A Decade-Long Battle
Tags: Beauty, Body Image, Self Care, Reflections, Mental Health

A Decade-Long Battle

Photo by Wanly Chen

“Beauty, the price I pay, you return with empty compliments.”

It’s fair to say I’m immune to most beauty trends. I wear make-up once or twice a year, never once dyed my hair and have chosen to remain consciously oblivious to fashion trends. While most girls and women chased for the new “in,” I was content with my plain Jane aesthetic.

But there was one that I couldn’t stay away from: the trend of being thin.

In high school, I had a friend who was pursuing a modeling career and her diet usually consisted of just juice and spinach. She was taller and weighed less than me, but still complained she was too fat. It made me begin to think I was the one at fault for being overweight.

In my first year at Buffalo, I started off by slowly removing carbs and meat from my meals. From there, I only took away more. In my final year, I went on an extreme diet with weight loss pills, protein shakes, and fasting through meal times. I fell sick often, but I had taught my mind to see those as freebie days — “free of calories” days.

When I went to study in China, my mentality had to change. I didn’t want to get sick in a foreign country so I allowed myself to eat, but some days it was still barely enough. In comparison to my female classmates, however, I was eating plenty.

In Asia, the desire to be thin was more common than in America. There, many of my female classmates were dissatisfied with their bodies and more often than not, how to lose weight was in our conversations. They would arrive with their version of meal supplements and fasted through lunch and dinner, techniques I was all too familiar with.

We were all young women pursuing a beauty standard that we believed to be viewed universally the same.

But it is not. The standard of thin is only an opinion with no numerical value, and that changes over time and across the world. To my American friend, I was deemed too fat. But to my international classmates, I was the skinny girl they wanted to be.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

The U.S. National Organization for Women found nearly 80% of women dislike their own bodies, a number that is devastatingly high and has severe consequences. I grew up in a society where curves on Asian women were not seen as normal and for a decade, I punished my body for being different. In what were supposed to be the best years of my life, I now associate with years of heavy depression and mental instability.

Quarantine has truthfully been a time of sobriety and recovery. I finally sought the professional help I needed and dedicated myself to ending this war. I replaced pills with vitamins, protein shakes with food and created a meal-time and exercise schedule. For me, it was not self-love that was the cure but rather, self-care.

By sharing my story, I hope to raise awareness of a problem too many women face, and to challenge the stigma against mental health illness, especially in the Asian community. For many of us, it is not only difficult to admit suffering but to find the support we need to seek help. It should be in every person’s desire to have a healthier culture around beauty and mental health illness, and I believe, it is in every person’s power to foster such society.

Today marks a full year since I almost lost myself, and it is here where I dedicate this piece to a future me: that if she is ever in trouble again, I want to remind her this year was truly the healthiest and perhaps, the happiest, she has been in a very long time.

If you’ve read this far, thank you.

(Background story for my poem “Beauty.”)