My friend’s daughter had her confidence knocked big time at a Christmas party this weekend – she’s quite a curvy girl, but definitely in a ‘curves you’d kill for’ hourglass kind of way. She’s young, gorgeous, and to be honest if she was my daughter she’d be locked in a tower until she was at least forty. There’s a bloke in the mix who she has a bit of a soft spot for – actually she’s got the raging hots for him, I was being discreet – so she was gearing up for a bit of a flirt and maybe a moment under the mistletoe you know?
Off she went, feeling really giddy. And within ten minutes of arriving at the party, a thoughtless catty comment made by one of her so-called friends about the way she looked ruined her whole night. I could have wept for her as my friend was telling me about it, because like many of you guys I’m sure, I’ve been there.
She doesn’t see what we all see, when she looks in the mirror. I look at her and I see flawless peachy skin and an amazing smile. I see a girl with boobs to die for and a proper waist, and yet all she sees when she looks in the mirror is fat. To put it into perspective, I’ve got more fat on my earlobes than she has on her body.
When I look back at my own teenage years, I often wonder how different my life might have been if I’d grown up in a hot body. I mean don’t get me wrong, I was a proper party animal when I was younger, and I didn’t suffer from a lack of confidence per se, but, I always felt like a munter at the side of my skinny string bean friends, like the fat funny one who was good for a laugh but not, you know, fanciable.
At the end of the night when it got to slow dance time, all the girls used to stand around the dance floor looking like they couldn’t be arsed with the boy thing, and didn’t care that they hadn’t yet been invited to shuffle around in circles and have a quick snog. And yet one by one the hot girls all got picked off by the hot boys, the reasonably attractive girls got picked off by the reasonably attractive boys, and then there were only swamp donkeys left, feeling a little bit awkward, with both sexes furtively weighing up their remaining options.
I used to fall somewhere in the middle, you know? I had a pretty face but I filled my disco pants a bit too well to be an A-lister. Mostly my dancing partners were definitely to the left of hot, but you know it was generally quite dark so it didn’t matter too much, in the moment. But the point I’m making is, because I didn’t feel confident about the way I looked, the overwhelming feeling I got whenever someone asked me to dance was grateful. And let me tell you that’s not how you want to feel when it comes to members of the opposite sex.
Feeling grateful that someone picked you leads to a whole world of pain…you put up with more, and overlook things which should set alarm bells clanging because you know, he likes you and that’s good, right? You settle. Usually for someone who’s not worthy of you…here speaketh the voice of experience.
When I look back, I wasn’t fat really, not fat like now fat. I mean yes, I filled those disco pants a bit too well but not on an industrial scale. Trust me, I wish I was the same size now as I was when I thought I was fat the first time around…nothing quite like the twenty twenty vision of hindsight hmm?
Anyway…I’m happy to report that my friend’s girl got her man, well that is to say he texted her the next day and apparently told her he’d thought she’d looked ‘sick’ the night before. I’m reliably informed that these days that is a compliment…I shall file that away for future reference because under normal circumstances if anyone texted that to me they’d be asking for a smack in the chops 🙂
