Written by Abigail Marble
Art by Lillian Anderson
The small dorm room bed is lumpy, the ceiling fan is humming, and my sleeping roommate’s breathing is steady. I am spiraling, and hoping my sobs are quiet enough to be drowned out by the fan.
What the actual fuck does my body look like?
My friend posted a picture of us from last Saturday on social media; a night filled with laughs, smiles, and of course, alcohol. While at the party, I was not feeling self-conscious about my body at all. I was having too much fun being surrounded by the people I love to be thinking about what my body looks like.
Now, sitting on my lumpy bed with my phone in my hand, I hold back tears as I analyze and pick apart every little detail about my body and face in this crappy Polaroid photo. This is not how I remember looking at all; this is a whole different person. The phrase ‘Oh my God, my arms are huge,’ keeps repeating in my head. More thoughts echo in my head, but they blur together and become forgettable–though their effect is not.
This one picture has sent me through a spiraling wormhole that I am not sure I will be able to
get out of. I don’t know what I look like. I scroll through my camera roll in search of my high school senior photos, every photo that has my body visible; I compare my selfies to pictures that someone else has taken, and I just do not recognize this person in the crappy Polaroid picture. Who is she?
I no longer know what my face looks like or what my body looks like but I know that this is not how I see myself when I look in the mirror. How do I see myself? How do others see me? Which is the real me because surely this girl in that photo is not me. Is it?
Eventually, this picture leads me to my desk. Not to write this essay, no, but to write in my god-forsaken journal– the journal that has to listen and take in all my existential thoughts, ideas, and crises. In said journal, I frantically write every thought and question that comes to mind about my body. Some time passes and I have settled enough to force the pen out of my hands. I look down at the chaotic mess of writing and I am unsettled again. Thinking that writing my feelings down would help was the wrong idea; this only sent me further into the spiral, leading me to the one place where I ask all my strange and bizarre questions: Reddit (keep the judgment to yourself, don’t act like you’ve never turned to Reddit in your desperation).
Surprisingly, I did not find many posts relating to my topic. I guess many people do not turn to Reddit in their desperation. However, there was one post I found that offered solutions for when one is having a crisis over their body. Ask your friends what you look like and hire a professional photographer to capture your beauty are some of the solutions they recommended. Both of these are out of the question for me, as I do not have money for a professional photographer and I would rather not ask my friends what they think I look like as I believe my spiral would get worse if their answers were not what I wanted to hear–which would not be their fault.
After many hours of sitting on this idea of what I look like; I have come to the conclusion that I would rather not know. As they say, ignorance is bliss. In all seriousness, this crisis about what my body looks like has made me realize that it does not matter. I know I made it seem like it
matters, but it doesn’t.
As I think back to that Saturday night with my friends, I know only this to be true: I had a fabulous time with my friends, everyone was happy to see me, and I was happy to see them. They said that I looked fantastic, and they obviously love me enough to post a picture of us together. I was never thinking about what my body looked like. I was never thinking about what my body looked like–I was too focused on being in the moment.
Perhaps this existential crisis about my body is something I should figure out before it becomes an actual issue, or maybe I’m just hungover and this won’t be a big deal tomorrow.