the finish line
dangling the carrot of beauty
***I’d like to start off with a trigger warning, I briefly talk about body dysmorphia and disordered eating. I appreciate you reading, but please protect your peace!***
For my entire life, I have struggled with self-confidence. I have never been able to look in the mirror and fully say that I look beautiful. I can remember being in kindergarten and looking at the fifth graders and thinking that they were so beautiful, and then I got to that age and I didn’t feel like I looked like that, so on with eighth graders and high school seniors.
I’ve always been in a bigger body, always the biggest in all my classes. My COVID-activity was giving myself an eating disorder, and when you starve yourself as a bigger person, you’re met with “wow! you look amazing! keep doing what you’re doing!” anytime you see someone. After lockdown, I was met with some health issues that made me sedentary, so I gained all my eating disorder-weight back and then some. This all goes to say that I don’t know what I look like. My body has fluctuated so much and so quickly that I have no idea what the body I’m in looks like.
I wrote this poem to explain my relationship to beauty in comparison to others. Maybe it was never supposed to leave my notebook, maybe it was supposed to stay private, I don’t know. It’s definitely a heavier topic, but if you found any solace or related to it in any way, please let me know.
the finish line
when i was little
i would look at the older girls
and i thought that they were so beautiful
but when i reached
this so called "age of beauty"
i never looked like them,
but they always
looked beautiful
and the finish line kept moving,
and these girls got more beautiful
as years passed on
and as i reached their age
i’d look in the mirror
and ask
“why don’t i look like them?”
but it’s because the finish line kept moving
not for them,
only for me
and i asked the mirror
“why do you keep moving the finish line?”
and she responded “
my dear, i’m not doing anything”
-a.g.