Let’s talk about body image. Everyone has a body. Everyone would have at least one part of their body that they don’t like or aren’t exactly happy with. The last thing people want is for others to notice their perceived flaw. Or to comment on it.

Words can be the most hurtful things sometimes, especially when you’re so young. I remember in year 7, the males in our class conducted a “rating test” of the girls in our class. My cousin was nice enough (sarcasm) to let me know exactly what they thought of me and then one of the boys decided to take it upon himself to reiterate it, you know, just in case I missed it the first time.

“Kia is pretty but it doesn’t mean anything, she’s fat so she’ll never amount to anything”

Excuse me? Since when did how you look determine your value, what you’re going to achieve in life? If I had that comment directed at me now, as a 21 year old, yea it would cut. It would be at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks, I would feel guilty every time I so much as looked at food and I would hear those words being played in my mind over and over on a continuous loop. This would probably go on for a few weeks before I it up, got over it and told that person to off because, hey I may not be your definition of ‘skinny’ or ‘normal’, but I can tell you that I’m a better person because I don’t judge people based on their looks.

Unfortunately I had to hear that comment when I was 13, a young and impressionable age where being conscious of one’s body image is pretty ing big. At 13 when I heard those words I became reclusive, I pulled away from the so called ‘popular’ group and hid in the quad area away from the rest of the school with the ‘rejects’.  I felt sheltered in the concrete area surrounded by various people playing handball, out the front with the rest of the school I was constantly worrying about whether or not people were looking at me. How fat do I look to them? Are they talking about me right now? I couldn’t even get up to go to the bathroom, the trek from our spot on the hill, down the pathway, past the seniors and into the canteen too daunting of a task so I would just sit there and  hold it. I was always the last one to leave our spot, dawdling, organising and reorganising my bag so I had an excuse to sit there a while longer until the majority of people had left and the stragglers were too busy to pay attention to the fat girl on the hill.

The saddest thing about all this? I was a size 12 in year 7. A size freaking 12! I would kill to be that size right now! My younger self just automatically assumed that because people had said I was fat, I was therefore fat. I gave up soccer because when you got to a certain age, it stopped being mixed gender and there was no way I was going to be on a team full of girls who thought they were better than me and sniggered and commented about my weight behind my back, often not even bothering to hide the fact they were ing about me. So soccer, my favourite sport, a sport that made me happy and energetic, was scrapped. Which meant that swimming club was scrapped as well, if I got laughed at while playing soccer what was going to happen if I wore swimmers? I wasn’t going to take my chances.

I no longer hung out with my original group of ‘friends’, preferring to stay inside and watch anime or discover new music from all over the world, comforting myself in any food that I could find because hey, if I was already fat what did it matter. In my little cave of isolation, I was happy. On the surface at least.

Around year 9, my parent’s fighting increased and my father ended up sleeping in my brothers’ room every night for a year. In such a small town where everyone knew everyone’s business, a gossip town, my parents didn’t want the news of their arguments to be broadcasted for everyone to hear or see (we had a very big sticky beak of a neighbour who would actually lean over the fence and take pictures of us), so I was told to keep quiet. I couldn’t talk to my parents about the bullying or the nasty comments that were left online and in my inbox for me to read and anguish over alone in my bedroom as I felt their issues were more significant than mine. So I kept quiet.

I grew older, bottling up my troubles to put my family’s issues first, helping to look after my younger brothers and be supportive for them when my parents eventually said they were splitting up. I felt like a failure, I couldn’t be good enough or skinny enough no matter how hard I tried to starve myself, only to break down and binge eat a few days later, and I couldn’t even help my family stay together.

I’ve come a long way since high school, I don’t talk to anyone from my class, I haven’t bothered to keep in contact and neither have they, a fact that I am content with. I wish I could say that I’m happier now, I feel that I am sometimes, at least much happier than in high school, however the scars are still there and my body image is still a big issue for me. I don’t like being in large crowds or groups, the more people present, the more people to notice how awful my body is. Wherever I go I make sure to sit with no one facing my back, I will put myself in a corner just to make sure no one can look at me from behind and judge how I have more to my thighs than they do. I don’t like going out, I’d rather stay at home where it is safe, no one can come see me if I don’t want them to. I’m a loud person who makes friends by being an idiot, if I can make others laugh then they won’t focus on my flaws.

