Trigger Warning: eating disorders and body dysmorphia
“I spent 45 minutes every morning slowly picking to the root of skin, watching it open and bleed, waiting for it to flatten then suffocating it with tArTe sHaPe tApE fOunDaTioN iN tHe sHaDe fAiR sAnD, then crying a little, and off the 7th grade I went.”
To get the nitty-gritty out of the way, hello, my name is Jaden Croucher, I am a 15 year old from Canada, I use she/her pronouns, I have OCD, anxiety, and depression, and my fresh issue is body image. Trigger warning, mentions of eating disorders and body dysmorphia!!.
I am thick with 5 k’s and I was a pretty fat child, but most of my youth (the short first 11 years) I walked with pride and a Beyonce type aura, until social media. It started innocent, mostly used to stalk Harry Styles {Harry if you see this hit me up ;) } but slowly models and viners and every sort of slim, clear-skinned women popped up on my page, now initially I tried to function with OCD until the beautiful of puberty dawned on my skin in the form of tiny, ugly, little shits i.e. acne. Now I have always loved wearing makeup, and not for men, for me :), even through being bullied into pretending I wasn’t wearing makeup. Makeup, like food, was my security blanket. I caked my face to the point that I looked like a malnourished Casper, I spent 45 minutes every morning slowly picking to the root of skin, watching it open and bleed, waiting for it to flatten then suffocating it with tArTe sHaPe tApE fOunDaTioN iN tHe sHaDe fAiR sAnD, then crying a little, and off the 7th grade I went. All-day I packed on more and more powder so that my mask wouldn't slip. It all went well of course other than swimming and sweating until I realized, people can come up close to me and see….see my…MY PORES. I mean how could I not think of this, and what could I do, well I kinda did nothing other than stand far away and miss out on life. I would cryyy and complainnn to my parents about how sick I felt, then I could stay home, eat and no one could see my zits. Slowly my anxiety about zits progressed to weight issues.
Even though medication is great for mental illness it has a hell of a lot of side effects, personally do to very painful periods I am on birth control (and if you think this is TMI, oh you just wait) so along with nice, short, cute periods it has gut-wrenching nausea, earth-shattering headaches andddd...weight gain. Like looooots of weight gain. I didn’t think there was a problem until my buttons started popping off my jeans one by one. So I dieted, also ouch, dieting is really damn hard, then I worked out a little more. I couldn’t tell whether it was the side effects of my new meds or dieting but my head spun and thumped. It felt like death on earth. I finally felt progress for once. Until when walking home from the gym and a car pulled up behind me, a long white car, with chad looking college boys inside. They rolled down the window and motioned that they were puking as they pointed at my thighs, my thighs which are decorated with stretch marks, they then laughed and drove away. It felt like the sad scene in a movie where the fat kid holds her stomach and cries, I wanted to cut my stomach off and restart. That was 3 weeks ago. Since I have become enthralled with fat-shaming comments, repeating them in my head as my body glared back at me. But I’ve progressed since then. I took some social media breaks and surrounded myself with support and people who had gone through this before. I am feeling better, and so will you. My biggest advice, dance naked in the mirror, it works ;).