Post Image..."they may not mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
and add some extra, just for you."


(Philip Larkin - This Be the Verse)


"Oh, our Shelley, you'd be such a pretty girl if only you were thinner."


(My mother, some time in my early twenties, at a guess.)


"Pull your stomach in, you look like a sack tied round the middle!"


(My mother, again, when I was about fourteen, maybe thirteen.)


Don't get me wrong; I adored my mother, absolutely and utterly loved her, still do now and she'll have been gone ten years this August. And she loved me, beyond words. But she reinforced the idea that I was fat, fat, fat that my school peers had drummed into me. 


My teens were so desperately unhappy that I could not wait till I was eighteen to leave school, leave home, leave that small village behind me. I left at seventeen, took a course I didn't want to do because I couldn't bear another year in that place with those people. My life would have been so very much different if I had stayed, I think. But it isn't, it is what it is. I am who and what I am, as a consequence of all of the inputs into my character and personality that I had throughout my life.


Other people cause us more damage, wittingly or unwittingly, than we can ever cause ourselves. Some of them mean it with the best of intentions. Others, not so much. 


Funnily enough, the inner strength to change myself, both in terms of how I see myself and how I see the world, came from my parents. My mother was beyond strong, but ultimately the strain was too much for her and she died far too soon. She knew that she would, too. She told me more than once that she would never make old bones. She'd been bone weary for so long.


There's a point to this ramble, somewhere. Bear with me, I'm getting there. Please don't feel sorry for me - I'm not after sympathy, this is just how it was. 


Here's the thing. I was not fat, not really, until I was fifteen, sixteen? And even then, I was not obese, just overweight. If you hear often enough and for long enough that you are fat and stupid and lacking in worth, you grow to believe that. Hell, I went back to university after dropping out of the course I hated and deliberately picked a difficult subject. (I got a 2:1. My dad's reaction: "How come you didn't get a First? Why didn't you work harder?")


I did this because I want to prove to everyone that I am not stupid. I may have the common sense of a stunned lemming at times, and I may not really understand most people or what motivates them, or get social cues, or any number of things that mark me out as different to a lot of people, but I am very far from stupid. I feel bloody stupid fairly frequently, especially in German class when I just can't think of the word I want or get the hang of some fiendishly twisted bit of grammar. 


Here's the thing. I like myself, now. I like who I am. I'm great, me. There are loads of really good things about me that mean other people like me, too. I am still shocked by that - other people actually like me. They liked me even when I didn't. 


How I feel about ME is my concern. My opinion of me and of my self-worth is the only opinion that really matters. There will always be someone who thinks I could be thinner, or different to the way I am in some way. So long as that person isn't me, I choose not to let it bother me. 


I choose. That's the thing, you see. It is my own personal choice whether I let the opinion of others dictate the size of my jeans or my choice of partner, my choice of home, my choice of career. 


I've lived long enough and been through enough of the stuff life can throw at a person to have grown sufficiently to be able to say all of the above. I am strong. Stronger even than I often realise. Sometimes I forget, and the old insecurities come knocking. But never for long, and not all that often. 


The photo? I'm probably 12, 13. Around 11 stone. 5' 7.