“I spent most of growing up feeling like my body in particular was unwanted. It was a strange place to be in because I was surrounded by friends and did always have company but I felt that when it came to being attractive, it would never be me. This came up explicitly multiple times when the boys who would ask me out would specify that “if we had to go for someone with a personality – it would always be you”. I think my loudest memory is – One time in 10th grade, I got told that someone in my class had seen my breasts when I was
standing by a window sill or something and told the boys group that they were “two mosquito bites”. I was never vocal about how it affected me and maybe hence I didn’t really let it get to me back then. But that sentence has stuck with me 10 years since. It wasn’t like the other taunts like LG Flatron or the usual ‘But what curves?’ – it had compared me to something nobody would ever look at with love.

By the time I got to college, I found myself stuck between wanting to like my chest and being desired. My mom kept pushing me to wear padded bras and that would allow me to wear a lot more types of dresses and tops but after 2 years I stopped. I felt like I was being a cheat. I had multiple people say different versions of ‘but you don’t even need to wear a bra’ – and that made things worse. I’m 27 now and only slowly understanding and liking my choice of dressing and not freaking out about what a guy thinks when I’ve undressed in front of him. The process of understanding what I want to be desired for
and being okay with the things I will never be desired for was painful, to say the least.

I’m a lot kinder to my body, thanks to therapy, but there are still days when I spend hours naked in the mirror trying to convince myself she’s just right the way she is.”

They wanted to be “painted in the setting of a sky because that’s
what my name means – everlasting like the sky.”

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