What are your best qualities?
My resilience, my flexibility, and my eyelashes.
Do you have any undesirable qualities?
My anxiety, my perfectionism, my sensitivity.
What do you love the most about your body?
I love my eyes.
Tell us the story about your stretch marks and scars…
So my stretch marks and scars stem from infancy. I was born with hydrocephalus and underwent 2 intense brain surgeries at 6 and 7 months which actually resulted in a small abdominal scar from where they fed the shunt in. It was a life saving success and I have minimal brain damage, but I live with this knowledge every day that my hydrocephalus could come back again. Another reminder is my scar of course, which did not stretch as a grew and resulted in a small pouch around the scar itself.
What was your response when you first noticed your body changing?
To be honest, when I was growing and I could feel the shunt unwinding and growing with me, I thought it was kind of cool that I knew I was individual. But as I got older I only knew that I didn‘t get any skinnier in my stomach no matter how much I dieted or worked out. And it resulted in a lot of self hate. I didn‘t even consider that I had over 6 feet of tubing in my abdomen as a small barely 5‘3“ young woman.
How did those around you make you feel about these changes?
My dad made comments that if I sat as often as I did I would get fatter, and he encouraged me to go on hikes with him which he did with no food or water in an effort to lose weight (for both of us he said). And although unintentional, I had quite a few friends skinnier than me that would complain about their body image which only made me feel like a lost cause. Someone who was beyond obese even though I was literally a size medium.