I’m writing all this to show how big of an impact a couple of words can have, starting off as something small before snowballing into something much bigger and hurtful. Sometimes the comments can be unintentional.

My friend, who is a couple of years older than me, invited me to her mother’s birthday party where I met her older brother for the first time. His English wasn’t the best at the time so I don’t really know whether he was trying to be intentionally hurtful or whether he was just naïve with his choice of words but one of his conversations started with, “are all Australians fat like you and my brother?”

Words ing hurt guys. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the majority of you who have taken the time to read this rant share similar experiences or at least understand what it is like. I’m going to go out on an even bigger limb and suggest that I suspect majority of people have been bullied/scrutinised/picked on or have had a nasty comment affect their self-esteem at least once in their lifetime.

Why then, do people think it is okay to and whinge about their ‘idol’ losing their abs or being  ‘too round faced’ or ‘not being the standard Kpop skinny’. Like seriously, what the . The people this rant is really addressed to probably won’t ever read this but when I saw countless comments about how they were ‘disappointed that Jimin has let himself slip’ and how they were leaving the fandom because ‘he’s got nothing left to offer”, I felt really sick.

Wake up to yourselves!

Have you ever met him? Do you even ing know him? How would you like it if your parents said they wouldn’t love you anymore and you had to leave their house because you put on a couple of extra kilos? It’s a sad example but ing hell these people are ridiculous! The few haters will be like “you’re only do this because it’s Jimin and he’s famous”. No! I’m doing it because I’ve seen too much of this happen to very good people and if can make people wake up and smell the ing roses by using a celebrity then so be it. He’s living his life in the spotlight, he can’t even so much as blink without people seeing it, without commenting on it or taking photos. He’s not stupid, he can see what is being written on fan cafes and he can definitely hear what’s being said to his face at fan meet and greets. The poor thing already believes he is fat, I’m not sure what program/interview it was but when he said he thought he was big and his face had too much fat to it I really felt for him.

I went to the BTS concert in Sydney on Friday and it was spectacular, they were full of energy and happy to be performing for the first time in Australia. I myself was over the moon, I got to see them live, in person. Imagine my disgust the next morning when I see countless pictures of Jimin with his shirt raised and comments about people ing and ranting how he doesn’t have abs. Quite frankly I was happy to see Jimin regardless of whether he had abs or not so I find it really odd how such a small thing on HIS body can ‘upset’ so many so called ‘Army’s’. It doesn’t matter what he has or hasn’t got, to me, I still find him ing adorable and you’re not a true Army if you could treat a human being like that. Leave the fandom, you shouldn’t be in it to start with, just remember how nasty you were when someone makes an offhand comment about you, feel what it is like for a ‘normal’ person and then times that as many times as you can for a celebrity, to factor in, of course, the millions of comments online that happen every day.

This has seriously gone on longer than I had originally intended but small minded people me.

I don’t care who you are, where you come from, what you look like or how much you weigh as long as you treat me with respect and as a human being with feelings, treat me the way you would like to be treated. How is that so hard for some people? A body is a body no matter what it looks like! So you’re skinny? Great! So you’re average? Great! So you’re bigger than what society tells you to be? Great! The main thing is, are you happy with the way you are? It is your body, love it! And don’t let some wit bring you down.

We need to learn to accept each other for who we are, the labels, the categories and the ing ‘ratings’, we are beautiful and shouldn’t be guilted or bullied into becoming the ‘norm’ for society, what we’re ‘supposed’ to look like.

If we were all the same the world would be a pretty boring place full of nasty people. I for one don’t want any part of that, I’ve made it my life goal to nip this in the bud, to protect the younger generations so they don’t have to deal with what I, and countless others have gone through. This body image shaming has got to stop, I won’t stand for it and if I hear someone start that crap in my presence, they will ing know about it.

The more we fight and stand up for ourselves, the more we can squash negativities. The more people who pull up a person for this disgusting behaviour the more we can stop it in its tracks. Let’s stop this .

Who is with me?