Body Language is an essay series that speaks to the ongoing conversation about beauty standards around the world—an exploration of where we came from and where we’re headed.
I’m 12, maybe 14 years old, standing in front of the mirror, for what seems like hours on end. It’s a regular Monday morning and I’m still in my underwear, wondering when I’ll stop feeling like this.
The sun shines through my window and lands perfectly on my stomach like a spotlight. I never used to care much about what my stretch marks looked like, but now all I can think about is how much they’ve grown. And then my thoughts start spinning, over and over, like a broken record.
Am I pretty? Am I good enough? Does this make me look fat? Why does everybody hate me so much?
My eyes wander around my body like a metal detector searching for a flaw, a mistake. I begin to suck in my stomach as much as possible. Tracing my fingers around the cellulite on my thighs, I grab the fat rolls on the side of my waist and my thoughts continue to spin. I can feel the tears running down my face. They feel heavy, like a burden. I stay like this, standing in front of the mirror, inspecting myself for a while, before covering the mirror back up with the blanket I’d placed over it the night before.
By this point in my life, I was used to being ashamed of my own reflection—not wanting to admit what the rest of the world kept telling me: that I was fat, and therefore, that there was something wrong with me. When you live in a small country like Iceland, with a population of only 360,000, it’s easy to feel as if all eyes are on you, all the time, especially when you don’t fit the prescribed mold, which is overwhelmingly thin. Every time I stepped inside a mall, or walked down the streets of downtown Reykjavik I could feel people staring at me, waiting for me to make a fool out of myself, waiting for me to become the punchline of the joke they would later share with their friends.
It didn’t help that growing up, I never saw images of people who looked like me. Not in fashion, not anywhere. It was as if fat people didn’t deserve to be seen as beautiful—as if people didn’t expect us to be happy, successful, or even in love. In all honesty, I don’t think I ever truly hated my body; I just hated how the world perceived my body. I hated how the world led me to believe that because of my size, I didn’t deserve to be loved.
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