Feeling comfortable in my body isn’t entirely about beauty standards. What I know and what I feel are two very different things. I’m a feminist and I know that it is important to resist unreasonable standards for how my body should look. It would be easy to pretend I am just fine with my body as it is. I don’t hate myself in the way society would have me hate myself, but I hate how the world all too often responds to this body. My memories of the after are scattered, but I remember eating and eating and eating so I could forget, so my body could become so big it would never be broken again. When it was all over, I pushed my bike home and I pretended to be the daughter my parents knew, the straight-A student. I remember that they had nothing but disdain for me. I remember their smells, the squareness of their faces, the weight of their bodies, the tangy smell of their sweat, the surprising strength in their limbs.
They were boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do the damage of men. You may learn how to be the life of the party so that people are too busy laughing to focus on the elephant in the room I was 12 when I was raped by Christopher and several of his friends in an abandoned cabin in the woods where no one but those boys could hear me scream.
