glass.

In 2018, I was seeing someone for the first time in my life. Someone I met on Tinder, who I was shocked matched with me, partly because of the difference in our body types. It wasn’t until after we stopped seeing each other, and I was experiencing my first (quite melodramatic) heartbreak, that I entered the worst period I’d ever gone through in terms of my relationship with food. It was during my first year of university, and due to circumstances at the time I didn’t have access to a kitchen. I lived pretty much exclusively off low calorie instant soup, or anything else I could make with a kettle I kept in my room. I remember seeing my parents for the first time in a few months and them commenting, with concern, on how much weight I’d lost. I felt both guilty for causing them concern, but more than that I felt proud of myself. I felt pride that the lack of food I was consuming was having visible results, and felt that maybe one day I’d be desired again. My mental health plummeting due to being isolated to my room meant consuming a lack of food, and when I started to get better mentally I sometimes wished I wasn’t so that I could look how I did when my parents made that comment.

Girls who float above insecurity, sculpted to perfection. Girls with brittle looking bones who tiptoe in the palm of your hand.

I’m in a better place now. Not a perfect place, but a better one. I won’t pretend there aren’t days where I look at other girls and want to curl up and disappear, I won’t pretend there aren’t days where I fill my phone with dieting apps, I won’t pretend there aren’t days when I attempt fasts, I won’t pretend there’s days where I throw myself into the gym just to eat very little for the rest of the day. I’m not going to pretend that things are perfect, or that they ever will be. But something I have realised is truly how little people give a fuck about what a body looks like, and I’m working on adopting that attitude myself.