My first SPT post for February’s theme “all of me” is a photo of my arm. We were told to “embrace your mistakes, love the ugly bits”. Here is one of my ugly bits.

I’ve talked before about my body issues, how the only times I have felt feminine was during my pregancies. My arm is a perfect example of how awkward and gawky my body is. Looking at that photo of my arm conjures up images of cancer patients. Gaunt, starving refugees. Sick and struggling anorexics. I am none of those things, but the skin and bones on my arm would say differently.

When I was fourteen, I took a trip with my best friend’s youth group on a service mission to an orphanage in Mexico. He was the only person in the group that I knew well, everyone else was a relative stranger to me. At the time, I knew I looked different from the other girls my age. It bothered me for reasons of vanity- I wanted to be cute and pretty, budding with adolescence like my friends were. It never occurred to me however that when people looked at me, my body told them something more than just my youthful inelegance. A few days into our trip, the women gathered in one of the dormitories and summoned me in. When I sat down, they were all looking at me with pained and serious expressions. I began to panic, sure they were about to tell me that my family had died or my house had burned down. Taking my nerves as a cue that they were on the right track, one of the women leaned towards me and said softly, “Karli, we’ve noticed that you don’t eat.”

Um, excuse me? What the heck…?

Another woman launched into a lecture about the dangers of anorexia, and how she had struggled with it as a young girl as well, but with the help of people who loved her she had overcome the horrible disease. When I realized what was going on (this was an intervention!) I burst out laughing.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I told them. “I’m a garbage disposal! I eat ALL THE TIME! I’m always hungry!” I called my friend Jeremy in for back up. “Tell them I eat,” I demanded. “I’m not anorexic.” He supported my claims, citing the time he watched me consume almost an entire package of Oreos by myself. And I didn’t throw it up later.

“We understand that this might be difficult to hear,” they said. “But you’re sick. We can all see it. We’ve watched you at meals, and you don’t eat anything.” I tried to explain that on the plane ride down, Jeremy had traumatized me with stories of dog meat and “mystery” meals, so I had been eating only the tortillas and fruit. They weren’t buying it. They all held hands and prayed for me to be healed, while Jeremy and I sat there with our mouths open, completely incredulous.

When they left, he looked at me and said, “What was that?” I just shook my head and ate some of the licorice he offered me.

Another time, I was in dance class learning how to pirouette. All of the girls in my class were twirling around the room, their perfect little bodies spinning in beautiful circles. I felt like a lumbering giant towering over them, and I was having trouble finding my center of balance. My teacher stopped the music and clapped her hands for attention. All of the students stopped and watched as she walked over to me, and rearranged my arms so that my hands overlapped in front of me. She told me that I had to compensate for the length of my arms, so I wouldn’t be able to position my arms the same way as everyone else. All the other girls giggled as I stood there blushing, humiliated at being singled out for something I was already so insecure about. I quit ballet soon after that.

I’d love to say that as I’ve gotten older and wiser, I have come to accept the way my arms look, maybe even learned to love my body. It hasn’t happened yet, but I still have hope that some day I’ll look in the mirror and not cringe at the reflection I see looking back. I have to reprogram my brain, to override the tapes that play on repeat, telling me how ugly and disgusting I look. It’s a long, slow, insanely difficult process… but I’m working on it.