by Natalie Case

Created on: November 02, 2009   Last Updated: November 03, 2009

I Am Beautiful

Growing up in the United States, girls are surrounded by conflicting ideas of what is attractive and normal and healthy. We're shown images of tall, thin women with nearly no curve to their bodies at all draped in ridiculously expensive (not to mention in many cases just plain ridiculous) clothing and we're made to believe that this is beauty. Our televisions are filled with scantily clad women with larger than average chests and flat stomachs and we are informed that this is what inspires lust. We see our mothers and grandmothers with sagging breasts and gray hair and extra pounds and we believe that they are beautiful.

That is just the beginning of the confusion really. All around us are varying standards of beauty and normal.

Unfortunately for most of us, we don't look like the super-models who walk the runways or the actresses on our television screens. Many of us spend our lifetimes trying, but all the dieting, plastic surgery and expensive clothing isn't going to transform us into some ideal.

I, for one, am short. I stand just barely five foot two. I hit that number at around 16, and haven't grown an inch since. Well, upward anyway. Over the course of my life I have been overweight since I was maybe 6, in varying degrees depending on which standard you're going by. I wasn't "fat" until high school.

I knew I was fat. I got told every single day. By my peers, by my friends, by my family. I knew that I wasn't attractive. I didn't need to be told. The message resounded in the comments about my weight. Fat isn't attractive. No man was going to want me if I didn't lose weight, and any man that did was clearly a pervert who just wanted to have sex and should be avoided. Yes, that's a pretty messed up message, but believe me if that was the message I was getting, other girls out there are getting it too.

Forget that all around me were rotund Italian mothers who were doted upon by their husbands. I just reasoned that away with the logic born of the clearly universal constants: Fat isn't Pretty and Love is Blind. Clearly these men fell in love with the beautiful, slender women they had once been and now could only see them with the eyes of love.

This is how I entered adulthood desperately craving the love of a good man and knowing I would never get it as long as I looked like I did.

Then something amazing happened. I met someone who told me I was beautiful. And meant it. And more amazingly, I believed him. He wasn't a pervert. He wasn't looking

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