I Was a Beautiful Teenager. Why Did I Hate Myself?

My most vivid memories are still about feeling fat and ugly

A few weeks ago, my Facebook feed filled with friends posting their high school senior photos as a show of solidarity with the class of 2020. I seemed like a fun, light-hearted thing to do amid the constant stream of bad news about COVID-19. I dug out my old yearbook and flipped to my senior picture.

The face looking back at me was flawless. I had carefully lined my almond-shaped eyes with black eyeliner. Highlighter made my face glow, and my lined and glossed lips formed a perfect close-lipped smile. A long main of soft brown waves spilled over my shoulder with a hint of natural bronze highlights, probably helped with a spritz or two of Touch-of-Sun. My thousand-mile stare looked through the lens of the camera and into the world.

Not to be braggadocious, but I was stunning.

It’s easy for me to say that 27 years later because I feel so far away from the 17-year-old girl in that photo. I don’t identify with the poised beauty on that page. The self-assured smile and casual look of serene confidence did not reflect how I felt about myself back then.

On the page, I was stunning, but in my mind, I was fat, ugly, and disgusting.

I longed for curls. My straight hair vexed me; it wouldn’t hold waves without copious amounts of Aqua Net. My olive skin wasn’t creamy enough, and brown hair wasn’t blond enough. Almond-shaped eyes were just a bit too slanty to be attractive. I strategically stroked highlighter on my cheeks, temples, and chin to slim my round-shaped face. And my pressed lip smirk hid the small teeth and crooked smile that I never could force straight.

I remember the carefully selected outfit I wore that day. I had spent hours at the mall on the hateful chore of trying on clothes. My size nine body was too big for the teen section. Pants didn’t drape loosely around my thick thighs. My wide-set boobs spilled out the sides of little tops in fat ripples. And nothing ever adequately hid my lumpy, soft stomach. No matter how little I ate or how many crunches I did, there was always a roll, always a muffin top.

That day, I wore a pair of purple oversized, pleated silk shorts with an enormous matching silk button up top. I had carefully ironed both pieces and put them on only minutes before the photos were taken. I didn’t want it to bunch up and wrinkle around my chub rub. I tucked the tiniest sliver of the shirttail into the shorts to ensure I could puff it out and hid my gut.

Girls, women and body image

My story isn’t unique. I am surrounded by women who have, at some point in their life, hated how they looked, hated their body, or longed to look like the airbrushed, and trimmed images pervasive is advertising.

Even those who profess to love their body now typically have a moment of self-doubt that haunts them. They can render that moment — something said to them, something they witnessed or something that happened — with vivid detail because it penetrated their soul and made them feel unworthy.

Statistically speaking, this is true. Back in 2011, Glamour Magazine did an informal survey of young women and found 97% had negative thoughts about their body at least once a day.

Despite the casual nature of the Glamour Magazine survey, a study by the University of North Carolina found similar results. They evaluated the literature and completed a body image study of women across all age spans while adjusting for controlling factors such as a respondent’s BMI.

The authors noted that “About 91% of women evidenced a discrepancy between their current and preferred silhouettes, signifying a high prevalence of body dissatisfaction in adult American women that is supported by prior research.”

Studies and surveys simply confirm what I experience and what I’ve observed. In my writing groups, several women write about learning to hate their bodies when they were kids. They write stories about how negative body image has affected them their whole lives, even as adults.

I’ve read about their eating disorders, negative self-talk, and shame, all stemming from the self-hatred they learned as kids. And even as these women feel they are recovering from those self-destructive behaviors, they admit negative body image has still permanently lodged itself in their consciousness.

Learning to hate my body

I was a late bloomer. I didn’t start my period until I was 16 years old. Beforehand, my body morphed from a wiry adolescent to a pudgy tween. I didn’t fill out around curves; I filled out everywhere. And people let me know that I wasn’t carrying my weight well.

“Moo” would follow me through the hallways. Boys echoed the chant back and forth to each other. One tormenter sat behind me in math class, and he would “moo” when the teacher turned her back. I cried and begged to switch to another class, but the teacher insisted they were not moo-ing at me; they were moo-ing at her. “It’s not about you, you know.”

When my grandmother visited, she scolded me about eating. She’d sit in front of me at mealtimes, arms crossed and lips pursed, watching me eat. And my dad, who doled out mental insults with regularity, took to saying, “You’re so fat. You’re so ugly.” I think he thought these taunts were a kind of reverse psychology that would motivate me to lose weight.

After my freshman year of high school, I was determined not to start my sophomore year as a fat kid. I spent that summer weighing every bite I put in my mouth, limited to a strict 1000-calories a day. I rode my 10-speed twice a day — 45 minutes out and 45 minutes back each time — with sweat pouring out of me.

