kinda cool to think how someone somewhere is having the best day of their life today. someone’s hearing “i love you” for the first time today. someone’s gonna meet the love of their life today. someone’s gonna get the job of their dreams today. it’s someone’s best day today. and guess what binch? tomorrow it could be ur best day so keep going
This is really uplifting
emporer penguin
when I was 6 years old, my first grade teacher taught us about penguins. I was new at school, without many friends, so I was already throwing myself at the prospect of academic success and developing my thirst for knowledge. I recognized animals as my friends from an early age, making it easy to obsess over the differences between penguin breeds and exactly what temperature of water they can withstand in the arctic ocean.
But out of all of the countless facts about penguins I memorized in the first grade, the only fact that still remains etched into my mind is the average weight of an emperor penguin: 60 pounds.
At six years old, my teacher thought a fun way to learn more about penguins would be to demonstrate that most of us were a similar size to an emperor penguin. Great idea, right? But the difference between weighing more than an emperor penguin and weighing less than an emperor penguin meant your name and weight on the board all year, separated into two sides. I weighed 61 pounds in first grade, exactly 1 more than an emperor penguin, so my name, along with three others’, stared back at me from the “more than an emperor” penguin side of the board for the entire year. I felt sick every time I looked at it in a way my pre-formative 6-year old brain could not comprehend. I learned to feel an unidentifiable shame about my body before I learned basic multiplication.
When I was 8 years old, I decided in the morning that all I would eat that day was an apple. I was told that my weight was healthily in the 65th percentile for children my age at the doctor. My height was only in the 59th percentile. By dinnertime, I started crying and ate the pasta my mom had cooked for me because I was so hungry. That was the first time I tried to lose weight. That was also when I started to dread going to the doctor, not because of shots or blood tests, but because they would always weigh me before the appointment, and no matter what the number on the scale said, I would always get that sick feeling that resembled the one I got when I was put on the board on the wrong side of the emperor penguin.
At age 11, my best friend’s mom bought us hot dogs from costco to entertain us while she bought groceries. As I excitedly bit into my hot dog, my best friend carefully removed the bun from her hot dog and only ate the sausage. When I asked her what she was doing, she told me she was trying to lose 5 pounds. We frequently shared clothes and weighed the same amount.
At age 13, a fitness day at middle school told us our weights and body fat percentages after we were told to do 100 sit ups. We got full paper reviews of our bodies and compared them after the event. The woman working the stand congratulated me when she handed me the paper that said I was 120 pounds and had a BMI of 20. I had 20% body fat. I envied my friends whose BMIs were under 18 and had less than 10% body fat. I guess I missed the point of the exercise, but so did my friends who had their moms pick them up because a fitness exam told them they needed to lose weight.
In every picture, I scrutinized the sizes of the legs of my friends and I. Mine were always bigger than the friends standing next to me, and I discovered the concept of a thigh gap. I have not stopped checking the space between my thighs since then.
Every year, my dad would go on a “master cleanse” diet, where he would only eat lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and maple syrup for 10 days straight. He told me he was doing it to cleanse his system, but he would also tell my mother loudly and excitedly that he had lost 15 pounds from the cleanse. My mom cleansed with him a few times. When they fasted together, I asked if I could participate and they said it wasn’t healthy for growing people to fast. They both have BMI’s in the “normal” range, and always have.
When I was in high school, my friends and I decided to give blood to be responsible and giving community members. I was jealous that my friend was told she didn’t weigh enough to safely give blood. I told myself that next year, I too would try to give blood but end up being too skinny to donate.
At age 18, I was forced to take a swim test late at night surrounded by my new peers in order to participate in an orientation adventure on catalina island. My tan, sculpted, skinny peers excitedly jumped into the water surrounding me while I tried to cover my stomach with my arms.
At age 21, I was forced to do the same thing in order to lead a group of freshmen on an orientation trip, and I cried in the bathroom looking at myself in the mirror afterwards.
At age 20, I got Salmonella while abroad in south america and couldn’t keep any food down for two weeks. The thought that motivated me through the feeling of my insides being ripped apart by the bacteria was the thought that I would be thinner on the other end.
I am not clinically overweight, nor have I ever been. I do not have, nor have I ever had a serious or consistent eating disorder. I have privilege in that I am mentally healthy enough to be able to see my own body objectively and practice generally healthy eating. I have no idea what it is like to be in either of those positions.
I am also not a poet, but I wanted to share this in order to be vulnerable about the thoughts that go through an average weight person’s thoughts about their body. I wanted to reveal the culture that influences us from when we are children who are still learning their abc’s to responsible and fully formed adults who know intrinsically that their self-worth should not be based off of their weight.
