Mad

just so you know, i’m still mad.

i’m mad at the magazines that continue to feature stick-thin, pastey-white models who stare blankly at you. at the clothing companies who claim that it’s one-size-fits-all, when the t-shirt would barely fit my cabbage patch kid. at the girls in junior high who would point and whisper at the girl who hadn’t quite yet figured it out. (i can still remember their names and i wonder what they’re doing these days.)

i’m mad that, despite my effort to tell myself that i’m okay (i am an intelligent girl, damnit, i know about media tactics and idiotic puberty, i know better), i let it get to me; that my girlfriends and i can go through bouts of total insecurity and feel incredibly inadequate. this is not even to mention the anorexia, the bullemia, the depression i’ve seen, either.

oh, i’m bad, too. i gawk and point and whisper under my breath, ‘oh my god, look at her, what the hell was she thinking?’ but it’s more to make myself feel better about me than anything. if i point out everything wrong with everyone else, maybe they won’t notice that today i woke up with flat lifeless hair, a zit beside my lip, and more body flab than i remember.

what does it take?

sometimes i think, i can do it. i can fight the system. i can make them see the truth. of course, sometimes, i am too busy having my own pity party under my bed.

my cousin, before she turned teenager, used to say to me, “ate, you’re so pretty,” out of nowhere, for no reason. it would automatically lift me out of whatever funk i was in, and you know, there were so many, because my middle-class, suburban life was just so unbelievably torturous. what made it so powerful was that it was unsolicited and genuine. you could see in her eyes that she meant every breath of it. i just wish i had her voice bottled up somewhere, so i could hear it when i feel the way i do now.

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