The Blood & The Bones

From a very young age I wanted to be something other than what I was.
Most of my formative years spent praying to God to be like everyone else.
To be what I thought was beautiful, but not in a way that brought attention.

Therapists always want me to pinpoint when it began. They say it’s the starting point of healing.

So was it when the girls at school bullied me?
Was it when nothing fit my too quickly developing body?
Or was it when I was 10 and looked 16..
And the men that came around our house to drink made me afraid to go to sleep?

Some people try their hardest, after that kind of trauma, to be ugly.
But I wanted to starve away the way my hips curved out before they were supposed to. Thinking this would make me beautiful but in a way they weren’t drawn to.
Diet pills, starvation, purging, self loathing were my sustenance..
Endless miles on revolving belts to nowhere trying to outrun a disease that knew it was mostly for nothing.
Arriving at the destination for fleeting moments, yet it was never enough.
It isn’t designed to be when you get there that way.
And what’s worse, as I got older, I let men into my life and my body who never would’ve looked at me twice when I wasn’t this close to complete.
Men who knew a wounded animal when they saw one.
Jokes on me, there is no complete.
No final state when the world and fear brainwash your mind to think that way.

No wonder my body still rages at what I put it through.
No wonder when they said I wasn’t good enough it was the only thing that resonated and stuck.
No wonder I still struggle with what I see in the glass across from me.
And I still ask was it my fault?

What woman would I have become if I had not based so much of my worth on the shape of my body?
All these years later, I’m really not healed..
Still chasing the high of smaller thighs or lower numbers on tags.
But now I worry more about being strong.
A woman feared instead of desired.

I just wish I could go back and tell that little girl that my body was always as it should be.
That it was their fault and not mine.
That I was not to blame.
That they were ruined, not me.

the blood
& the bones