Puberty is so horrible. Even the word is like something smashing through you with each syllable. PEW...smash...BER...smash...TEE. Crash-smash-slam-abracadabra-your-body-is-not-your's.
I felt alien when I started changing. Eight years old, with some creepy white stuff leaking from between my legs. I thought I had some weird disease. I thought I was dying.
But I didn't die. It was worse than that - I got fat. My hips widened and I grew upwards, my head trying to reach the sky.
I am nine, and blood is in my underwear, and there are breasts in my shirt. I was afraid. I knew what was happening, I'd become obsessed with the process of growing up. I spent hours on my mom's computer, learning about hips and tampons and boobs and the scary, scary, scariest: SEX. For months, it was all I would talk about. Periods, sex, weight. I had a friend named Heather who would listen to me for hours. Periodssexweight.
I stood on a scale about that time, and I remember the precise feeling of wanting to crawl inside myself, fold into myself, and disappear. I'd never weighed myself before, besides on doctor's scales. I remember the exact number. 112 and 5'3. I am nine, and most girls my age are around 4'11 and 80 pounds.
I make the decision, I swear, that I will stop eating over the summer, not eat all summer, and I will come back to school so small and thin and no one will ever say Arianna Erickson's butt is big ever again.
It wasn't so much thinness I wanted, it was the promise of thin. Be thin, and you will be happy. Be thin, and you will be contained. Be thin, and you and all your emotions will be neatly bundled, manageable. If I were thin, I could keep myself and be able to control that self. I would hold myself together if I were thin, I would not have bones that grew or a body that bled or hips that widened. If I were thin, I would be under the power of my own head, and nothing else.
Contain yourself. Control yourself. Stop yourself, start yourself, be yourself, forget yourself.
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