Image Source: Unsplash- Drazen Nesic
I spent most of my teenage years in a body that was basically an enthusiastic stick figure; slim, straight up and down, and the kind of body that slid into skinny jeans like it was born for it. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, I was too busy worrying about school, boys, and whether having thin eyebrows in a world of social media, which praised women who had thick ones, would affect my personality, or not.
Back then, I genuinely thought my body would stay more or less the same forever, like it was frozen in some kind of lifetime guarantee of slimness. But bodies fluctuate, as I grew to learn. It is not just a product that can be contained. They are like plot twists; they appear when you least expect them, and they rarely ask for permission.
Somewhere between a couple of heartbreaks that felt earth-shattering, but really were just character development, a full career change that sent me to an actual ocean, and a handful of mental health spells, which ranged from quirky to ‘please someone hide my phone’. My body felt the change as my world began to change.
It was slow at first, like it was testing the waters, and then suddenly, as if it had been pre-determined that at the grand age of twenty-five, I had curves added to my description of my appearance.
My hips rounded, my thighs introduced themselves with keen enthusiasm, and my waist started making gentle suggestions instead of drawing sharp lines. When I first noticed the change at 23, I reacted dramatically – trying to squeeze into old jeans like it was reenacting a tragic scene in a coming-of-age teen movie. My teenage body had moved out and left me with a roommate I hadn’t interviewed just yet, but then, something shifted in my line of thought.
As I sailed through different oceans and versions of myself, I began to realize that maybe my body wasn’t betraying me. It wasn’t the storyline I had prepared myself for, but I needed to shift my mindset. It was growing up with me. It was the same feeling as the nights I cried over the wrong people, the mornings I dragged myself out of bed with a tired and overstimulated brain, the days I worked in the salty air of a job I never expected to love from the get-go.
My curves became a record of the life I’ve actually lived, not exactly the life my teenage self had quite imagined. They are proof that I had gorged on good food, taken risks, survived the nights I found unsurvivable within my sad brain, survived heartache, changed careers, and kept going even when my mind felt foggy and fragile. It is clear-cut evidence that I’ve expanded my horizons, not just sideways, but emotionally, spiritually, and mostly chaotically.
Do I miss my body, I never had to think about? Sometimes. My heart feels the dull ache of longingness for a time that doesn’t exist in the present day, when I flick through old photos of myself. Especially when trying on clothes with harsh lighting, and feeling the age of weight, I have gained so quickly and unexpectedly.
I am trying to enjoy my new body with thrivalance, a softer, fuller, and more grounded version of myself. The woman with curves, a belly, stories, and a sense of humor that can captivate a room full of strangers, about the wild process.
Because maybe growing up isn’t really about perfection. It is about accepting that we are allowed to outgrow versions of ourselves. We are not simply frozen in time. Old colleagues, school friends, and neighbors can’t expect us to stay the same. My teenage body belonged to a girl figuring out the world. My twenty-five-year-old body belongs to a woman who has dealt with many storms, literal and emotional, and still shows up with a smile, some curves, and the occasional mental health wobble.
And honestly? I think she is pretty great.
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