I am a control freak. I live my life by the checklists I write in my calendar each morning. I wake up, take care of my pet snails, eat, and go to my zoom classes; Day in and day out. I start an art piece and work on it the whole week and do not start another one until I am satisfied with how the art looks. I always have to be going something productive with my time. I listen to Netflix shows at two-times speed because I get impatient when they talk slow. I submit assignments days ahead of time, and I prize my agenda. I am always in control. 

Until I am not. 

I am not in control when I eat a whole jar of Nutella in three days. When I pick at the skin around my fingernails until it bleeds. When I let random papers pile higher and higher until my room looks like I dumped out of my school's recycling bins and poured it into my room. I operate myself as a machine, incapable of making mistakes and work for hours on end. It is the easiest way: I can worry more about superfluous things and worry less about more important things like my health. 

I have always struggled with body image. I guess that it is partly because of social media and beauty standards, partly from the shaming of my family, partly from toxic perfectionism. What gets me upset is not knowing why I even care? I know I can become so much happier and more fulfilled if I spent the time caring about how I looked, doing things that mattered. I know my worth as a human being is not tied to the size of my thighs, or how flat my stomach is. I know how privileged I am to have a body this healthy and fully functioning. I know there are bigger things to be concerned about. I know this is just me sublimating my anxiety about the precariousness of life into a vessel I can control. I am aware of all of this and the cognitive dissonance in my brain. I can rationalize every valid reason as to why I should not care about what others think, but I still do. In the process, I have created an enemy out of myself. 

The beginning of freshman year marked the time I became more aware and judgmental of my body. Yet, another obstacle to conquer, another blemish to refine. I have always been in support of body positivity of others, but when it came to my body, it went away. I had rolls on my stomach, which my grandma would poke at any time I would come over to her house. My family would give me nicknames like ‘Gordita,’ which slowly but surely stuck, and eventually, everyone called me that. 

Eating no longer was a crucial priority but only  for the times when I felt dizzy or when I would remember. Friends would tell me about how skinny I looked, and my family members would point it out as well. Perfectionism devoured me until I was hollow. It had only hit me in December of last year that I noticed the damaging effects of what I was doing. 

Walking to the doctors' office, I was already on edge, and my father had been persistent to take me to the doctors so that they could tell him why I was losing so much weight rather quickly. We sat down in the waiting room. The whole atmosphere was cold. The once vibrant yellow flowers were now brown and dead. The constant ticking of the clock was the only thing that was filling the noise. 129 ticks from the clock I counted before my name was called by a nurse. Her name tag read ‘Katie’ and had glittery stickers on it, reflecting in the fluorescent light above us. She checked my blood pressure, height, and finally made me step onto a scale. The number 41.5g appeared on the screen. 

She walked us into one of the rooms and told us that my doctor would be with us shortly. As soon as she left, my father and I Googled the gram to pound conversion. Typing the numbers on the glass of my telephone, my fingers trembled over the numbers. I was shocked at how much I weighed; the last time I weighed myself, I was 103 pounds, not 91 pounds. I could never be satisfied with the number on the screen that I used to think determined my self-worth. A knock at the door hasten my already rapid heartbeats. 

The person who knocked had a hairstyle like Albert Einstein, little hair in the front and untamed, raven-black hair with streaks of gray in the back. On either side of his nose, there multiple dark circles around his eyes. The man who walked in was my doctor.

“Kayla, what I am seeing here is terrible. You weigh as much as you did five years ago.” He spoke roughly, and words got caught in my throat; I did not know what to say. He concluded that I was overworking myself and took me off my ADHD medication because it decreased my appetite. My father sat in the room with me and attentively nodded to everything my doctor was telling him. However, I think we both heard two different things come out of his mouth. My father was hearing about how my health was on the line, while I was fixated on the amount of weight gain I would have to endure and not quite listening to what my doctor was saying. I was worried that with a new change in my routine, I would become ugly because of the increase in my weight.

Weeks past and I began to be honest with myself and found out what was truly more important to me. I regularly debated about why I was so keen on being a certain weight. Was it my weight that was bothering me, or was it how I was going to be perceived by others? 

Unfortunately, I cared more deeply about others' interpretation of me. The next week, I deleted all of the social media platforms I had and worked harder on accepting myself and my body. Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I wish someone would have told me so that I could conclude that when you try too hard to bend the unyielding universe to your own will, inevitably, you are the one that is going to break. 

There is no difference between flowers and weeds. We label the plants we want as flowers, and the plants we do not like weeds. This is an arbitrary value of judgment by society, just like beauty standards. Millions of people are driven to mental illness in the pursuit of an unattainable ideal that is agreed upon by the collective. Beauty standards today are rooted in patriarchy, and beyond the definition of beauty, I think beauty itself is absurd. We treat the bone structure as a reflection of someone's character instead of how they are as a whole. People should not strive to achieve the beauty they crave but instead express their unique beauty. The saying is correct beauty is only skin-deep. At times it is a struggle to not fill my thoughts with negative comments about my body, but now I understand how important it is for me to keep my body healthy. I can express myself creatively and help show others about the beauty they have sitting right in front of them even if they do not know it yet.