"You talk too much. No one cares." - My aunt, when I was 8.
"Who sings this? How about you leave it to them?" - My father, when I was 11.
"Your hair doesn't matter. No one is going to be looking at it with those thunder thighs in the picture. You'd be pretty if you'd just stop eating." - Also my dad, when I was 13.
"No one will ever be as amazing as you are." - My husband, frequently.
When I turned twelve years old, I overheard our our 45-year-old neighbor say to my dad, "I can't wait until she turns sixteen so I can fuck the shit out of her."
My neighbor didn't know that I heard him.
And my dad didn't know that I saw him punch our neighbor in the face.
When I was in 7th grade, I mistakenly thought I was supposed to dress up for career day. I didn't know any better. People made fun of me for it, telling me I was weird and stupid. They laughed at me and joked about me.
This was the moment in which I became extremely aware of myself. I started to get my entire self worth from other people's meaningless jokes, side comments, and attention.
I am now in 11th grade with social anxiety, and can't even talk to people I don't know or only sort of know without crying and hyperventilating. Those comments definitely stuck with me.
When I was in 7th grade, I bought a new white miniskirt and couldn't wait to wear it to school. It was the middle of February, but I knew that people still wore skirts in the winter, as long as they were wearing tights.
When I showed up to school, my then-best friend waited for me at the top of the stairs to judge my outfit, like she did every day. She took one look at my short skirt and shouted, "What's wrong with you?! It's winter!" Then everyone looked at me and pointed out how crazy I was for wearing a skirt in February.
She made sure I didn't forget my foolish decision all day long. Every time we passed each other in the hall, she would scream, "It's WINTER!!!" to me. This drove me crazy, because even if my choice to wear a skirt in February wasn't the wisest decision on my part, there was nothing she could say to change the fact that I was already at school in this outfit. It's not like if she said it extra-convincingly, my skirt would magically transform itself into long-johns and jeans. I was stuck at school in this tiny skirt, and her constant vocal protest of my outfit made me feel naked and exposed and trapped.
She was a very unsupportive friend in general, and I am happy to say that we are no longer friends.
When I was in junior high, I was overweight and spent most of the school dances alone, in the corner.
The last dance of 8th grade, the school hired a DJ who would dedicate songs to couples, and they would go to the floor and slow dance together. Imagine my surprise when the DJ announced the next slow song dedicated to me, by one of the most popular boys in school! We danced together, and I felt so special.
After the dance was over, I returned to my dark corner where I overheard the DJ talking about a group of pranksters who were dedicating slow songs to all the fat/ugly/unpopular girls, so the popular boys had to dance with them.
I have never been so humiliated.
15 years latter I have thankfully left behind my ugly duckling phase. That particular popular boy is now bald and short. But still, I don't think my self-esteem will ever recover from such mortification.
It all started when I was eight years old. My sister, who is four years older than me, and I had spent the evening arguing over some not so import things. Like most children, we had our sibling rivalries. But this particular argument set my father off, and when I bring the subject up to him now a days he doesn't even remember. But I do. Oh God, how I remember.
My father pulled my sister and me off each other and sent me to my room as punishment. I wasn't angry about his decision, but I was upset and crying.
My sister was definitely the golden child, while I was always the black sheep. Our rooms were next to one another, connected by our closets. After I was sent to my room, I could hear her on the phone with her friend through the thin walls of our connected closest. She was complaining about me, saying some really hurtful things. I vividly remembering sitting under all my hanging clothes, crying about all the horrible things my sister said about me.
I guess I was really loud because only moments later my father burst into my room and threw open the closest door and began to scream a million things. But one thing he said sticks with me to this day.
"Don't fucking cry. Only babies cry."
This was the day that my now-eleven year journey with depression began.
Be careful what you say to your children. You could be setting them up on a date with the monsters that live inside their head, waiting to be released from their jail.
My parents were always physically and emotionally abusive. My father would hit me, and I always knew he didn't like me. My mother was more verbally abusive, but her words hurt me more than any kick, punch, or slap my father could have thrown at me.
