A Girl’s World

Intangible Weight Essay

“Make sure you have your pepper spray on you at all times, okay?”

“Don’t wear that, it’s way too short, and you don’t want to attract THAT kind of attention do you?”

“That outfit’s a little too slutty for you.”

“Chubby girls like you are just not my type.”

These, among many others, are all words that at one point or another have been said to me. Whether they had been said to hurt me or not, they still have resonated deep within me. I live with the weight of other people’s opinions around me. I live with the weight of always having to defend myself. I live with the weight of constantly looking over my shoulder, and watching out for the world around me. But this is only a fraction of what it’s like to live in a girl’s world. And it’s a fraction from my world.

One may think that pepper spray is a bit excessive. I mean, we go to school in rural Maine! But tell that to my Dad, who a week before school started, heard of a attempted kidnapping only a few miles from our campus, and began to worry about his daughter being next. Tell that to my mother, who whenever she is watching the news tells me of all the missing and murdered girls that had only happened that month. Tell that to the parents of so many high school and college girls who went out one night and had their lives changed forever, and possibly never returned. But yeah, keep saying that I’m just overreacting, because in the real world, this doesn’t happen. My parents fear that I am next, because so many of our family and friends know someone who has been a victim. According to RAINN an estimated 321, 500 women each year are victims of sexual assault, so my parents worries about me being next are completely legitimized, because those are only the number of reported assaults, and there could be so many more than what that number represents. And the worst part about it is that according to RAINN, about 995 perpetrators of 1000 will walk free. How come everyone knows someone who has been a victim, but nobody knows anyone who has been a perpetrator?

It shouldn’t matter what I decide to wear when I go out, because you know, it is my body, my choice, yet people always feel the need to give me their personal input and judgment. I shouldn’t have to worry about what I wear possibly leading to an excuse for me being sexually assaulted because what I wore was ‘asking for it’. No one is ever asking to be sexually assaulted, but it still happens, regardless of what they are wearing.

And then there’s the constant pressure to look a certain way. It’s in the way that an authoritative figure from my past constantly watched my weight, and eventually told me I needed to be much skinnier than what I already was. It was them hounding me if I looked even a little ‘pudgy’ in their eyes. It was forcing myself to act, look, and feel a certain way just to please this person so that I would be in their good graces.

But it wasn’t just pressure from them. It was pressure from ex-boyfriends who would occasionally mention that ‘you would look so much better if you just dropped a few pounds’ or would constantly drop little hints about my weight not being to their liking. It was one of them, in the middle of the nastiest breakup of my life, said that ‘you’re too fat to be loved by anyone else’. But why should my weight be a deciding factor on if I deserve to be loved or not? Why does it matter if anyone loves me if I just love and embrace myself for who I am?

Like I said before, this is a fraction of my world, and if I were to tell much more, well, I’d probably be on my tenth page. This is my weight that is always hanging on my shoulders, trying to drag me down. The experience differs from girl to girl, and no two girls have the same weight on their shoulders. This could just be downplayed as me overreacting to situations around me, but to me, these are real experiences that shape me into the self-conscious, always worrying, sheltered person that I am today. Though this weight on my shoulders has lessened its load as I’ve learned to love myself. The self love began this year, a fresh start, new, welcoming faces, and a caring environment at Hebron has helped me somewhat move past these insecurities that I carry with me. I have learned to laugh without thinking about how ugly my smile is or how weird my laugh might sound. I have learned that weight is just a number, and it should never dictate my self worth. I have learned that the ugly scar that crosses my forehead is just a scar, and doesn’t mean anything more than a mark on my face. And most importantly I have learned that nobody else’s love for me is worth more than my own love for myself. I still have a long ways to go before my self love journey is over, and my intangible weight of being a girl is always going to be there, whether I like it or not. But it is up to me to move past it, and learn and grow from it.