Alyson

I was looking through old pictures I found in my dresser drawer last night. I was cleaning. They captured my middle-school life.

Sixth grade: Me and Mr. P at Bulldog Luncheon (something a student got invited to if they were a standout *flips ponytail*). My hate for my looks was just beginning to brew at that point. But my first reaction to looking at that picture was that I was pretty. This picture—I remember seeing only stomach and chubby cheeks years ago—looked good to me.

Seventh grade: Me and friends at my birthday dinner. I liked the picture when it first developed because I thought that my legs looked OK, never good, but good enough. Did I even eat that night? That was when I wasn’t eating, but I think maybe I did, because we had so much fun roasting fries in the small candles atop our table. It’s things like that that get whisked away like leaves when your head is a tornado, concentrating on whether or not you looked “OK” in the night’s single photo.

Eighth grade: Graduation. In what I saw, I looked beautiful. I don’t know if I have ever thought that of myself before. But I felt that about those pictures of me hugging my friends, and the teachers who made that year better for me. On the day, I thought I looked so…bad.

It’s so (not) funny how much I put myself through to look that way and I never even got the chance to live knowing that I had achieved it. No, my thighs were not disproportionately large, as I had always seen them. No, my nose was not cartoonish, but cute. No, my stomach didn’t look bloated in the clingy dress, despite how it felt after eating just a banana before the ceremony. I can see that now, but I couldn’t then.

I may have developed a new psychological condition: Feeling jealous of the self you were years ago. Am I still this pretty? I know I am not as skinny, but do I still look good? OK, at least? I wished to be that self again, after all, when you are gorgeous, what problems can you have? The warmth of self-acceptance—of my former self—froze over as I understood my scary indifference to my own struggle. ♦