I remember stepping on it when I woke, and before I went to bed and wincing over its reluctance to offer me a more desirable number.

At the same time, puberty started moving some of my fat in the right places, and that helped. But no matter what I did, there was still fat in the wrong places. I was still genetically burdened with thick thighs and calves, wide-set boobs, and a full round-shaped face.

Although I returned thinner with curves where there should be curves, I still desperately wanted to be smaller with long, stick-thin legs, delicate twiggy limbs, a flat smooth belly, and a long narrow face.

The BMI scale wasn’t prevalent back then. Nevermind the fact BMI is a racially biased, I wouldn’t have believed 140 pounds was considered healthy for my 5'7" frame.

I wanted to be under 115 pounds. I wanted to wear a size six. Those were the magic numbers I believed would make me feel good about myself. No matter how little I ate or how much I exercised, the magic numbers were unobtainable. I never questioned if my goals were reasonable. Instead, I beat myself up for my lack of discipline, my poor habits, and my shitty, non-conforming, hateful body.

The moo-ing didn’t stop. But that was okay, I still felt like the cow portrayed by the chants.

I was a pre-teen beauty queen.

No, that is not a setup for a Lifetime movie; it is the starting point for how I learned to hate my body.

I have this picture of a family vacation to Lake Powell. In it, my mom holds my chuckling little sitter who wears a toddler’s swim dress. My brother stands beside me with mussed up hair wearing shorts and a pair of Chuck Taylors. I’m beside him, five years old, and wearing the teeniest string bikini. It wasn’t a sexy thing; it was a running around in the sunshine splashing in the water thing.

I have a long braid, straight as stick bangs, and my fist jabs into a sassily popped hip. I look at that kid with detachment, much as I did when I gazed into my stunning senior picture. Who is this confident kid? How could I have thrown on that bikini and still felt great about myself? What the hell happened to her?

Fast forward a few years, and there I was standing on the pageant stage. I was there because my parents wanted somewhere for me to dance solo outside of the regular recitals. Pageants were about the only place for that.

I had done my dance, and I had pretty much checked out of the rest of the program. I was ready to go home. When the judges announced my name as the winner, an older girl had to nudge me into action.

My mom sewed frilly little dresses and took homemade photos of me for the pageant books. We never really got the hang of being a pageant family, and the whole scene faded from our day-to-day lives.

I don’t think my mom every forgot that first win, though. She always wanted to see me become a model. She mentioned it off and on until I was in my late twenties. The last time I remember her floating the idea, I responded with, “I have a master’s degree from MIT. When will you give up this dream of me being a model?”

The pageant mentality never totally left me either. I had taken note of what beauty meant. I understood how my face and my body were on display. I felt how I existed for an observer’s satisfaction as well as their judgment.

The feeling of being objectified at a dog-and-pony show spilled over into my pre-teen world and shaped how I felt about my looks.

Self-objectification and mental health

Psychologists have a term for people, primarily women, viewing themselves from the observer’s perspective and judging themselves based on that perspective. It is called the objectification theory.

According to this theory, self-objectification can result in feelings of shame, anxiety, and self-hatred. Those same feelings I had because I couldn’t live up to that 115-pound, size six ideal.

That perfect ideal body was what I thought I needed to obtain to make myself happy. But really, that was the body that I thought would please people around me. It was an ideal body that would make the moo-ing stop, make my dad shut up, and make my grandmother unfurrow her brow. Ideal me would become a model, and that would make my mom happy too.

I’ve cried tears in dressing rooms wishing I could find something to fit, something to flatter. I’ve hidden in my bedroom and refused to go to parties because I looked hideous. I’ve called myself stupid, a loser, a pig, a fat ass, and a piece of shit because I didn’t like how my thighs, my stomach, my arms, or my face looked.

At nearly every stage of life, I’ve found a reason to hate some part of my body just a little bit, whether it is my tiny malformed little toes, my thinning eyebrows or that way-too-large number on the scale.

Fortunately, according to the authors of the paper “Body Image in Adult Women: Moving Beyond the Younger Year,” self-objectification decreases as we get older.

Of course, they can’t pinpoint why that happens. Is it because women become more invisible as they get older? Does our tortuous self-objectification disappear alongside the real external objectification? Maybe we are just tired of our own internal critic’s bullshit?

I don’t know why either, but I do know it took me 27 years to look into the eyes of my 17-year-old self and call her stunning. Still, that doesn’t erase the memories of how much that girl in the photo hated herself.

Kimi is a recovering corporate engineer figuring out what’s next. She is a Boston area freelance writer with work featured in HerStry, For Women Who Roar, Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing, The MOON Magazine, Backroads, and Culture. Follow her at NoReturnTicket.kceridon.com or as [at]WordsbyKimi on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.