thanksgiving,1988: my mom has an appointment for an ultrasound to check on her baby's development, 7 months into pregnancy. she finishes the appointment and makes an attempt to leave the hospital, but i wasn't having any part of that.
sometime later in the evening, i was born, weighing in at barely 4 pounds. the doctors immediately stuck me in an incubator and told my parents that due to the complicated nature of the fact that i was overly premature and most of my body wasn't quite right, i wouldn't be able to leave the hospital for awhile. they weren't even entirely sure i would survive. they weren't sure how i would grow up.
i progressed through the first few years of school as a problem child who refused to do anything i didn't consider fun. i was enrolled in a ukrainian boarding school where i couldn't stand ukrainian class. eventually, my parents took me out of that school and into a regular public school. but once i had applied myself, the faculty soon realized that i was too smart for my own good. now i was being bullied for being a small, skinny kid who was also really smart.
i wasn't sure why this kept happening. it wasn't my fault that i was skinny or intelligent. i ate as much as the next kid but never gained any weight. my parents had taught me how to eat healthy and it stuck with me because when i started eating like shit, i felt like shit. it was easy to see the connection that healthy food = a healthy, alive amber.
several schools approached me to enroll in gifted programs and instead, my parents decided to move to a remote area and let my brother and i grow up there. the public school gave me a gifted test and put me in different classes even though i had expressed no interest in those classes. as i got older, i kept trying to hide how skinny i was in loose fitting clothes. having to change for gym class and noticing that all of the other girls were much bigger than me was intimidating. i would once again be bullied for being small, even though i had a way with words to get out of almost any situation.
this continued to happen despite me never commenting on any other body but my own. am i supposed to be your size? am i not supposed to be wearing kid's sized clothes in grade 9? are you not supposed to be able to see my hips, collar bone, and ribs protrude out of my skin? well, i'm sorry. but that's just how it's always going to be. and if that meant a life of loneliness and constant bullying, i didn't care. the optimist in my knew that someday things would change.
i spent my teenage years with the same issues; people would shame me for being skinny and others would tell me that they'd kill for my body. let's just say that skinny shaming always outweighed the positive aspect. and over the last five years, i've been able to "put on weight" - where my hips and ribs weren't nearly as noticeable protruding out of my body. but i could just as easily take it off if i exercised or became sick.
at 5'6", a normal BMI should be anywhere from 118lbs to 130lbs. i can't ever recall a time where i came anywhere close to the 130 mark. even today, i still get skinny shamed. i get close friends telling me that i'll "never be able to finish that" or that i've "eaten a lot" - phrases that continuously irk me in numerous ways. in grade 10, i weighed 115lbs. a decade later, i weigh in at about 118lbs and that's after i had a life-threatening illness.
i keep seeing articles every day over the last little while where fashion magazines and photos are actually photoshopping women's bodies to be less skinny. less bony. more "normal" looking. we're shamed for being overweight, for being normal looking, and for being skinny. most of which is thrust upon us and cannot be changed without determination. there's issues for having a thigh gap. there's memes of hot dog legs and bikini bridges. society will always find something wrong with your body and i think that's totally fucked up.
my brother and i have been roughly the same size all our lives and yet, because he's a dude, he doesn't get the same kind of skinny shaming i have experienced. dudes have it a little easier but i'm not saying it's any better.
from what i've been through, i'm just happy to be alive.
love your body because it's the only one you have.
