When I was a child, my body became a problem before I even understood what a body could mean.
I was an early bloomer. By the time I was 11, my chest had developed enough that parents of my classmates , full-grown adults began to react. Not with curiosity. Not with concern. But with fear and disgust. They saw me not as a child, but as a threat. A symbol of something inappropriate. Something that had to be controlled. I didn’t understand any of it at the time. I was just trying to make friends.
I was told, in roundabout ways and sometimes directly, not to spend time with certain girls. That I might “spoil” them. As if my body was infectious. As if I carried some kind of moral disease. I wasn’t sexually active. I hadn’t even begun to grasp what any of that meant. But the assumptions of the adults around me taught me one thing very quickly: my body was not mine. It belonged to the gaze. And that gaze was always watching.
While some girls were denied maturity, I was denied innocence.
This was my entry point into a world that told girls our value rested in how we looked, and our danger in how others looked at us.
And then came the internet.
By the time I was a pre-teen, internet and porn was in full swing, and with it came a wave of thinspiration and early pro-ana content that swept so many of us into its tide. Even if I wasn’t fully immersed in those specific communities, the imagery, the language, the aesthetics were everywhere. Thinness was not just a beauty standard it was an identity. It meant control. Discipline. Desirability.
I was already carrying a body I was taught to feel ashamed of. So I watched in silence as thin bodies were praised, starved ones elevated, and those who looked like me were erased. And even though I had what people later called “a woman’s body,” I never felt womanly. I just felt exposed.
Meanwhile, TV and early porn reinforced the same message: to be wanted, you had to be a certain shape. If you weren’t, you were either invisible or dangerous. There was no in-between. I was already made to feel like I was too much.
And then they told me I wasn’t enough.
I began to shrink inside, even if my body couldn’t shrink on the outside. I internalized the shame. I believed I had brought this attention on myself. That maybe I had done something wrong by existing.
No one taught me that this was not my fault. No one told me that this was a societal illness. That young girls, both early and late bloomers, were being pulled apart by a system that sexualized us, judged us, blamed us, and then abandoned us when we broke.
Later, like so many others, I stumbled into a world of self-diagnosis and pop-psychology online. BPD infographics. DSM definitions. A flood of language trying to explain our trauma as if it were a static disorder. It felt like the only explanation available. But the deeper I went into it, the more I realized this was another trap.
I began to see that what was being labeled as dysfunction was often just a reaction to a society that had never protected us. What if unstable relationships, impulsivity, chronic emptiness what if those were not disorders, but symptoms of lives disrupted too early and too often?
Somatic Experiencing helped me more than any diagnosis. The work of Peter Levine showed me that trauma lives in the body. That I wasn’t broken. I was activated. That my nervous system wasn’t dysfunctional. It was trying to survive.
And then came the voices that helped guide me back: Marion Woodman, Carl Jung. Myth, archetypes, and the forgotten language of the soul. They didn’t tell me to fix myself. They told me to remember. To gather the fragments and hold them gently.
They told me my story was not a pathology. It was a rite of passage.
There is no neat ending to this. I am not fully healed. I do not pretend to have transcended the shame that was placed on me before I even had words for it. But I am learning to come back to myself. Slowly. Without apology.
I still live in a world that mocks feminism, that treats female pain like a punchline, that tells women to be desirable but not sexual, smart but not intimidating, visible but not too loud. Feminism, for me, is not a theory. It is survival. And yes, I have been called dramatic, difficult, attention-seeking. But I am done pretending those words mean anything. They were never meant to help us grow. Only to keep us small.
To the girls who were late bloomers, early bloomers, or never felt like they bloomed at all. I see you.
To the ones who were told their bodies were problems before they even knew what bodies were. I know what that does to a person.
We were robbed of our girlhood. And now we are slowly learning how to return to it. Piece by piece. Voice by voice. Without needing anyone’s permission.
