Writing Prompt: Write about your body

I started feeling insecure when I was in fourth grade. It was one of the most deepest emotions I have ever felt. At such a young age, it really tore me apart. It still does. I am thankful, however, for the emotion. And that's a very strange thing for me to have to say. That I'm thankful- for at times feeling pathetic, worthless, disgusting, and teary-eyed looking in the mirror. I am thankful, I think, because it was in fourth grade that I sulked into my bedroom, sat down in my closet- which used to have this little area where the ceiling caved in, and so it became my own cave, the only little place I sat, that no one could find me in. In my illegible handwriting I picked up a big journal I was given for Christmas one year, and I wrote about my body. I wrote everything I hated about my body. 

And that hasn't changed. I still write about my body. I write about all the marks that stretch along the never tan enough skin. I write about the dumb little brown spots. I still write about their reasons for ever being placed where they're placed, their significance. I still write about the shape of face, and its complete disproportion to my body. I write about my horrendous feet, and how masculine they are. Or my horrible vision, or the greatness of my nose, and the small lips that have never been placed on a woman deemed beautiful. Or how I needed to lose so much weight. In fourth grade.

And it was this that made me write, beginning in fourth grade. I desire to go back, so badly, to hold that little girl's hand and tell her that she had no business thinking about those traits just yet. She had a lot of growing to do, and if she didn't let go of those horrible thoughts they would grow like an addiction to cigarettes. She would keep inhaling their poisonous consequences, and end up feeling like the ashes off their paper, useless and frowned upon. 

But she did in face grow with those inhales. And she did indeed continue to write about them. And I am grateful that something has listened, because my body will always have something to say.