If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my getting-to-be-super-long-life, it is that size really does matter. For males it’s clearly one thing but for females it’s quite the opposite. Truly, if you are a female and you are small, you will be forgiven for absolutely anything. This is a lesson that has beat me in the head like a sledgehammer since the 6th grade. A brief and relatively boring account of the exact starting point of this realization is coming, and I promise to keep it short. Suffice it to say it was a game-changer for me and rocked my innocent, safe world.

Here goes: I was wearing an outfit my mother made especially for me; I even got to pick out the fabric. It’s important to interject here that new clothes were a rarity for kids when I was in the 6th grade. I was stoked and feeling so proud until…I heard one of my male classmates say under his (probably bad) breath, “Hey Big Red.” I was mortified. The snickers that followed from this comment sealed the deal for me. Because I wasn’t small, I was pretty unforgivable; an eyesore my poor classmates had to endure. I knew it wasn’t the outfit, which was perfect, so it was me. And I wasn’t big either, I just wasn’t tiny. I mean for Pete’s sake I had noticeable breasts by the time I was 9, and let’s face it, no matter what the rest of you looks like, if you’re stacked, you’re big: Big Red.

This comment, which should have been so insignificant, sent me careening into a life toward a singular purpose – be small at all costs. I couldn’t believe that I had been duped into thinking everyone had value up until that point. Now though, plunged into the depths of social mediocrity in the blink of an eye, I got the picture. I wish I would have left my camera at home because I wasted so much of the 50+ years since on the endeavor to look perfect and small; not skinny, small. It became an obsession such that all my accomplishments, failures, wins and losses, family events, the works, are all colored even now by what I saw reflected back to me in the mirror at the time. I teetered precariously between being small and forgivable, and twisting helplessly in the wind as anything but small for many, many years, When I was small and forgivable, I was happy. It didn’t matter what else was going on in my life. I was living the lie that I had swallowed (haha) hook, line and sinker. This was my reality, and it was reinforced by just about every person I knew, every media source, every casual acquaintance and every passing glance of judgement on any given day. It is no wonder that I thought it might be nice, at least easier, to just disappear altogether.