This is My Body
I'm eleven years old taking a bath. I'm at that strange age where I'm straddling childhood and adolescence. Still playing with Barbies secretly and alone on the weekends. Applying mascara and shaving my legs during the week. I wrap both hands around my thigh and feel disgusted when my fingers can touch. Back then being skinny was a source of pain. Bullied mercilessly by the cool girls in fifth grade, I had been given the nickname Stick and well, it stuck. My small frame and birdlike bones made me ripe for the picking among the social elite of my grade. I spent most of that year eating lunch in the library to avoid the abuse. By eighth grade I had escaped the worst of the bullying both by transferring schools and befriending the studious Mormon girls. Still my skinny frame persisted. Boobs and a period, the ultimate symbols of womanhood, would allude me for a number of years. Someone approached me in line in the cafeteria and remarked how I looked like Kate Moss. The quint...
