You’re fairly sure your skin has always been a problem. A problem before you even realised, lurking in the background of your earliest memories. Never with a clear mark for when yourealisedit was a problem. (When you realised what it means, to hate your skin so much.) But with signs scattered throughout your life.
The very earliest sign was swimming. Or clothes in general, really, but swimming was the easy one. When you swam, you always wore (and always still wear) a shirt, even though the males of your family don’t. More broadly, you refuse to ever be seen without one. You called it modesty, but now you know it as shame. Shame for your square-ish, flat, slightly hairy flesh prison. Because, even then, you knewyourchest should be covered up, even though your skin is flush against your ribs and males don’t need to cover up.
(The thought makes you sick – not the unfairness of who should cover what, but that you don’t actually have to care. Youwantthe extra part of the dress code, the additional rule when swimming.) So despite the fact that you didn’t have to, you covered up. Refused to take off your shirt, anywhere, for any reason. Convinced that you were just being dumb.
And even if it was discomforting, it was so easy to write it off. So easy to shy away from the teasing about your modesty, so easy to pretend you were just a little odd and there was nothing else to it. Because as long as you’re just a bit odd, nothing could go wrong. Just push it down, just don’t think about it, just ignore the wrongness of your skin and the strangeness of your bones. Masking yourself as you masked your body, because you were safe if you didn’t think about it. If you ignoredwhyyou needed to cover up, you could pretend you were fine and normal and yourself.
A sweet little lie.
The most obvious sign, a little later than the swimming, was video games, and your refusal to play as a male. “Girls look better!” you might have said. But that wouldn’t explain the first-person games, the ones where you spent hours dressing up a character so unlike you, even though you would only ever see the results in menu screens. Even back then, playing games, having fun, there was a crushing sensation. A vague, growing envy. That even little digital pictures wore their skins better than you.
That feeling – the crush, the envy, even a little hurt. It’s never left you. You find it in the mirror, in your head when you look down at yourself, in the back of your mind when you’re reading. It’s a second skin, a layer of disgust. You clench your hands and it’s there. You scrub yourself in the shower and it’s there. Rest your hands on your thighs and it’s there. You’re terrified that no matter what you do, the crush will never leave. That you willalwaysbe what you are, instead of what you want to be.
The first time you showed off a bit – wore a sports bra, showed some skin – there was so much joy that it scared you. Because the one truth of you is that your skin disgusts you. But put a strip of fabric over your chest and suddenly your skin made you ecstatic.
And from that moment, from seeing yourself in the mirror like that, you know something has changed. You realise that there’s a word for you, as your eyes trace the shape of the skin you suddenly want to keep seeing. A word that encapsulates so much but also so little, and you’re terrified of it. (You still are, if you’re being honest.) It settles over the crush and the envy and the hurt and, suddenly, there’s so much more of you than there was only a few days before. A cut in that second skin of disgust, showing something promising beneath.
And then the crush comes, and you put a bandaid over that cut. The joy of your skin deserts you, and the disgust returns, because you know exactly what’s wrong when you look in the mirror now, and there’s no amount of pretending that can fix it. You stay up late with your best friend, and they help you find a name, and it is the warmest feeling in the world, and your skin constricts around you. Because names don’t fix the fact thatyou aren’t you. That your skin isn’t yours, and seeing your own face is like the sound of cracking glass turned into a feeling, and you begin to fear that you willneverbe fixed.
Because you have lived in ignorant bliss for so long – simply calling yourself weird, simply swallowing it all down. There was peace in your lack of self, in not realisingwhyyou’ve slowly, unnoticeably grown addicted to skirts and long hair and bare strips of skin. Because as long as you didn’t think about it, it couldn’t quite hurt you. As long as you were strange little (not-)you, you were safe and you were normal and you were completely fine.
And now you’re not.
You’re not fine.
And you haven’t been for a long, long time.
Your safety, your peace, has been torn down so slowly you didn’t even notice, and now everything hidden behind it has come rushing out. Everything youwerehas been torn out and you don’t know how to rebuild yourself. You’ve lost every building block, and all that’s left is the hurt that you’ve spent your life crushing out. The hurt when you touch your face, when you see your hands, when you sit down with your thighs together.
You’re terrified of what you want to be. Terrified because you finally realise it, finally see the shape of everything you’ve been forcing down.
Terrified, because now you know what you are, and that knowledge is like an anchor with a too-short chain. Fine when you kept it up, but now you’ve let it drop, and it’s tugging you down with it. You were afloat, and now you’re drowning, and you don’t know if you’ll ever surface again.
In Australia, support is available atheadspace.Other international helplines can be found atbefrienders.org
Elsie Thwaites is a student and hobbyist writer