“Are you really going to eat another piece of pizza?” 

It was my fourteenth birthday party when I received my first weight related comment. Maybe I don’t need another piece. Am I tricking myself into thinkinking I am still hungry? That was all it took. From that day on constant thoughts of self hate ran through my head and I was constantly picking my flaws apart in the mirror. Looking back, the most hurtful part of it all was that the person who made that comment was supposed to be my best friend. After that day, every single comment that someone made weighed me down and stuck in my head way longer than it should have. 

“Are you sure you need another bowl of cereal?”

“You should really consider wearing skinny jeans to school instead of leggings and sweatpants.”

That’s when I made a decision that altered my life forever. In my head I decided that in order to be pretty… I couldn’t eat. Eighth grade year ended in quarantine, which seemed like the perfect time for me to get some extra workouts in. It started out as just a few extra workouts here and there, but it quickly turned into skipping meals and needing to workout every night before bed. As I cut down the calories, the comments started to change, and the worst part is…I liked it.

“You need to eat.”

“You're dizzy because you don’t eat.”

Perhaps my favorite comment was,

“Omg, you’re so skinny.”

Maybe they didn’t know it, but their comments were fueling my social constructions of beauty and what it meant to be beautiful. All my life I was taught through magazines, movies, tv, and other media, that skinny girls are beautiful. “Skinny” girls are happy. My idea of beauty has been socially constructed practically since I was born. As Deanna Wagner writes in “Man Made Beauty: The Social Construction of Beauty”, “The false ideal of this beauty that society has created has hurt the self-image and mental health of our world population. We have lost the true meaning of what is even beautiful.” This false, socially constructed idea of beauty, caused around 10,200 deaths each year. That’s one death every fifty-two minutes. To think, I was almost one of them. As I succumbed to these social constructions, my condition slowly (more rapidly actually) became worse. My caloric intake was less than that of a toddler, my eyes went black every time I stood up, I no longer had the energy to do the things I once enjoyed, I cried more than I smiled, I completely destroyed my relationship with my parents, I socially isolated myself, and worst of all, I was killing myself. 

Everything changed when I got a call from the director at my dance studio. She informed me that she wanted to move me to the advanced level, but she had noticed I was very skinny and if I wanted to dance in advanced, I would have to get better. I promised my parents I would recover, but slowly slipped back into my eating disorder shortly after being in advanced. It took many scary moments for me to realize how bad it was. I was at risk of losing my role in The Nutcracker, my ability to dance, and I was a few wrong moves away from being sent to a treatment center, four hundred miles away from all of my family. People would tell me “just eat” or “it’s not that hard”. The only thing that could express to someone else what constantly went through my head was music. Specifically Sascha Alex Sloan’s song House With No Mirrors. I would mumble silently to myself  “...if I lived in a house with no mirrors, where the walls didn’t pick me apart…” and “...I wouldn’t pull away from his touch, if he said I’m pretty I’d think that I was…”. She seemed to be the only person in the world that understood what I was going through. She was putting my thoughts into words. I managed to recover partially, recently falling into a relapse, but this time I decided that I wasn’t going to let society’s idea of beauty be the death of me. Literally. 

I decided to go back to therapy, go back to my doctors, and get better for real this time. Mirrors and scales have no idea who I am. They don’t see the acts of kindness I extend towards others, the dreams I want to achieve, the life I want to live. Social constructs should not lead me to hate myself or intentionally starve myself. It’s not worth it. As I grow older and I choose more and more of recovery, I am learning that this idea of beauty. Well, it’s bull. I am learning how to love myself and take care of the body I was given. Socially constructions of reality will always be present in the world that I live in, but ‘ve decided to ignore them and not let them rule over me.