If I Changed My Body, Maybe I’d Be Enough

By the time I reached high school, I had become very good at believing that changing myself was the answer.

If I felt insecure, I blamed my body.

If I wasn’t confident, I blamed my body.

If I was afraid someone wouldn’t love me, I blamed my body.

Looking back, I don’t think I was actually trying to lose weight.

I was trying to become someone I believed would finally feel worthy.

I was in a relationship throughout much of high school, and like many teenage relationships, I was still figuring out who I was. I didn’t know it then, but I was looking outside myself for reassurance that I was enough.

Instead of asking whether I felt loved for who I was, I kept asking myself a different question.

“What do I need to change about myself to deserve love?”

So I kept trying.

I exercised because I thought I had to.

I skipped meals because I thought discipline would fix what I believed was wrong with me.

I bought diet pills that I hoped no one would notice.

Every decision felt connected to one belief:

If I could just become smaller… maybe I would finally become enough.

When that relationship ended, I thought maybe things would get better.

Instead, the belief followed me.

In my early twenties, I entered another relationship carrying all the same insecurities I had never healed.

This relationship brought its own challenges, and I found myself believing once again that if I could change my body enough, maybe I would finally be chosen.

The eating disorder no longer felt like something I controlled.

It had become the way I coped with fear.

Every pound I tried to lose was really an attempt to gain certainty.

Every meal I skipped was another promise that maybe tomorrow I’d finally feel okay.

But tomorrow never came.

Because no amount of changing my body could heal something that had never been about my body in the first place.