A message to the (former) small girls

I've been thinking about us lately.

It can be emotionally hard to gain weight for anyone-- in this culture, in this climate...

But there's an extra something for those of us who grew up as Small Girls.

Small Girls capitalized because that's what it felt like for me. People always commented as if it was the central truth about me: "You're so small!" "Look at your little feet!" "Those tiny hands!" "How tall are you?" And also... "You're so cute."

I remember being in second grade, looking in the mirror and wondering if I chopped off all my hair if people would stop calling me cute (I didn't try it).

I didn't really mind being short, and I had already learned that being extra small was somehow better than being extra big. But "cute" got to me.

Overtime I got less small. Hips and boobs and a belly, and by college "cute" was not the choice word on people's tongues when describing me. And even though I'd fantasized about that being the case, once cute was gone I felt its absence. What did it meant to not be cute? To not be tiny? And how would people describe me now?

It felt like a piece of my identity had been stripped away, even if it was a piece I'd never consented to and never ideologically agreed with.

These days it still trips me up sometimes. I catch a glimpse of myself in a store window. Still short, still not a big person, but not tiny. Not a little girl. Not cute. It jerks at some pathway grooved deep in my brain But I'm small! How could this be me?

It used to send me into a tailspin. Into planning-- here's how I'll get small again...

These days I just take a breath. Perhaps that's it-- a breath, and keep walking.

And some days I remember that girl, staring in the mirror, trying to crack the code on how to end the comments of cute.

I release cute.

That woman in the storefront window is not cute. But hot damn. She is something else.

My fellow former small girls: it was never bad that we were small and it is also good that we got bigger. I am proud of us for taking up the space our bodies desire to claim. For stopping chasing descriptors we never consented to in the first place. I love us for the variety of bodies we have lived in and the variety of truths we have learned about how people respond to body size. We were always so much more than little and cute.