When I was in middle school, my mom told me that I was "a fat girl" and that "fat girls don't have friends, and they certainly don't get boyfriends."
Small 12 year old me truly took her words to heart and developed a severe case of anorexia due to what she said. I'm now 23, and I have been battling the eating disorder ever since. I also have an intense fear of gaining weight and suffer from extreme depression if I do gain any weight.
My mom was dating this guy a while back, and he brought us up north to meet his family. His dad was an awful person, to put it nicely.
As my brother and in were waiting in the car to leave, he came over to say goodbye. He stood at my window, looked inside at me, and yelled to my mom's boyfriend, "No wonder you have a flat tire, all the weight's on this side of the car!"
I was barely 13.
When I was 10 or 11, my class split up into groups and competed to see which group could put a puzzle together the fastest. I essentially finished our group's puzzle on my own, and the boy I was working with said, "You're really smart for an ugly girl!"
It took me a long time to get over this.
I attended a small Christian elementary school with only eleven students in my class. Out of six girls, there were two Melanies. I was the tall, chubby Melanie. The other Melanie was like a golden, perfect swan.
In 5th grade, we all participated in a track and field event, and everyone started rooting for "Pretty Melanie."
I spent the next 15 years battling eating disorders.
One day when I was 11 and in 6th grade, everyone was in the hallway switching between classes, and a kid I thought was my friend told me to go kill myself.
Seven other classmates who were around agreed loudly and high-fived the original guy for saying what they were thinking.
When I was 15, I was unamused by Beyonce's Super Bowl performance, so I posted a picture on Tumblr with a comment about how she was dressed like a hoe or something like that. I don't even know, it's been years, and I don't really have the same mindset anymore.
A famous blog found it, posted it, and I got thousands of death threats in the course of 2 days. Funnily enough, the death threats weren't what bothered me. When people weren't attacking my statement, they started attacking everything they knew about me. One person told me my nose was huge and ugly.
Prior to this, I had never seen anything wrong with my nose. It looked like a normal nose to me. Then, it was like, bam. Every day all I've ever been able to see is how big my nose is. How ugly it is. Even four years later, I look back at pictures I took then and notice that they were angled differently because I apparently didn't know what an ugly nose I had.
Looking back now it's really surprising to me that I still carry that hatred for my nose. It's not crooked or hooked or anything (which is perfectly normal and sometimes beautiful for noses) but I am still, to this day, really self conscious about my nose. That's what stuck with me, I guess.
My mother's ex-husband was an alcoholic. His drink of choice was Captain Morgan mixed with Mountain Dew. I would smell it on him when he came home, I would smell it on him when he screamed at me, and I would smell it on him when he beat me. He would tell me how fat and useless and stupid I was, and I could smell it on his breath.
To this day, I have trouble accepting compliments, and I can't stand the smell of Captain Morgan.
The day after my boyfriend and I broke up, I sobbed about it on the phone with my cousin, who was three months younger than I was.
For hours we relived our childhood memories and the games we created together and holidays we spent together. We talked about how excited we were to see each other in three weeks, when she would have her new car and I would be done with my semester.
She told me, "Life will always work out for someone like you."
She turned my tears into laughter.
She died an hour and a half later in a car accident.
I like to think that God, if there is one, knew he was going to take her and gave me one last time to relive everything we did together and how much we loved each other.
During that phone call, I told her for the first time, "I know you look up to me, but I want you to know that your big cousin looks up to you too." I felt the urge to say this, out of nowhere.
I miss her every day, but that last conversation is what keeps me together. I'm so thankful for whatever in the universe gave me that solace to be able to say goodbye, even when I didn't know I would have to.
I live by her words, that life will work out for someone like me. And she gets to look down from heaven and watch it happen.
When I was 12, I had to go swim suit shopping with my mother for a one piece to wear to my cousin's church camp. After picking an orange swim suit to represent our group's color, she pointed and the clear plastic mannequin the swim suit was on and laughed, "Oh look, even the mannequin has bigger boobs than you do!"
I caught my boyfriend cheating on me again. I knew it was stupid to stay with him, but we had been dating since my freshman year of high school, and we were going on five years, so it terrified me to leave him. Each time he cheated on me was for a different reason, so I simply asked, "What's your excuse this time?"
He looked at me with fury in his eyes and blurted out, "Well just look at you! You've let yourself go. You do not look the same as when I first met you. I know I don't look the same either, but I'm not as bad as you."
I was stunned. I was a 150 pound 15 year old girl when we met, and stood in front of him as a 180 pound woman.
I didn't even cry. I just excused myself from the room.
I don't know what possessed me to stay with him for another year. He never even apologized. The most he ever said was, "That was a bad choice of words."
After that night, I exercised constantly behind his back. To this day I'm a fitness freak, only because I'm scared to death of gaining weight and having another person fall out of love with me.
Has anyone ever made a fleeting comment about you that immediately became tattooed onto the front of your brain for all of eternity, impacting your self-perception and self-worth? Whether it was an offhand comment made by someone you love and respect or a fleeting declaration by someone you barely know, we share the moments that stick.
