God Bless This Mess(27)
The anxiety and self-imposed pressure was a lot. I just couldn’t take it anymore. I had a lot going on in my life at the time. I was suffering from undiagnosed anxiety and depression (which I’ll talk about more in just a bit), and the Miss Alabama competition was too much for me to take.
I didn’t want to give up on pageants entirely. I’d dedicated so much of my life to it. It was my thing. So I decided to give it one more try in the Miss USA system, which requires a little less preparation, follows a different format, and has a different set of rules. It was just a little bit less-intense than the Miss America system.
I entered the Miss Alabama USA pageant with high hopes—and I didn’t even make the Top 15.
I was crushed. I had worked so hard, for so long, believing very strongly that recognition and affirmation equals worthiness. I just wanted to be accepted—and couldn’t get over the feeling that I had been rejected.
As I’ll explain in the upcoming chapters, there was just so much going on in my life at that time. I couldn’t take it all. So I decided I’d never do it again. That was it for me.
Pageants weren’t my thing, after all.
Chapter 9
Legs
Looking back on it now, I think the way women are judged in pageants and the way we’re judged in life aren’t all that different. That was a problem for me, because so much of my happiness came down to my desire for approval. My whole life I’ve wanted approval: from my parents, my friends, my teachers, boys, judges, audiences, perfect strangers, everybody. The problem with wanting people’s approval is that when they don’t approve, it hurts. And it’s really hard to shake that hurt, especially when the disapproval has to do with my body.
By the time I was four or five, I would look in the mirror at dance class and notice that my legs were bigger than the legs of the girls beside me. I danced on competitive teams until I was nearly seventeen, and that comparison in the mirror never went away.
I would look at Limited Too catalogs in second or third grade and think, I don’t look like them. Even then, because I was dancing, I had muscular legs and a bit of a booty. And it bothered me that my body didn’t look like those girls’.
In pageants, my body was literally judged and compared to other girls’ bodies, and instead of feeling good about the differences, I never felt like I was enough. I stressed out over the fact that I could never change this situation. Why couldn’t I fix it?
Where did that pressure come from? I’m not even sure. It was always just there. I think a lot of girls feel it. It’s a reflection of everything we see, everything we read, everything we’re told.
But the one trigger I remember the most came just before I went into kindergarten. My parents owned a hair salon that was also a tanning salon and gym—one whole section of a shopping plaza. A guy named Chuck ran the gym. I was always around at that age, hanging out in the back room watching Grease over and over till the VCR stopped working.
Chuck had all these cute little college girls working out in there, and one day I was in the back mixing ketchup and mayonnaise to put on my sandwich. I liked to mix the two, which grosses me out now, but I loved it then. And Chuck came in and told me, “If you keep eating like that, you’ll get fat!”
I never ate mayonnaise again.
Why did I even know what “fat” was? Where did that come from?
For dance class, I hated that my feet were wider than the other girls’. I had to go to special places to get my dance shoes. I looked at myself in those pink leotards we wore and noticed that my thighs touched. On other girls, the taller girls, the skinnier girls, they didn’t.
I would hear the older girls talking, including one who grew up to be a model. She said, “The perfect legs are supposed to have three holes, one two three—I have it!”
I looked in the mirror. Shoot, I only have two, one by my knees and one by my ankle.
My American Girl dolls’ legs didn’t touch.
My Barbies’ legs didn’t touch.
The little-girl models in the Limited Too catalog—their legs didn’t touch.
In later years we danced in booty shorts, like tight spandex. I hated wearing them because my legs didn’t look like everybody else’s in them.
For as long as I can remember, I’d been told that I had “thunder thighs.” Older people in my family, older friends of my parents, would pick me up and talk about how heavy I was. I remember they’d say, “Oh, oh, oh!” as if it hurt their backs when they lifted me.
When I got into pageants, I can’t even count the number of times I heard the same passing comment from people. You’re so pretty, but if you could just lose ten pounds, you would really see a difference.
I tried. I really tried.
I’ve never been naturally skinny. I don’t have those genes. I’ve always been fit, but I had to work at it, which means working out. I work really hard. But I also love ice cream, and I love pizza and hamburgers and french fries.
I don’t think most people would look at me at any point in my ups-and-downs in pounds and think I was “overweight.” But I could not ever look like the tall, skinny model-type I so desperately wanted to be.
So where did that leave me?
In a perfect world, I shouldn’t have cared. Why should any of us feel pressure to fit into a category of body type? My body is mine, it isn’t like anyone else’s, and I should have just loved and adored that I was uniquely me. But instead, I was drowning in insecurity and a self-hatred of my own body. I had such a warped view of what my body looked like versus what I thought it was supposed to look like.