They said you had two X chromosomes, then they said you were supposed to be nice, charming, lovely. Pretty. Skinny. They frame youth as beauty, make you drown in Photoshopped magazines and pictures of women you know you’ll never be. They want time to stop for women, they don’t want you to have wrinkles, they don’t want your hair to turn white. They expect you to look twenty your whole life at the one condition that you’re not wearing short shorts or short skirts or that your skin isn’t showing. If you’re skin is showing, you’re the B-word. They might even add that you’re asking for it. Bitch. Especially if you’re twenty. Most especially if you’re still a teenager, if you’re yourself twenty years younger than them.
They make you cry at night, cry big and sad tears that roll on your chubby cheeks, and you cry because you cannot act, you cannot dance, you cannot sing, you cannot cook. All those woman things you’re supposed to do so well, you’re unable to accomplish them. You don’t even like pink, what the hell is wrong with you?
You keep telling yourself that it doesn’t matter, that you deserve better. And it becomes okay at some point because you smile and they tell you that your smile could heal bruises, bruises that women sometimes have to hide; that your smile is so pretty and your lips so pink and you look very much like a nice little girl. So you say thanks because for once, society seems to be gentle with you. But there’s that teeth problem: your teeth are a little messy, the front ones don’t align perfectly with the bottom ones. You say that you don’t care. But they don’t care about your opinion. 3 years with braces because if your teeth aren’t as shiny and pretty as in the magazines, things could get bad. Now you got those great teeth and those good grades and you think the whole world is gonna love you.
It’s not.
Did you really think it would? Stupid little girl. This isn’t a world for you, this is a world of beards and testosterone. Because of an X, you won’t be able to be yourself. You’ll be put in some category defined by how they grade your beauty, you’ll be nothing else than standards and gaps and screams because women seem to be yelling too much nowadays. Women scream on the streets, chanting slogans. They won’t let you listen to them, they even make you think: what do they want, those ladies?
They keep telling you that you should exercise. Sports, what a concept; no matter if you’re the best, no matter if you train like a beast, you’ll never be as good as a man. And you hate exercising, you hate sports, and the sport clothes are all tight and everyone can see your body, your body full of imperfections, full of all this skin that should not be there. And the smelly smell of sweat under your arms disgust you and the blisters under your small feet hurt like hell. But you have to be skinny. That’s what they keep telling you, and that’s obviously the only way to look like one of those perfect women in the magazines.
Your eyes are permanently looking at those blonde skinny women in those salt-glaze magazines, shiny covers, dirty words… Dirty body, that’s how they want you to think about your own. Dirty body meaning that your body is for them nothing more than an object. They tell you that your mascara and your lipstick are false advertisements as if you were nothing else than a car or a lamp not being fast enough, not being bright enough. As if you were as unimportant as some object being sold in a grocery store. Dirty body, as a dusty chair you could clean as you wish. Dirty body, since your body is a game for them. It’s your temple, but it’s their property. Like that house in the middle of nowhere grandparents leave to their children, you know the one with peeling paint and rust on the doorway. That’s what your body is for them. An old house they can decide to like, to fix, to care about or to let root.
They still want you to have a flat stomach, a clear skin, nice boobs, thin legs. They want you to be just one more shotgun in a subdivision. And you listen to them because they’re like that real-estate agent that seems to know everything. As if they knew your body more than you do.
And so it all starts: skipping breakfast, putting those chocolate chip cookies in your bag or back on the shelf, hiding the fact that you haven’t eaten since last night; an apple for lunch, or a cereal bar, two-digits calories no matter what; counting the number of calories you ate today, doing algebra as soon as you want to bite on something. And there is your stomach that grunts in class, your stomach that begs you to swallow something other than gum or water, and there is your head, your brain yelling that it’s unhealthy, your brain telling you that you’re smarter than this.
There is absolutely nothing pretty about this. Nothing cute, or sweet. It’s not funny. It’s not how it’s supposed to be. But it’s what you go through every second of your day, it’s a whisper in your head, a little one more day, one more day coming from whatever part of your brain they hypnotized. So it seems fine for a while. It seems okay. And even if it’s not, it’s your only way to look at yourself in the mirror and smile.
It all stops at some point. It’s brutal. It’s like I’m falling off a cliff and I keep hurting myself against its boulders and bleeding from everywhere and hurting my body again and falling falling falling.
In truth, it’s simply eating too much and not fitting in those red pants again and thinking about not eating again. Then it’s not eating for a few days. Then eating more. It just never stops. They look at me, they look at you, and they keep smiling, they smile at our despair, at our sickness, they smile and they make us think that we’re alone, make us think that there’s no one going through the same thing.
They know that you’re caught in that thing and that you can’t get out of it. They know you started it yourself and you try to avoid thinking about it, relaying it into the background, like if it was normal. You don’t even want to give it a name. It would be like admitting that it’s stupid and that you should stop everything and have three normal meals and not weight yourself all the time and tell your mom about it. But you can’t do that. You can’t tell anyone. You forgot how to eat, how to breathe, how to ask for help.
It’s okay. Me too. You’re not alone. We are not alone.
So it just ends up being you, me, anyone, at night, scared to have one day a hole in our stomach, only thin skin over weak bones. It just ends up being you, me, anyone, all day, afraid of having skin over skin with skin we can grab in our hands and bones that disappeared a long time ago.
It’s crying at any time of the day. It’s also trying to figure out why did you do this to your own body, why did you hurt yourself like that, why the cereal bars were lunch and dinner, why the gum instead of breakfast. And I know that you keep telling yourself that you’re so fucking stupid — but you’re not, I promise. They are. We are the dolls they like to play with, the ones they experiment on, trying to cut our hair, our shirts, arms, body. Those dolls they threw away as soon as they got bored, and who cares if it hurt because after all, they’re nothing but toys. Toys you can buy at the store, with a little number so you know their values. So you know how much they’re worth.
I know that you’re trying to be a better you, a healthy you. And that’s the only thing that matters. You, you being healthy, you smiling, you being happy, you not caring about them. They want to rule the world with their standards but we need to fight. I’ll help you. Take my hand and follow me, we’ll fight. We’ll win. I promise.
Comments are closed.