This past summer, I sat at a table at a restaurant in France with two of my friends across from me, scolding me for my self-deprecation. "You have amazing curves," one of my best girl friends said. One of my guy friends reached across and added, "Seriously, Rachel, you are very beautiful."

As much as I love my friends, I will never believe this, because I simply can't stand my body.

Every morning, I wake up, look in the mirror, and scrutinize my appearance. There are always too many blackheads that linger on my nose from poor teenage skincare, and stretch marks that haunt my back from my heaviest weight (well over 200 pounds) during my bout with depression in high school. I inspect the roots of my hair and constantly wonder if they look as dark to everyone else as they do to me, if someone will question what color my blonde hair is supposed to be (blonde, for the record, but a bad dye job made it the wrong blonde). These are just the big things. I brush past the dark circles under my eyes, the scars on my fingers from years of picking my cuticles, and the hair that has inevitably grown back in places it was just removed from the day before.

This hatred has existed since the moment puberty set in when I was about nine, and my hips started to widen and the shelf bra in my camisole became inadequate support for a bulging bust line. It only increased when I entered middle school. I found new things to resent about my body: randomly occurring acne, poor eyesight requiring unstylish glasses, and an ever increasing dress size over three years. By the time I was in high school, there wasn't a thing I liked about my body, from the way my breasts made my back hurt when we had to run the mile in P.E., to the fact pretty much every article of clothing I put on in some way was inappropriate in my Catholic school dress code because of the way it graced the curves of my body that refused to narrow out.

I realize this means I have hated my body for about as long as I've comprehended its existence beyond just being the vehicle that houses my soul. It's true. I'm not going to blame it on bullying or societal views, though I'm sure both affected my feelings. The body positive message the media promotes hit my generation just a tad too late. I didn't accept that I was never going to look like the skinny, five feet tall girls with the straight, brown hair I attended high school with until this past year.

But this isn't a piece about finding a light at the end of the tunnel or how I overcame the struggle because that piece would be a lie. I don't think the struggle will ever be over, no matter how many cute boys say I'm beautiful or friends tell me I am perfect. It's an idea as ingrained in me as my name and date of birth. So this is about continuing to live with the self hate every single day.

It's about living with the worry that when I go out wearing a dress that's a little bit short or a little bit low cut and I hear someone laugh, I automatically assume it's at my appearance. It's about hating summer clothes because they expose the blubber on the backs of my arms and legs, and swimsuits always making me appear like a porn star who's been stung by a family of bees. It's about getting over that hatred of summer clothes just in time for winter ones to come out, only to be worried that I've fluctuated in size in six months and my favorite black pants won't fit anymore, so I don't eat for a day to see if that helps, even if the fix is only temporary. It's about never, ever getting out of the darkness of these feelings.

And it's about hoping that if I'm open about this, maybe some people will stop thinking it can be remedied with compliments, and others will feel brave enough to know if they're in the same spot, they're not alone.