I Didn’t Want to be Prettier
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: 2019 Challenge, Self, Health, Weight Loss, Body Image

When I was a little girl — starting when I was maybe eight or nine years old — I would occasionally get this feeling. It’s hard describe. Sort of a squeezing in my chest, a twist in my guts. It felt gross.

And for some reason, I associated it with puberty.

This was what it felt like to be grown up, I decided. And I didn’t want anything to do with it.

I didn’t start my period until the summer I was fifteen, and I think that it’s possible that I held it off by sheer will power. I didn’t want my period. I didn’t want boobs. I didn’t want anything to do with not being a kid. At all.

Looking back, I can see that the physical feeling I equated with growing up was a direct response to what was happening to my body at the time.

I was being sexually molested by my step-uncle.

At the time, I didn’t see a connection. In fact, at the time, I had a little steel box inside me where I kept everything to do with that step-uncle. How he touched me. What he said to me. How scared I was of him. How his attention made me feel. All of it.

Because it was all packed away so tightly, there was no way for me to tell anyone. One day my dad saw and then it was over. Once someone knew, the box opened and I could tell the truth.

The thing that stuck, though, sort of like the way that hope got left alone in Pandora’s box, was an intense aversion to— even fear of — growing up.

It was a strange thing. I was born wanting attention, but from the age of eight or nine the idea of anyone looking at me was horrifying.

I have another memory. I was, again, eight or nine years old — standing in front of a full-length mirror after a shower, and having a horror-movie moment of absolute panic.

I was misshapen. There was something wrong with me. My hips were too wide. My arms were put on wrong — my palms faced backward like a gorilla’s. I had this handful of fat on my stomach.

I couldn’t breathe. I finally got clothes on. And I decided that I needed to lose weight. That moment, standing in front of a mirror when I was in the third grade, was the birth of an eating disorder.

I started sneaking these little weight-loss caramels that my mother kept in the fridge. They were called Aydes — an unfortunate name that was their eventual downfall.

I taped $1.50 in stolen quarters to a mail-in form out of a magazine to get a copy of a celebrity diet.

I hoarded food. I binged.

It took a while for me to actually be as fat as I felt. But I got there. And, although I hated myself for it, the truth is that I was comfortable and safe.

That’s the truth. Being fat was self-protective.

Fat made me invisible. It didn’t matter that I’d grown up, because no one was looking anyway. I think it’s relevant that I didn’t make a real, lasting effort at weight loss until after I’d reached another female invisibility milestone — middle age.

Until I started to get near to the age my mother was when she died. Until my mother-in-law got sick from something she could have prevented if she’d made a change in her 40s.

I lost weight because I didn’t want to die, not because I had any desire to be more attractive. And I think that it’s possible that I stopped losing weight well before I reached any weight that could be considered not-fat because I am still far more comfortable being fat. It still feels safer.