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 mean 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. 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.

I remember that second grade girl, staring in the mirror.

I release small.

That woman in the storefront window is not small. But damn if she isn't something else.