Dear Society,

I never wondered who gave me this will and thought to constantly hate my body, no matter what shape and size I have been. Until I started to love myself. Then I found the culprit all along, the culprit has always been you. You have taught me to hate my body, to hate what I look like, to constantly hate what I have no matter what.

In the past months I have begun to learn to love myself, in not just the physical sense, but in the sense of loving who I am, where I am going in life, and the people who surround me. The hardest part has been to begin to love the body I have been given, the body I have fought for my entire life. Everywhere I go, this society is full of diet pills, work-out regimes, eating disorders and tiny mannequins with tiny clothes. I was never made for your standards -- too short, to busty, to thick, and those words were always in my head, every moment I was in the mall, around people, in the world of society, I hated what I looked like, I didn’t look the way you wanted me to. This created a hate that I had no control over, a hate that I had no idea how to get rid of.

Every friend that I had seemed to share the hate that I had. Group shopping trips seemed to be filled with frustration, disappointment, plans for more diets, and just more of this mysterious hatred. I have never been a small girl, and to be honest I have struggled with multiple things due to your opinions, due to your mysterious hatred. I know for a fact I am not the only one -- I am not the only one that has struggled with an eating disorders and with self-hatred, and until your opinions change, I will not be the last. I have friends of all different shapes and sizes; tall and skinny, short and stocky, athletically built, dancers and artists. Everyone seemed to have a theme, they had always just hated their bodies. No questions.

The saddist part of it all is the day that I brought up this subject with a friend. I was thinking out loud, wondering why I had to continue to hate myself no matter what. Wondering why I had to put myself through such harsh thoughts. But when I talked to a friend about loving myself instead, the words of society broke through. “I think every girl hates themselves a little bit, isn’t it just a girl thing?” REALLY. This is no bad words toward the friend, seems as though she is my best friend. It just shows how much you have brainwashed the world with your skinny models, unrealistically sized clothes, sizes with no meaning, and the pressure to be perfect.

Well today, I am done. I am done being controlled by you. I’m sure I could still afford to lose some weight, and I will still do that. But not because I hate what I look like, but because I love myself enough to care.

With no love,

A Girl Who Is Fighting Back