'Perfect'

Perfect: (adjective) entirely without flaws, defects or shortcomings; to make flawless or faultless.
-Dictionary.com

The meaning of the word is subjective, we all have our own ideas of perfection. In today’s media, perfection is flawless skin, hair without a strand out of place, thinner than a ‘normal’ person. That’s what we strived for.

It was midsummer, maybe in July, and we had been bored, sitting in Her room talking about the upcoming school year and what we would do with it.  Somehow, it made sense at the time for the two of us to try and be those movie teenagers who were ‘cool’ and ‘pretty.’ By the time I went home, we had already come up with a list of things for us to do to ‘improve’ ourselves. Our lists were different, but we both had one thing in common: to ‘lose weight.’

At that time, I was about 105 pounds, and I was pretty healthy, I wasn’t morbidly obese and I could do the mile run. However, the goal was to be less than 100 pounds by the end of summer and to maintain it all school year.

When school reopened, I was 100 pounds, and convinced I was fat. On the first day, I woke up at 5:30 to get ready, there wasn’t anything to do, but I was nervous. When I woke up, the sun wasn’t up yet, and the sky was that blue-grey colour that looked like denim that you see just before the dawn .The trees outside my window were still pretty dark, but you could see lighter skies behind them. It also rained that morning, and the roads were jammed.

When I got to school, I was late, and terrified because being late would make a bad impression, and our goal had been to be one of those perfect people. It was just the first day and I was already breaking the promise we had made. The teacher was nice enough about me being late, and I took a seat next to Her.

When we went to our first class, we sat together. Second period, we sat together. We were always together, because we had left any other friends we had before.
“How much do you weigh?” She asked me that day over lunch.
“You?” I asked, deciding that I would lie about it if she weighed less than I did.
“95 pounds.”
I was 100 pounds, “I’m 98,” I lied.
She nodded without saying anything. I promised myself that I would eat less at dinner.

As months went by, my weight went up and down. On ‘good days’ I was 100 but on ‘bad days’ I was 104. I remember writing in my diary ‘103 pounds, eight more to go,’ in the way that one might countdown to their birthday. But instead of counting down days I was counting the amount of weight I thought I needed to lose. I was getting dizzy often, the room would spin around me when I tried to stand up.

On my birthday she pulled me aside from the food and asked “How much do you weigh?” as she had been doing for a while.
“103 pounds,” I lied, I was 105 again, and determined to hide it.
“Don’t you think you should eat a bit less?” She said it like a question, but it probably wasn’t. I did not say anything, and she walked away to enjoy the food she could enjoy as she was 102 pounds, and I sat there and listened to her complain about the fat content.
I ate my birthday food, and vowed to be at least 100 by December.

One day, she ignored me completely. She did not talk to me, and when I tried to make conversation she would just nod a little. That day in Maths, she sat next to me and said “You’re getting fat.” At the time, I was 103 pounds and sort of happy about it. When she said that, it was as if she had popped that bubble of happiness I had gained from losing weight.
I just stared at her, and said “Yeah, I need to diet a bit.”  
She said “Yeah, me too.”

And our friendship was okay again, but our relationship with food was no longer healthy.

During that year, I remember weighing about 95 or so at the very least, and I remember getting sick often. She kept pushing me to eat less, and I did, because I wanted to be skinny, or at the very least, weigh less than her.

We knew about the warnings about anorexia and bulimia in teenage girls, but we ignored them because we wanted to be those picture perfect girls. I guess our goals would sound stupid to you, and they sound stupid to me now, but at that time we were young and I think we were scared of growing up, and this plan seemed to make sense to us in terms of
it.

When I was about 98 pounds, my science teacher held me back after class, because He was worried about me. I remember walking out of the room crying and people asking me why, but She did not, She continued talking about something that had happened to Her in class.

A few days later, I was called out of English to see the councellor. The councellor was worried about me after my Science teacher had told them about my weight loss. The councellor let me go at break and I left their office crying again. She had told me that shewas proud of me for being strong. When I was released from the office, I went into the bathroom to make sure my face wasn’t red or anything, because I did not want to seem less perfect than I had led people to believe.

