Hello everyone! I want to share an experience of mine struggling with body image and depression. This story might be a bit long, but I hope that everyone can learn a good moral lesson from reading my confession.
Growing up, I have always had body weight problems. When I was just a young little girl I had problems to gain weight but I was one of the most cheerful and active girls among all of my cousins. I was always smiling, laughing and eating but I was the skinniest compared to everyone else my age. I was also the one with the fairest skin and the best grades in kindergarten. I had little care about the world and I thought everybody loved me then. But that all changed when I started joining primary school.
I attended an elite all-girls school and I had a difficult time making friends because apparently most of them already had formed cliques as they were from the same kindergarten (the kindergarten of the school) and also their parents know each other (most of them anak orang atas2). Immediately, I shyed away from other girls, I ate alone, played alone. But that never really bothered me. Until I was announced as the best student of the class and I became the teachers’ pet. Then they started bothering me. Calling me names like “cicak” because apparently I was too skinny for them to consider human. They also made fun of the scars on my legs that I got from practicing riding bicycle and called me budak kudis although I never had kudis. Literally everybody hated me. Nobody wanted to even sit on the chair that I sat, because they were scared that I would leave my cicak virus there. This psychological torture went on until I graduated primary school.
I entered secondary school with 5A upsr results, so I thought I would finally make friends. But no. They still hated me. I started gaining a lot of weight after puberty too, so they started calling me names like “gajah gemuk” and “fat pig”. So I did one of the most stupid thing that I have ever done. I tried starving myself to fit in. Little did I know that I was starving myself to death. Literally. And I failed my exams on purpose so that they would want to be my friend. I forced myself to vomit my meals. It was very painful, but seeing the numbers on the weight scale drop, I was “happy”. I also started having some friends. They loved that I was lowering myself to their standards. I finally felt like I am “one of the girls”. I laughed and smiled more in school.
However, all that facade fell off whenever I was at home. I cried all the time, randomly getting angry, yelling at my parents and getting yelled back by my parents. I fainted a lot, and I had to wear makeup in the house because I wanted to hide my dark circles and pale face from my parents. My beautiful hair started falling out. My menstruation stopped. My clothes became shorter and tighter because I wanted to show off my skinny body. I thought I was beautiful, but I looked more like a walking skeleton.
My “friends” started to shy away from me once again. They were scared of being friends with a living skeleton. And there I was, wondering what I did wrong. What did I do to deserve this kind of treatment? Because of how I look like? I was so weak, I had no energy. I was so stressed out and I couldn’t sleep. Once, I couldn’t sleep for almost a week. So I stole my mother’s sleeping pills and ate more than what I should have. I thought, dying is better than being treated this way. So I tried to die, in the most peaceful way I could think of, in my sleep, forever dreaming about the life and the love that I wanted to have. Because I thought, even if I don’t deserve love, at least I deserve to die peacefully. I was only 14. And I wanted to die.
My mother burst into my room, about to yell at me because I dumped the lunch that she made for me in the kitchen sink and made a mess, when she saw me lying across my bed, almost lifelessly with the sleeping pills bottle in my hand. I remembered her crying, shaking me, begging for me to stay with her, and then I remembered nothing else. Next thing I knew, I was on a hospital bed with painful needles and liquid things jammed in my arms (the IV). The doctors forced me to eat. At first it was painful to eat because my body was rejecting something that had been denied from it for so long. I vomited a lot and cried while eating, but I kept on eating. My mother’s cry was like a wake up call to me. Even if I don’t have friends, I have my mother. From that moment, I had a new goal in life. Not to be “one of the girls”, but to make my mother smile upon me. I wanted to make her proud. I didn’t want to disappoint her. So I ate. And I studied hard while going through rehab and receiving psychiatric help. I didn’t give two cents about the girls mocking me in school, I just wanted to make them regret mistreating me that way. I wanted to show them that I can fight them although it was basically like a single unarmed soldier fighting in a war against an army.
Alhamdulillah, I Ieft high school with 8A for pmr and 9A+1A for spm. And now studying a course that I love in a prestigious university. Not only that, I am also happily dating a dreamy guy who loves me for who I am. What about the other girls? Are they still studying? Or did they get married? I have no idea. But I could still recall the shocked expressions on their faces when they watched me receive the best student award from my school. And that alone made all my efforts worth it.
I am writing this not to brag, but to show that it is possible to rise back up from the lowest point of your life. Nobody else can save you from yourself, but yourself. Be a fighter. I am a fighter.
– Aqish
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