EVENTUALLY

Lump. Pimple. Scar. Every part of her body made her cringe. She avoided mirrors at all costs. She didn’t want to see the stretch marks that covered her hips and thighs. She didn’t want to see the pimples that scattered on her face and back. She didn’t want to see her murky brown eyes. (She always hated her brown eyes. Why couldn’t she be born with a more interesting eye colour?) She didn’t want to see her wild eyebrows that never seemed to be able to be tamed. She just didn’t want to see herself, because she didn’t like herself.

“I’ll just get plastic surgery one day, then I can look at myself,” she would tell herself. Her reasoning for wanting to get plastic surgery was all wrong, though. She didn’t want to get it to enhance what she already had, she wanted to get it so she could remove every single part of her existing self.

She couldn’t exactly pin when she started disliking herself. Maybe it was when her mean best friend in the second grade called her ugly. Or maybe when the boy she liked rejected her because he’d ‘never date a chubby girl.’ Perhaps it was when her own parents told her she needed to wear makeup to cover her face up. Whenever it was, it didn’t matter. All she knew was that she was, for a fact, ugly. And she thought there was nothing she could do to change that.

One gloomy day, she sat in her room on her computer, looking at pictures of skinny girls online. They didn’t have stretch marks. They had nice eyes. Their skin was flawless. Straight-teeth. Small noses. Beautiful hair. Long legs. No body hair at all. They were so completely unnatural, yet so gorgeous. Everything she strived to be. She continued to search through the internet until she stumbled upon a video. This video entailed the use of photoshop on models in magazines. The kinds of models she always saw as a little girl and expected herself to look like when she got older. The skinny ones with perfectly tanned skin and blonde hair and hot boys standing around them and gawking.

Her eyes grew wider as each minute of the video played on. The original picture was of a girl who looked a lot like she did. Curvy and acne covered and hairy and… ugly. She cringed, thinking of herself at first. Soon, this ‘ugly’ girl became a ‘gorgeous’ model, and the girl decided she would do the same to herself.

She took a picture of her full body, which was quite a new experience for her as she usually tried to stay out of pictures as much as possible. She emailed the photo-shopper with her pictures and explained everything she wanted done to her. She also included the reason why she wanted to see herself photoshopped. Within a few days, an email was returned to her and she saw the horror that was the new her.

She didn’t look like herself one bit. In fact, she looked like Kate Upton, which she decided really didn’t suit her. This new image of what she originally thought was her perfect self haunted her. But, instead of making her hate herself even more (which she thought was totally possible), it ended up making her appreciate what she had.

With time, she learned to love her hourglass figure. For her own benefit, she decided to take some yoga classes, which gave her a good enough work out and helped shape her body into a way she actually enjoyed. She noticed that she didn’t actually have acne constantly, only when she was about to get on her period. She saw that she had more good skin days than bad, and appreciated the small amount of freckles she had never seen before. She grew to love her stretch marks. They looked like lightning strikes, and they adorned her body in one of the most beautiful ways possible. She liked the colour of her eyes. Although they were brown, they were deep. Deep with emotion, deep with darkness and light, deep with soul.

It took a good while, but eventually she loved herself for how she looked. She would tell her friends to love themselves, and when they’d respond with a ‘give me one good reason why I should,’ she’d reply back with, “Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t.”

#selflove #beauty #shortstory