It Started When I Was Six

It started when I was six years old.

I got a haircut I regretted the moment I opened my eyes.

I told my mother I wanted bangs

Because Hannah Montana came out that year and I wanted to be just like Miley Cyrus.

I figured my hair could stay brown

But the fringe could be just like her alter ego.

And as I looked into the mirror at the salon

I started to cry.

Suddenly I knew what it feels like to hate the way I look.

I knew that this would give the boys at school another thing to throw at me,

Creating puncture wounds

Cuts

Scrapes

That I changed the band-aids of for almost nine years.

 

A year later

Seven years old

Second grade

I got my first zit.

Those blasted bangs against my oily forehead caused nothing but trouble.

I was the first kid to start puberty before knowing what my vagina was

While the boy sitting next to me knew what a penis is.

I hid my forehead with make up and my hair

The bangs being my worst enemy

And yet the ally I wanted most in the foxhole.

Every adult told me to wash my face twice a day

Not knowing that everything I ever tried just made my sensitive and oily skin worse.

By the end of the year it wasn’t just my forehead covered in pink dots.

 

In third grade I was the first to get a bra.

Girls avoided making contact with me

As if puberty was contagious

And not something they would get in a year or two.

Boys would take the strap or waist band

And before I felt a difference

Let go.

Boy, I felt a difference, then!

They caused bright pink marks against my skin.

I noticed other pink marks on my tummy

Not knowing these were called stretch marks.

Boys called me fat

Telling me to not eat so much

Even though the skinniest girl in our class ate more than me at lunch.

I started to listen to them

And believe that I wasn’t wanted

Because no one picked me to be on their team in P.E.

When I turned nine later that school year I cut my hair again

This time in a pixie cut.

My father told me I would live to regret it

While my mother supported me and was even inspired by me to cut hers, too.

Dad told us people would think we were gay

Not knowing that I had a crush on both a boy and a girl at the time.

 

Friends didn’t recognize me

Telling me they thought I was a boy from a distance.

I started wearing more pinks and purples after that

Trying to hold onto a gender that I didn’t always feel like I belonged in

But society told me I was born with a gender

And that I have to fit into that role.

I become the fat butch girl who burned up on a cloudy day.

I was the kid who cried too easily

Picked on every time the teachers couldn’t hear

And even when they could.

Told “Boys will be boys” when I tried telling people they called me fat, ugly, worthless

All that shit.

I was told I brought it upon myself for being an “easy target.”

 

I tried dieting in elementary school

Yearned for diet pills

Wanting to be loved

Willing to die because of the desperation to be skinny.

When I told friends and family I was fat

They looked into my green eyes and told me “You’re not fat, you’re beautiful.”

That was when I learned before hitting double digits

That I can’t be both.

I stopped eating lunch on most days

And if I did I felt guilty because I knew that meant I was eating calories.

I dreaded P.E. because people would see how slow I was

Nobody running with the fattest kid of their grade

Because that kid kept them from proving to themselves they were above a fat classmate.

 

Middle school was when I learned that putting yourself down

Is supposed to raise others up.

I didn’t need the bullies from my old school anymore

Because I was my worst bully.

In order to make my older friend feel beautiful

I was willing for her to find me ugly

Though I dreaded the day she believed it.

She got me to read Seventeen magazine

Which was were I got confirmation that I needed to be different from what I was.

I started eating even less and started loving Ana.

The only times I felt beautiful

Were when people noted on the weight I had lost.

Even after recovery I cried myself to sleep

Obsessing over every little stretch mark.

I dreaded P.E. more because I was supposed to change in front of a quarter of my grade.

 

The only thing that made me feel better

Was knowing I wasn’t the fattest kid anymore.

Two of my friends were larger than me

And while that is not why I love them

It made me feel a little better to be the “hot friend” according to society.

I found myself sucking in my stomach

Wanting to lose weight like my runner of a mother was

Insisting I was still a size 12 while I was really a size 14.

I cried in changing rooms

Left bruises on my skin from trying to somehow push down the fat without going back

Back to the anorexia

Back to not eating what I wanted

Back to trying to become a skeleton.

When I told my friends they brushed it off

Leaving me to feel more alone than ever.

 

If self worth is on a scale of one to ten I started high school with a three.

This was when I realized I needed to change

But not like how I thought I needed to when I was just a child.

I started forcing myself to love each freckle on my body

Run my fingers over the stretch marks that made me look like a white and pink tiger

Looking at myself in the mirror longer than made people felt comfortable with me doing.

I told myself I was beautiful

And I started believing it that March.

I realized I could wear the makeup I wanted

Wear the clothes I like

Love who I love

Be whatever gender I feel like that day.

I had cut my hair just before turning fifteen because I no longer care what people think.

And now I’m a high school sophomore with a self esteem of nine

Which I haven’t had since I was five years old.

It took ten long fucking years for me to believe I’m practically perfect, again.

That I am beautiful.

 

If I could go back to my younger self

I would hold that child in my arms

And tell them that they are beautiful.

I know that if I saw myself now when I was six I would believe it

Because I am beautiful inside and out.

I would go to the boys and tell them that they are beautiful, too

And to become friends with that weird girl and know that we all deserve so much better.

And maybe I wouldn’t have had to go through the nice years of hell because

It started when I was six.

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