To EveryBODY Out There by Meenakshi Jha (16, India)

Dear body,
I hope this finds you in the pink of your health. Whatever I am about to tell you has been long overdue. This is not a justification of any kind, they are just things that I have struggled to tell you
for a long, long time.

Truth to be told, I never really took you seriously till the eighth grade. To me you were just a sum of parts before that and my medium to inhabit this ever expanding, constantly altering cosmos.

The summer I turned thirteen was perhaps the first time I realised that your functions were not only limited to giving me a tangible existence but also an aesthetic existence. I never had any
metathesiophobic inclinations, so when you started to grow, I felt hyper-aware of you and welcomed your transformation with open arms. Thirteen as we all know, is the age of being naïve and naïve I was. My ebulliency had tricked me into thinking that I was the only one going through this phase of intense maturation. Therefore, when I walked into my school after the vacations, I was disappointed to my very core. We weren’t the only ones that changed. My classmates were going through exactly what we were and I felt like they were doing better than us. I was hooked on how scrawny I looked compared to the other seemingly well-built girls in my class and what a midget I looked like while standing with them. This is when the mirror started scaring me. I used to think about us with nothing but a revulsion inscrutable and unnoticeable to everyone around us. For the next two years, I forcibly tried to make peace with the fact that you were bound to change and you would. When Internet searches told me that there were only four body types and I could not relate to any of them, diets and workouts became all I cared about. Looking attractive was the only thing that mattered to me at that moment.
I used to keep scrutinising your outline underneath my clothes so I could gauge how on par I was with other adolescents my age.
Never in a million years I could have thought that all of my body image issues would just vanish into thin air by doing nothing but doodling idly. Into the margin of some overused notebook one fine day, I was doodling flowers. Flowers that were polychromatic, had no definite shapes and were different than each other. Further cogitation correlated this to the very creation of human beings. The almighty created us differently and maybe this is how we ought to be, unlike each other, unique and beautiful to look at. That is how I realised I was trying to rectify ‘flaws’ that didn’t exist to begin with. So I began anew. I began by making friends with the mirror again. I began by being proud of who I was. I began by accepting the truth that we weren’t created to be flawless because we had been crafted with enough perfection already.
Yours
Meenakshi