There is a moment that stands out in my memory. I’m young, maybe four or five, and I’m running around shirtless. I remember looking down at my belly, the soft, round belly of a young child; and I remember how pleased I am to be unencumbered by clothing. It is the only memory I have of being utterly, delightedly unself-conscious in my body.

I learned to hate my body by the time I was ten. Or maybe the hate came a little later in middle school. But certainly by ten I’d learned to see my body as inherently flawed, as something that required fixing. I hit puberty young, and had my period by age 10, so I had breasts and hips when the rest of my classmates were still narrow and lanky. I was different, and they let me know it in typical bullying fashion.

I was fat in middle school certainly. I say that without vitriol or insult. It’s simply a fact: I was fat. As a result, I was bullied for being fat. Likely, I would have been bullied anyway. I was the new girl in a small town, the introverted reader in a school that prized the school athletes. But my weight was an easy target, and it was chosen because those girls had learned from the culture what I had also learned: fat is bad. Fat is wrong. My worth was seen as inherently decreased because of the size of my body.

I would continue to be bullied for my weight for the better part of the next decade. In high school, I was called the Pillsbury Doughgirl by more than one classmate. One of my Navy supervisors told me I looked like a sausage stuffed in my uniform. Indeed, I can’t remember being bullied for anything else, though I’m sure I was. But the bullying I remember? It was always about my body.

And it was a target because the people in my life had been raised in the same media culture that I was. The female bodies that existed on screen -both television and movie- and that were given primacy were thin bodies, bodies stripped of any excess fat. Fat people existed in media as jokes or as ‘before’ pictures. They were mocked, or they were fixed. They never just existed without their weight being addressed and focused on.

You can’t live with that kind of constant exposure to a particular narrative without internalizing it, whatever your intentions. And I have spent a good two decades trying to escape my body and make it something else, something smaller and, therefore, worthwhile and beautiful. Because to be a beautiful woman is to take up less space. To be small.

There is another moment that stands out in my memory. This was maybe two years ago, at a yearly physical. Every year, on my intake form, under the question “is there anything else you’d like the doctor to address today”, I’d write “my weight” or “weight loss”. I don’t remember my doctor ever bringing it up before, but this year, as we were reaching the end of the appointment, she looked at me directly in the eye and said, “I’m not at all worried about your weight.”

I don’t know why, but this moment was eye-opening for me. Hearing that, something in my brain shifted, and I realized that the fight I’d been in all the years of my life was. . .stupid. That I’d spent so many years hating myself trying to adhere to an aesthetic standard I’d never agreed to, but that I was expected to meet simply by existing. And this aesthetic conferred no real benefit: it wouldn’t make me healthier or smarter or stronger or in any sense better. It would simply make me thin.

And I got angry. I got angry that I wasted so much of my energy fighting my body. That, even as I ran a half-marathon or did deadlifts at the gym, I worried about the way my body looked. That it might look fat in a finishing picture, or that someone might see a stomach roll when I bent at the waist to PR a deadlift, as if that would decrease the worth of the achievement. I got angry for all the girls who are barely old enough to read but already feel pressure to lose weight (Not a joke: a recent study showed that girls as young as 5 talked about wanting to diet). We destroy girls’ self-esteem before they have a chance to even develop it. And who benefits?

Corporations, mostly. A beauty standard built on patriarchal and white supremecist ideals only benefits those who profit from it. Those of us striving for it end up worse off. But there’s a push back against those messages. Body positivity is spreading, and girls (and boys) are learning that thinness is not a moral obligation and that worth has nothing to do with weight. Will there ever be a generation that grows up without these messages? Probably not, but I have hope that future generations will be supported by an opposing message that will give them the tools to fight it.

As for me? Well, it took me years to learn to hate my body, and to build my weight into my sense of self-worth. I can be angry, and wake up and say “I choose to love myself regardless of my weight”, but it’s never going to be that easy. What has been learned must be unlearned. But the important part is that it can be unlearned. I can choose to give those ridiculous beauty standards the middle finger, and dictate my own. It’ll take time, but then, so does anything that lasts.