God Bless This Mess(28)

How is a girl supposed to make sense of the competing messages?

Even if I wasn’t in pageants, given everything we see in magazines, and in movies, and on social media, how are any of us supposed to be able to think of our bodies as not being in competition with everyone else’s? I tell myself all the time, “I’m not a model; I’m not a fit model. I just want to be healthy!”

The first time I went on a diet I was fifteen years old. I was in tenth grade.

I was following a pageant expert’s advice, and what she told me was, “You can eat from morning till noon, as much fruit as you want. After twelve, no fruit, and you eat chicken and green beans for both of your meals. Then you can have some almonds . . .”

In the second week it was no fruit, two boiled eggs, chicken and green beans, chicken and green beans.

In two weeks, I lost sixteen pounds. I don’t remember how I felt on that diet, but I got abs! My legs were still big, but my abs looked impressive.

That was my first-ever pageant with a swimsuit competition—and I won second runner-up. Everyone said how great I looked.

And as soon as it was over, I gained it all back.

It was never healthy.

You can’t get into the pageant world without hearing about girls taking water pills. There were girls that all they would eat was hard-boiled eggs, all day. The body yo-yo was just a thing, and it was incredibly intense in the weeks just before and after a competition. But I’m not sure it’s all that different from the way we’re all encouraged to diet and try to look in our everyday lives. We treat our bodies as if we’re in some sort of competition.

I’ve been out of the pageant world for more than half a decade now, and all of these conflicting messages still affect me to this day.

When guys say “You have strong legs,” I don’t take it as a compliment. I hear it as “That means my legs are too big.”

When I’m working out, I gain muscle easily. My legs could be giant if I wanted them to be. But when I was super skinny, you could see the muscle better, because I was nothing but bone and muscle. And people liked the way I looked at those times.

I hate saying this, but a part of me still wants my legs not to touch. I wish my thighs were skinny. It makes me sad when I hear other girls say things like that, but I wanted that skinny-legged model look so bad, and for a time, I had it. I know it’s unhealthy for me, and it shouldn’t be what I think about. But I think a lot of girls think it, even if they don’t say it.

Body image haunts so many of us.

I am learning to love the feeling I get when I know I’m healthy, and being grateful for that, and being comfortable in the body I have. I’m proud of my athleticism. I can keep up with the boys. I do push-ups and can (if being chased) run an eight-minute mile. If you challenge me to almost anything athletic, I will do it.

I wish that was enough for me. I wish I didn’t have these conflicting feelings. And I’m trying my best to shed them—like a heavy coat that I don’t need to keep wearing in the summertime.

Unfortunately, it’s taking me a long time to shake it off. Maybe that’s normal. I spent so much of my life receiving these messages, it makes sense that it would take a long time to shed them.

I had a director one time who emailed me a picture of another girl and said, “You need to look like this by orientation week.” It was a photo of a girl who looked nothing like me, in a swimsuit. I was twenty at the time, so this wasn’t all that many years ago.

Another girl’s body.

You need to look like this.

It killed me. This director had years of experience at high-level pageants. She knew what she was talking about. She knew how to win. I was trying to do everything I could to follow her advice and her coaching.

I had been trying to follow everyone’s advice on what to do to “win.” I did the diets. I tried the workouts. I dyed my hair the color of a potato chip because my hair wasn’t the same kind of blond the winning girls had.

But I just kept losing.

I would practice for interviews and let coaches decide what I was going to say. Directors decided what I was going to put on my paperwork when I entered. They told me which books I should mention, and how many achievements I should have. I joined so many clubs in high school so it could be written on a piece of paper. I know some kids do that for their college applications, but for me it was all for pageants. I basically let other people craft a story of who I was.

Is it any wonder I lost who I was?

Undoing the things we’ve learned, especially the things we don’t like, takes a lot of time and effort, whether or not we think it should.

I mean, even when we think we’re over things in life, sometimes we’re not really over them, right?

Like when I said I had made up my mind to be done with pageants after I didn’t make the Top 15 at Miss Alabama USA. That resolution didn’t exactly pan out: I came back to the pageant world one more time, for some unexpected reasons, in the most unprepared way, just a year later. And part of the reason I did it was because I’d gone through a breakup with a boy.

Oh, yeah. Boys. I almost forgot: while all of this pageant and body image pressure was going on, I was also trying to make my way through high school and college, while dating and dealing with the rest of my life.





Chapter 10


Little Miss Everything