Catherine D.
Photography by Jessica Pentel.
Before reading this letter, we'd like for you to know it discusses Catherine D’s experience with an eating disorder. If you think that reading about this will be triggering for you, we encourage you to take a pause before reading this letter, center yourself, and prepare any resources you may need to access after reading it. If you'd rather not read this letter, we encourage you to read a letter on a different topic, such as Dana Q’s letter. If you're reading this, your feelings are valid.
If you're reading this you are worthy of love and happiness no matter what your body looks like.
I couldn’t possibly pinpoint the moment when I learned that I was not “beautiful” by society’s standards. It is something that I have just always heard and internalized. I know that I do not meet the “standard” definition of beauty and that is something that has shaped me.
I was about 8 years old when I was first told to lose weight. The doctor told me that to be “healthy” I needed to eat certain things, exercise, and track what I ate...all with the goal of losing weight.
Apparently “healthy” meant skinny, and that was made very clear to me. I later learned that in actuality, healthy looks different for every person, but that lesson did not come until after my mental health suffered greatly.
From age 8 to 18 I avoided the doctor’s office at all costs because I knew what they would say to me regardless of my reason for going. “Don’t you want to be healthy?” “Why are you not losing weight?” “Why aren’t you able to do this?” Each time I never had an answer for them and I left defeated. This led me to feel horrible about my body, and eventually resulted in me feeling horrible about who I was as a person. I knew that the doctors, nurses, and even my parents were supposed to have my best interests at heart, but did they really? Why did they want me to change so badly?
After getting told time and time again to change, you start to believe something is wrong with you. I started to internalize the belief that I was ugly. This led me to regress and feed my unhealthy behaviors. I obsessively tried every diet I could find. I stepped on the scale upwards of 15 times a day. I counted calories in everything I ate and drank. But the thing that hurt the most was that I stopped caring about myself and my relationship with others. I have always been extremely social, but I stopped wanting to interact with others because I believed that I could not possibly be good enough to be loved by someone else.
Why would I try to be loved, if I knew internally that I was not worthy of it?
It wasn’t until I came to UVA and escaped the toxic bubble that had always surrounded me that I began to become the real kind of healthy. I escaped the world where I had to constantly shrink myself to fit other people’s view of health and stepped into one where I defined myself and prioritized what makes me happy and healthy. I stopped caring about the calories and what other people thought of me and started caring about the fuel and happiness that food and exercise brought me. To this day, I workout as a gift to myself. I give myself 45 minutes of uninterrupted time every day to learn to love myself again.
I wish I could tell you when the lightbulb clicked but I can’t. I have no idea what changed except for the fact that I went to college. I have no idea when I started to believe that I was enough. What I can tell you is that it is a process. I wake up every day and have to fight to believe that I am worthy and some days I don’t believe it. Some days a singular comment about my appearance derails my entire day and some days that same comment rolls off my back. Healing is unpredictable, but every day brings progress.
Self-love is a journey, one that I grapple with every day, but it is something that is worth fighting for. You are not alone if you have to fight for it too. The moment you start to convince yourself that you might be perfect just the way that you are is the moment that you start to change for the better.
While I won’t say that you will ever be completely in love with yourself, please know that you are worthy of love, worthy of respect, worthy of everything just the way that you are.
No matter what you look like or whether you fit the societal standard of “health”, if you are happy and prioritizing yourself, you are healthy. You do not have to be skinny to be beautiful. You do not have to change to be beautiful.
If you’re reading this, you are beautiful exactly the way that you are.
Catherine D., University of Virginia
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