First time I Saw My Fat

I was nine years old when I begged my mom to throw this picture away.

I thought I looked fat. That was the whole reason. It is the first photo I can remember looking at and thinking, wait, is that what I look like?

She kept it anyway. I am so grateful she did.

It is strange how one picture can plant a lie deep enough that you are still pulling at the roots decades later. Mine was short and it stuck. I’m fat, so I’m ugly. Nine years old and I had already decided that about myself, and then I carried it around for years like it was simply a fact about me instead of something I made up on an ordinary afternoon.

Here is what I see when I look at it now.

I see a girl at the end of one of the best days of her life. My family was living in the Philippines, and we threw a pool party for the Primary kids from our church. Most of them had never been to a swimming pool before. Some of them probably never went to one again.

I could not tell you a single thing we ate. I have no memory of what games we played. But I know we laughed all day, and I know it turned out to be one of those days you keep forever without realizing at the time that you are keeping it.

For years, none of that was in this picture for me. All I could see was my body.

That is the thing about an insecurity. It does not just make you feel bad about yourself. It reaches back and quietly erases everything else that was happening. A whole day, a pool full of kids who had never seen one, and I shrank it down to how I looked standing there.

Now my body is the last thing I notice in this photo. That took a long time. But I look at that little girl with so much love, and I wish I could tell her that the thing she is worried about is the least interesting thing about her, and that nobody else in that pool was thinking about it at all.

She had no idea she was beautiful.

So if there is a picture you have been meaning to delete, would you leave it alone a little longer? Someday you are going to want to see what was actually happening that day.

I promise it was so much more than your body.