Opinion: How I overcame the devastating effects of body shaming and began to see beauty in everything

by Onuh-Yahaya, Z.

 

It was a rainy Saturday and all I wanted to do was sleep. My family, however, would not allow me be great.

‘Zee, you need to see this movie’, my brother yelled from the sitting room.

I groaned, as I threw the covers away and hobbled to the sitting room.

‘The little girl,’ my mum said, pointing, ‘looks just like Ata,’ she said, pinching my little sister’s cheek, who was sitting next to her on the couch.

I navigated my way to the next couch, then, so she wouldn’t pinch my own cheeks when she eventually finds someone that looks like me. That made me miss what Ata said.

‘Say what?’ I asked, folding my legs.

‘I said I don’t look like her. She’s beautiful.’ She murmured.

‘Why would you say that?’ my brother asked, sitting up.

She shrugged her little shoulders. ‘I don’t look like her because I’m not beautiful.’ She said again, clearly.

‘What makes you think you’re not beautiful’, I asked.

‘Because you and Mustapha are fair. And daddy, too. And slim. And I’m not.’

I gaped at my eight-year-old sister.

‘But, I’m dark’, my mum said. ‘Am I not beautiful?’

She shrugged again.

And that was how we had to convince an eight-year-old that she was beautiful, in whichever colour, shape or form.

*********************

I wasn’t always ‘fair and slim’. I was the proverbial caterpillar turned butterfly. Growing up, my mother fought virtually everyone in the neighbourhood, child or adult, because I was always referred to as ‘lenge lenge albino’. It was devastating. I couldn’t race with the other children because I had my bones sticking out my neck and my limbs looking like broomsticks. They called me ‘mosquito’ as well to spice things up. And it clearly didn’t help that I had a head too big for my body. Because of skin that was too fair, the green of my veins could be seen from a mile away and people who didn’t even know me or my parents, for that matter, concluded I was a ‘sickler’. I never even did a thing around the house since the day neighbours saw me carrying a pail of water and screamed that I was going to ‘break’.

Twenty years later, and I am being used as a yardstick to measure beauty. Wow.

**********************

‘There’s beauty in everything,’ I said to my little sister. And even as the words left me, I realised how true it was.

Tade, the security guard was short, but he has very beautiful dentition. Grace, the maid, was fat, but she has the best eyes; brown like caramel. Lucy, the receptionist, was thin, but she’s probably the most graceful person I’ve met. John, the plumber, had a flat nose, but he had a quick smile.

Beauty has no shape or form or colour. It wasn’t universal. It was relative. For me, it was the eyes; for you, it might be the nose. For me, it was the shape; for you, it might be the colour. It is not sacrosanct. It was in everything around; we just don’t look for it, so we don’t see. As I thought of this, I realised why people say ‘thank you’ when someone says ‘You’re beautiful’. It isn’t a sign of weakness. It is practically saying ‘thank you for seeing’.

As I mentally ran through everyone I knew, I realised that they all had something. Something about them that stood out and completely overshadowed whatever I had initially thought was negative about them. And then, I realised it was okay to not be perfect.

And as I waltzed into a new week with that realisation, everything seemed to take form. The woman seated next to me at the bus had a beautiful voice; the man in front of me had fine hands; the schoolgirl behind me had beautiful lashes. And as I got to the office, giddy from the positivity and beauty around me, I couldn’t be bothered when Gregory called me ‘big head’; not in an affectionate manner that says ‘I’m just teasing you’, but in a derisive manner that said ‘I mean it. I want to tear you down and make you feel bad about your head’, I laughed and just asked lightly;

‘Gregory, why do you have no joy?’


Op–ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija

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