It was a normal school day in 7th grade. School had just let out, and like most school days, I stayed around school as late as I could, trying delay going home. I lost track of time and pushed it a little to far. As soon as I got home, the yelling and screaming from my mom started.
Then she said to me, "I should have pinched your nose and covered your mouth when you were a baby!"
Basically she said she regretted not suffocating me.
This has always stuck with me.
Most of my childhood I was very skinny, healthy and athletic. Then two weeks after I turned ten, I developed type one diabetes. With type one, your pancreas no longer works, and you become insulin dependent. There is also a slight chance of developing Celiac Disease, which I did. You can also gain a lot of weight, which I did. And the Celiac made me swell up even more.
In 7th grade, I was on my school's track team. One day at practice, one of my bullies looked me in the eyes and said, "It's your fault you're fat. You ate all that sugar."
It was true that I had gained a lot of weight, but just the way he said it made me want to go cry in a corner. That was the first time I ever really began to notice how I actually looked, and I've cared ever since.
"It's your fault," I tell myself every time I even look at sugary food, even though I am the "perfect" weight for my height, even though I have someone to hold me close every night who swears he loves me every single day, who has given me a beautiful child. I still believe that it's my fault that I developed type one diabetes, even though it had nothing to do with me personally; my pancreas just decided to stop working, and it hasn't in years.
I doubt that my bully ever thinks about making this comment, but I hope he has grown up to realize that there are some things we simply cannot control, and I hope he uses that knowledge before he speaks of things he doesn't know.
When I was little, I had a lot of emotional problems and developed PTSD. Because of my anxiety disorder, I was very particular about things that literally didn't matter at all.
One year on Christmas Eve when I was 6, I decided that the ginger bread house I had made with my uncle and cousin wasn't right, so I wanted to do it over again. This upset my uncle because we had spent hours on it and now I was persistent that we had to start over.
After arguing with him for a while, I finally stormed off in a tantrum about the situation and went to the living room to cry and vent. A few minutes later he came over to me, and I hoped he would comfort me. Instead, he proceeded to tell me words that would stick with me forever.
He said, "You acted like a brat!" He sighed and continued with, "and I hope to God I never have a kid like you."
He was about 30 at the time and had his first child 5 years later. While he's never apologized to me for the incident, his son has problems of his own, and I like to think that he now regrets saying that to me all those years ago.
Regardless, to this day we don't have much of a relationship, and I generally avoid spending Christmas with my extended family to avoid incidents like this.
When I was in middle school, LiveJournal was very popular. There were these pages called Rating Communities, where people submitted photos of themselves to be rated, and the people who had already been admitted to the group voted yes or no on whether or not you were hot enough to then join the group to rate other people.
(Actually writing this for the first time makes me feel really sad for myself, because I realize now that it's such a pathetic and horrible premise. But as a shy preteen with a new digital camera, being accepted into one of these communities was all I wanted.)
The first time I got up the courage to submit my pictures, I was giddy with anticipation.
Then soon, one by one, the "no's" flooded in.
And the "nose."
By that I mean, not only did people simply reject me, but many of them added comments, saying things like:
"That nose!!!"
"That girl needs rhinoplasty!"
"I would have said yes, but that nose is unforgivable."
Until then I had never realized that there was anything wrong with my nose. I had never really paid much attention to it. I actually think I kind of liked it. But after that, I hated my nose. For years. Every time I met someone new, I thought about them reacting to my nose.
At the time, I thought that I got what I deserved. I believed it was my fault for putting myself out there, and that I was rightfully put in my place. How dare I try to join a beauty community with such a horrible nose?
But now, more than a decade later, I finally feel different. I don't fault myself for putting myself out there, because I was young and I was seeking validation.
When I look in the mirror, I am honest-to-god not bothered by my nose. I don't think I ever truly was, until insecure strangers on the internet who were also seeking validation told me I ought to be. The truth is, I don't really pay much attention to my nose. I actually think I kind of like it.
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.
