The weight of your words

Throughout my life, of all the things that people have said to me, it’s what they’ve said about my body that I remember the loudest.

‘Yeah, I actually don’t really find skinny girls that attractive anyway’, he says to me the first time we slept together. I know he meant it as a compliment – I don’t like skinny girls, I like you! But those passing remarks scorched my conscience and wilted my confidence for months to come. It was a moronic thing to say, but knowing that didn’t help me to unhear it.

I must have been about seven or eight when my uncle looked at my wrist and said it was skinny. We were on our biennial family Christmas holiday. It’s a vague memory, but out of all the things that happened that holiday, it’s the one thing I remember.

I went on a school netball tour to New Zealand when I was 15 years old. Giddy with freedom, in Queenstown I bought two ice-creams in one day. It was exquisite. When I came home, however, I recalled the experience to my Mum and she responded, yeah I can tell, I can see it in your face. My round face. I was 15, but I wasn’t invincible. Two weeks in New Zealand and one comment would confirm that.   

A few years earlier, in year eight or nine, I had the following conversation with my best friend at school.

‘Did you hear what those girls said?’, he said.

‘No, what girls?’ I replied. We’d just finished walking across the spaceframe – our school’s undercover assembly area – and were on our way to class.

‘The girls sitting over there,’ he said as he motioned to a group of girls a few years older than us. ‘They said you have the best legs and I watched them stare at you the whole way across the spaceframe’.

I don’t know what I said next. What do you say to something like that?

I remember my mum and sister laughing in the car. I was home from my first semester of Uni and was walking back from the ATM machine in William Street. Naturally, I asked what was funny. And they said they were laughing at how my boobs were bobbing up and down. That they were huge. I don’t know what I replied in the moment, but I can remember – even years later – exactly what I was wearing. A flimsy lilac bra with an underwire that dug into my ribs, beneath a long-sleeved pea-green top I’d bought from Glassons. The top was a thick cotton material and clung to my skin, and to my curves, evidently. I decided not to wear that combo again.

Living hundreds of kilometres from your family also offers extra room for comment, apparently. I guess because in between sightings, there’s extra room for change. I remember expecting, or dreading, the inevitable comment about my body upon first reunion. Feeling as though that initial hug wasn’t just a warm embrace, but an opportunity to examine.

I remember, when I was twenty, trying to explain to my family that their comments about my body were not welcome. That after years of absorbing them, I wouldn’t accept them anymore. I wanted to tell them that their opinion was tiring, and unnecessary – and that their comments affected me more than they could ever comprehend. But as I struggled to spit the words from my mind, they got caught in my throat and my eyes welled with weakness. My tears dissolving my dignity, revealing me to be the self-conscious and sensitive thing that I was.

Throughout my life, people have commented. They’ve used words like hot, attractive, best, muscley, and fit to speak about my body. And I listened to them like their words mattered. I listened to them too damn hard. Little did they know that their throw-away remarks - many of them complimentary - would be used to build or crumble my confidence.

The reason I wanted to write about this - needed to write about this - is that it impacts me, every. single. day. And I’ve never spoken about it, not properly.

Sure, I’ve had conversations with friends about body confidence. But I’ve never really admitted how much it has consumed me. Not even to myself. And when I think about how much it has, it makes me sad.

Sad for the little girl who wasn’t self-assured enough to leave those comments where they landed. And, instead, picked them up and carried the weight of them with her. The girl who let them shape her relationship with her body, rather than appreciate it for the wonderful thing that it is.

Maybe if I had told my friends, they would have helped to take the weight from my shoulders.