A Bit Too Personal
So in english today we were given a prompt to write about; we have two days in class to write an essay about “a time physical appearance has affected you”. A more appropriate prompt would’ve been, “write about a time physical appearance hasn’t affected you”. The prompt just struck me as odd. Usually they ask you to write about baby stuff like when someone has helped you, or when you learned something new, or stuff like that. This prompt is legit, and, at the same time, I find it really awkward.
Being a 17 year old-girl, I’m affected by my physical appearance every single day. I can sit here and pretend to not care about it all that I want, but I’m just lying to myself because I know how horribly low my self-esteem is. I’m sure that I’m not the only girl in my school who thinks this, either. The fact of the matter is that I have loads to write about this; I could go on for days if they’d let me. However, I don’t want to share some of what’s on my mind. For instance, I don’t want to talk about how I didn’t eat breakfast during middle school because I wanted to lose weight (I didn’t know how important breakfast was then). I don’t want to talk about how I stay strict about what I eat because I’m terrified of gaining weight. I don’t want to talk about how many times a day I mentally compare myself to other girls, and I don’t want to talk about how in the end they’re always prettier than me. I don’t want to write about how, every so often, I just break down because I feel so inadequate. Yeah, I’m fine with saying all of that here because I guess I trust the few people that I know read this blog- I don’t really know what other stalkers read it, so I could care less. These are not things that you tell your english teacher, though. My first thought is that they’d take my paper straight to a counselor and have my mom called to tell her about how I’m anorexic, self-harming, and suicidal (all exaggerations, of course). I don’t know. There’s a lot of potential in this prompt, but I don’t want to have to write about it and then feel judged for the rest of this year by my teachers.
Plus, I’m lucky in that I’ve never been straight up bullied to my face about my appearance. I don’t really have one specific instance to draw from, so I was just kind of rambling today. I’m going to have to re-write my paper tomorrow. However, I heard some people talking about what they were writing about… I don’t know. I couldn’t just open up and share that kind of stuff with a teacher. Also, I feel like any story that is appropriate for me to tell is too cliche. For example, I could write about the numerous times my feeble, little heart has been crushed, and I’ve attributed it to my looks. I just hate that, though. As a teacher, especially a guy teacher like Barckholtz, I would hate to read tons of papers about the woeful love-lifes of teenage girls; it’s all too Twilight-esque. Again, at the same time, though, I feel like anything else I wrote about wouldn’t be “kosher”. Boo for being conflicted. Hopefully I’ll figure out something to write about that isn’t totally awkward; if not, I’ll just tough it out and risk being judged by whoever has to grade my paper.
