A fact you probably (definitely) already know: I'm not perfect. If my myriad of flaws were each in a different color, I'd be a walking rainbow.
A fact you may not know: I like who I am, regardless of those flaws. Even amidst my many colored imperfections, I think I'm a pretty decent person. I realize there are things about myself that need improvement - that rainbow of flaws isn't going away on its own - but I have realized that I don't have to be perfect to like myself.
It seems like most of my life, I've allowed myself to define who I am by one or several of my flaws. At almost any given time of my life from age eight on until semi-recently, if someone had asked me to describe myself in my mind - just a private, one sentence description no one else would ever hear, and especially not my parents who, bless them, think the sun shines out my fingers and toes and whom I wouldn't have wanted to disappoint by admitting I was less than sunshiny - I would have labeled myself "The fat girl standing by the wall that hardly anyone notices."
I would have written off the multi-layered complexities, contradictions, strengths, hopes, fears and flaws that make up who I am by covering them up with the shy-and-overweight blanket. I wrote myself off because of my weight and crippling insecurities around people I don't know well.
Funnily enough, you could use that description of me just as easily today, because it's just as true as it ever was. I still go largely unnoticed by my peers when I don't talk first; it's still hard for me to begin a conversation with someone I don't really know; and I'm still far from model-esque in figure. But now, rather than "Fat shy girl" being the only entry in the Encyclopedia of Lisa on the subject of Me, it is just one entry of dozens. One, overly simplified, explanation of who or what I am.
Now, I define myself differently. I'm the girl who doodles on all her class notes. I'm the one who sings too loudly when she loves the song. I am she who stays up til two in the morning finishing a book even though she knows she has a class at 7:45 the next morning because, akdjhfaskdhfas, DUH, you cannot put down a book at the climax! I am the roommate who wears footsie pajamas and doesn't care what anyone thinks about it. I use big words in conversation with relish, and spell easy words wrong for the heck of it. I'm alternatively sweet and sassy, mild and obnoxious, uninterested and obsessed.
In short, I'm a normal human being. As far as I can tell, it takes everyone some time to get comfortable in his or her own skin. When I was younger, I was convinced I was the only one who'd ever experienced such crippling self-doubt. Again, normal. Every teenager feels they are the first to experience that exact brand of discomfort with him or herself, even if they understand, logically, like I did, that among the billions of people to have ever lived, someone has shared their agony. "But even if there have been fat shy people before," I thought, "they didn't have these friends (or unfriends, or antagonists, or whatever) and they didn't live here, and they didn't have these parents, or this life!" Eh. No antagonist or town is all that different from another. Human experience, while different in the superficial aspects, is pretty universal.
My point, I suppose, is that I made it. I lived through the crappy, hate-yourself, no-one-understands years and I survived and grew and came out the other side and became the type of person I'd like to meet. I know not many people will see this blog post, but I'd just like to throw it out into the universe, that no matter how hard it seems - and as cliche as it might sound - it really does get better. You will love yourself if you give yourself a chance. I know because I'm the fat, shy girl with the rainbow worth of flaws. And I love me.
