Apparently, it’s not liking the way you look. In this context it’s something some teenagers in the US need to be treated for. Very expensively, presumably.
Now I’m not going to claim I’m supremely well-adjusted. I mean, I probably wouldn’t go camerawhoring if I was, and I probably wouldn’t have run away to join a travelling theatre either, but by-and-large, I think I mostly cope all right.
But not liking the way you look when you’re in your teens? I thought that was normal. I didn’t. I was usually described as (‘derided for’ might be a better phrase) being ‘skinny’. I just fattened up a bit later after I discovered beer and burgers. Not a huge amount. Once briefly got to 66 kilos (lot of dedicated eating and drinking involved to get there) and felt like a Sumo wrestler.
But I was very conscious of having thin arms and wrists. (The arms have bulked out a bit now, though, it’s one of the consequences of using a wheelchair for spells, tends to build up the muscles, they’re hard things to pole around, I can tell you.) To such an extent, I avoided wearing short-sleeved T’s or pushing sweatshirt sleeves up to my elbows.
I got over it, after someone introduced me to the phrase ‘small-boned’, but it had never occurred to me before that it might have been a ‘disorder’ that needed treatment. Like I said, I thought it was normal. For god’s sake, one of the most conventionally beautiful (and blonde, and everybody thought so) girls I knew at Uni once kept me awake all night, and utterly confounded me, confiding (and sobbing her heart out) that she hated the way she looked. She thought she was too small, and couldn’t see why guys hit on her so often just because of a face she couldn’t see was different to anybody else’s.
Rather took my attention off my arms and wrists, that. (I quite liked ‘small-boned’ and adopted it, though it had actually been something of an expression of disappointment uttered by a boy who had obviously been hoping for something a bit heftier until I’d stripped off my bulky winter jumper and was down to my underpants; he just hadn’t dared to say ‘skinny’.) And my legs and bum which rather too many bullies at school had kept on at me about being a girl’s, though I got around to seeing that as kind of not such a bad thing later. I don’t have the sort of looks the girl had, but it was nice once to overhear two girls saying they wished they had legs like mine . . .But I’d got a bit more confident about being attracted (and sometimes even attractive) to men by then.
But apparently it gets worse. It leads to some sort of ‘societal disorder’ too. You kind of shun company or are awkward in it. Course you do, ffs. Especially that of chavs taunting you about your legs and bum and long hair. (I didn’t like my hair then, either. A girl cousin once told me she and her friends wished they had wavy hair like mine, and how did I do it? Told her I couldn’t helpit, it grew like that whatever I did, and they could take it. I spent years envying boys whose hair was straight, but I hated it short even more.) And especially if you’re a teenager. I thought that was normal, too.
You know, it’s a very scary thought when what you think is normal becomes something that should be ‘treated’. By people who either never went through it, or forgot they did, or decided it was abnormal. Like being gay, maybe?