I locked the bathroom door, and looked at myself in the dirty mirror, I saw that my eyes were red, and my nose was running, and that I looked fat.
People saw me, and asked why I had been crying, I did not reply. I pretended that everything was fine, and that I was fine, and that everything was perfect.
I didn’t want to shatter the illusion of perfection.

As time went by, I started being harder on myself about my weight. Even though I had a BMI of 18.0 I was not happy yet, and I skipped more meals, and my mother worried. I remember when my mother would look at me, and talk to me about how I didn’t need to lose weight, but I didn’t believe her. How she would keep asking me to eat more at dinner, and order more than soup. And I remember brushing off her concerns, and eating just the soup.
I got dizzy more often, and I got sick often. My mother got more worried, and She kept talking about dieting.

I remember feeling happy when people told me I was skinny, but now I think about it, I think they meant that I was too skinny. I didn’t believe them, because all I saw when I looked in the mirror was fat, all I saw in photographs was that I was fat, and when I got on the scales, I did not see the numbers, just the word ‘fat.I was no longer a person with a personality, I started seeing myself as the numbers I saw on the scale. It was like I didn’t see myself anymore, all I saw was that I was not good enough, as if the person in the mirror was someone else.

Near the end of the year, She left me, and She went back to her old friends, at first I was upset, and She did not offer any explanation. A few days before She left, she talked to me about how I should lose weight, and when She did leave, I thought that was why.
For a long time after, I blamed myself for ruining our friendship. I tossed all sorts of reasons out there: I weighed too much and she was embarrassed to be near me, I wasn’t smart enough, I wasn’t good enough, I couldn’t help her, and I just obsessed over that for a long time.

But I didn’t go back to her, because even though a voice in my head had told me that what I was doing was wrong, I didn’t listen to it. I no longer had an outside voice egging the slightly insane perfect-obsessed part of me on. Now I could hear that little voice that had been pushed aside for a year.
So I went back to my old friends, and at first it was awkward, and I missed Her. But I told myself that what had happened with Her was not healthy. When I realised that, I could finally live again.
I finally let myself enjoy food and eat, I did gain weight, and I was no longer 95 pounds, but I was happy again. With them, I could laugh again. I would crack jokes, and I did not obsess over my weight. I didn’t feel like I was always second best when I was with them.

When I went back to them, the scales at home broke, and I no longer had a number telling me I was fat, or ugly or overweight. I could make that choice myself.
I looked in the mirror, and I still saw the flaws, but I knew that the girl in the mirror was me, and sometimes I could even like what I saw in the mirror; it really was me. It was me with the really messy hair and the clothes with paint on them. The same messy hair that I used to wake up an hour early to try to tame, the same clothes I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a year ago.
Even though She had, for the most part, left my life, I still wondered what it would have been like if we had stayed friends, would I have finally reached that idea of perfection? Would we have stayed friends?

I still worry that I weigh too much, and I still think I should lose weight. But it no longer rules my life, it no longer weighs on me when I go out for dinner. I do not spend every moment wondering how I look, and I was even able to spend most of the day not realising that I had nail polish on my face.

I do not blame her for what had happened, I think we were both scared about growing up and we tried to imitate movies or magazines or books that talked about growing up. In those things, that was how growing up was shown, and maybe that’s what we thought it was.
Someone asked me a while ago if She was the reason I took care of my appearance, and I think that She was. I don’t think that a person can be 100% happy with themselves, and I think we all feel like we’re drowning in expectations sometimes. I also think we can get to the point where it no longer dictates our lives and our choices, where we can sometimes smile at ourselves and our flaws.

So what is perfect? A dictionary can tell you what it means, but it’s all in your head. Perfect can be a moment where you’re laughing at your friend’s dreadful jokes, it can be when  you are watching TV with a bowl of popcorn, it can be when you look in the same mirror that told you that you were fat and say “I look good.”
I think ‘perfect’ is what you make it.