The World We Live In

Stephanie

I’ve never been comfortable in my own skin,

I’ve been on the bigger side for a woman since I was young.

Let’s just say I didn’t always fit in with everyone,

I felt like the ugly duckling as a child.

Here I was wondering why I was such a big girl,

I couldn’t bare looking in the mirror at myself a lot of days.

Trying not to eat and drinking fluids all of the time,

Just to lose weight along with constant exercise.

Then one morning my body shutdown when I got out of bed,

I had to be rushed to the hospital and my body was malnourished.

My mom was questioned by people on what’s going on with me,

She didn’t even know I was bingeing my food and vomiting it back up.

I was intentionally getting rid of food from my system,

The acid clogged up my throat a lot of days and I was getting sick.

Granted I was losing weight, I was doing it the wrong way,

Being a woman in my early 20s was a big struggle.

I couldn’t get any dates with men, my acne was still lingering from my teen years,

Living in a society where skinny women are loved and adored.

They seem to be in commercials and all over the magazines,

Only in the past few years were there bigger women being shown.

Laying in a hospital bed being fed through a tube,

There was no way for me to get rid of these nutrients in my body.

 Going home, I had to look in the mirror at myself,

And accept myself for who I am, it’s not the end of the world.

Adoring the slimmer models that I saw in magazines,

I wanted to be more like them than just being me.

My confidence was never that high to begin with,

Being made fun of and ridiculed for being “fat” as a child.

I wondered why I was born this way, why was my family big,

I just wanted to be a smaller woman, which was what I felt inside.

Not many people truly understood the battles that I was going through,

Not just externally, but internally for over a decade.

Puberty didn’t help me much, I had acne and wanted to eat more,

There wasn’t enough exercise I can do to lose this weight.

The end of my teens was where I started purging my food,

I felt disgusted eating food a lot of days, didn’t want to keep anything in me.

Junk food, healthy food, it truly didn’t matter, I just wanted to be slim.

What I longed for was acceptance from others to make me feel good,

The reality was, I needed to accept myself before anyone could love me.

I didn’t love myself at all, there was nothing I liked about myself,

Not even my personality and how much of a giving person I was.

That’s what I tried to do to compensate for being the “big” girl,

I was a giving, loving, caring, sweet, kind person, but it didn’t matter.

The world saw how big I was, not what was inside of my heart,

What was deep inside of my soul which I was starting to lose slowly.