I often wish that I could go back to the days of being an innocent child. I miss the little girl who existed before every bit of my self-confidence was shattered in middle school. I would warn my ten-year-old self that girls will be nasty, boys will be rude and they will all bring unwanted attention to something she hadn’t thought about before: her weight. And although they didn’t realize it at the time, and they probably never will, my tormentors’ comments sent me down an unhealthy path guided by the hatred of my body.

I’ve never been a petite girl. However, in middle school, I gained a lot of weight. My family would joke about how I ate just as much as my older brothers, and it was funny because it was true. When I hit puberty, all the junk food and excessive helpings I’d eaten finally caught up to me and my classmates noticed. I remember one occasion where some girls (who were in the grade above me) actually pulled out my hair and made animal sounds. They imitated a cow and a monkey and danced around me like I was some kind of beast. And I believed that I was some kind of beast.

As I grew taller and my weight began to even out, I didn’t appear to weigh as much as I did. But it was too late at this time; I’d already fallen victim to believing what the bullies said about me. No matter how many times my mom would tell me how beautiful I was, or how many times my sisters would say that they wished they had my body, all I continued to see was the cow that the girls in middle school saw. I would sit in bed at night staring at my legs, pinching my inner thighs as if it were that easy to remove the parts I didn’t like. I would do the same to my stomach, my arms and my chin. I would measure the circumference of my waist using a shoe string, tying a knot where it measured each time. As I entered high school, I was entirely obsessed with the way my body looked.

My freshman year of high school continued in this same fashion. I hated my body and spent my nights wishing that it would change on its own. I had started playing volleyball that year, but despite joining athletics, I still wasn’t losing any weight. But when my sophomore year of high school came around I was determined to look the way I wanted. My fall season of volleyball finished and my body still hadn’t changed much; however that winter, I joined a club volleyball team and that spring, I decided to play softball for my high school as well. As an athlete playing two sports simultaneously, I would practice anywhere from three to five hours a day. My body saw significant changes. I started to make excuses for why I couldn’t eat, and when I did eat, it wasn’t nearly as much. I went from being what would have been considered overweight to what would be considered very close to underweight in less than two months. The worst part is that I noticed, and I liked it. I loved it. I craved that amount of weight loss. For once I didn’t feel like the cow that the bullies made me believe I was. It felt euphoric for some time, but then I started to hate myself again.

It was when I hit a plateau and I couldn’t lose any more weight that I began to hate my body again. What everybody else saw as a perfectly healthy body, I looked at and saw the beast. I wanted to be skinnier. I had lost the weight before so why couldn’t I just lose some more? All I could think about was becoming “supermodel thin.” I stayed obsessed with wanting to lose weight for most of the rest of my high school career, and my depression became almost unbearable because I hated myself for not being able to drop it. I continued to stay up at night, squeezing any piece of my body that was loose enough for me to grab, thinking to myself, "if it’s loose then it jiggles, and if it jiggles it’s ugly.” I became particularly self-conscious when playing volleyball. Jumping around in short, tight spandex was a breeding ground for my insecurities. Yet, it was in my senior year of high school and through the sport of volleyball that I came to love my body.

My club volleyball coach my senior year of high school has been, and continues to be, one of the most influential people in my life. After almost every practice, he would tell us to go home and eat something. This wasn’t because he was worried that we were starving ourselves; I didn’t really fit the bill for the girl who’d skip meals when nobody was looking. He told us to eat something because it aided in the recovery of our muscles. It would make us stronger, and it would make us even better volleyball players. Though at first I felt guilty for eating more than I had been, I began to see results on the court. I was becoming an even stronger volleyball player, and I craved that success more than I craved my former idea of success on the scale. I realized that in order to be the athlete that I wanted to be I needed to be strong.

I have come to love my body for all of the positives that my size provides me. I’d describe myself as an average/muscular build, and while it’s not the thin frame I once desired, I have grown to appreciate all of my characteristics. Every piece of my body has a purpose. My thighs are muscular and allow me to jump higher. The muscles in my arms allow me to swing harder. My body enables me to be the best athlete I can be. I have come to grips with the fact that I will never be petite, but that’s okay because I am exactly who I want to be. And, while it's not always exactly what I imagined it'd be, I love my body.