I logged onto ASOS last year to check out the ‘new in’ range of their Curve collection. To my surprise, I was met with various photos of models in bikinis with their stretch marks on full display.
I couldn’t begin to describe how important that moment was to me. Seeing a bodily feature that has been historically shamed and covered up now on full display was such an amazing, full-circle moment for me – and for a lot of us who are on our self-love journeys.
This decision by ASOS helped open up the floodgates of the e-commerce world, allowing for models of most shapes and sizes to be photographed in their rawest and most natural form without the retouching of lumps, bumps and scars.
For me, it finally meant the beginning of normalising a part of my body that I had spent so long hating.
I started developing stretch marks during the middle-to-latter end of puberty. I first noticed them around my hips but I didn’t really pay them any mind as I’d seen them on some of my smaller family members and just thought it was a thing that happened during a growth spurt.
Then, around the age of 14, I started noticing bright yellow chunky lines around my shoulders and upper arms. They weren’t delicate and wiry like the ones on my hips, these were thick and squidgy and almost neon in appearance.
I absolutely loathed them and they became a huge part of why I used to hate my body.
I already had quite big upper arms, so to add the stretch marks onto that just meant I would keep my upper body under wraps.
Every summer, I would walk around in long-sleeved t-shirts and cardigans. I absolutely refused to be seen by shop assistants when trying on bras and swimwear, and I hated having to go swimming in school for fear of people laughing at my marks.
I truly thought my stretch marks were ugly.
To me, they were a constant reminder of my fatness and the levels to which my body had to stretch in order to accommodate the excess fat.
Around age 15 I started to develop symptoms of depression and I would do silly things such as use a brown felt tip pen to colour in my marks.
In addition to this, I was given advice by doctors to use bio oil or vitamin E oil to reduce the stretch marks. I would also rub a turmeric and yogurt mix on my marks in a bid to reduce them.
As I got older, I even looked into skin treatments that could eradicate them once and for all.
I was approached by a medical practice who claimed they could get rid of them by injecting carbon dioxide underneath my skin where the marks were. Without even doing any research, I undertook the extremely painful treatment and, to my absolute horror, found that they did not go away after the two month healing period.
A couple of months later, I went to another cosmetic practice, which used skin-coloured pigment to tattoo-in the stretch marks. Although this proved to be effective, it only lasted for a grand total of six months, before the pigment faded away.
It was during this time that I started dipping more and more into the body positivity movement and preparing myself to start this journey of self-love.
I had to learn how to stop seeing my body as the enemy when all it had done was work to keep me alive and healthy everyday.
I wondered why stretch marks always seemed to be one of the main antagonists in the stories of our bodies, and my conclusion was that for most people, stretch marks represent fatness. They represent growth. They represent a sense of taking up space.
Which meant that society – for some reason – saw ‘fatness’ as an aesthetically unpleasant thing. A thing that means ugliness.
After living in New York for a while and catching a glimpse of what my life could potentially look like if I learned how to love myself, that’s when the penny dropped for me. There was an attitude there that just seemed so free and unapologetic, and the women around me looked like me but loved themselves unapologetically and loudly, owning their scars, stretch marks and rolls.
This inspired me to really think about who I was living for – myself, or other people? I felt like I could reinvent myself and carry around an air of confidence that I’d never dream of having while in the UK. So I decided that moving forward, I had to unlearn all the toxic thoughts and beliefs I’d had about my body.
Why was I continuing to see my body as ugly? Fat is not ugly. Fat is a body shape and it was time that I started learning how to love it.
From 2015 onwards, I played around with wearing bardot tops and short sleeved tops, then graduated to sleeveless and spaghetti tops. Since then, I haven’t looked back.
Since having my stretchmarks out in the open, I rarely get any comments on them and when I do, the only comments I tend to get are positive ones about how lovely and fierce they look.
Most of the time I tend to get stares, but I have since learned to stop taking those personally.
We need to remember that our stretch marks aren’t a sign of failure, letting ourselves go, or ugliness. We need to remember that everyone has them, regardless of shape or size. We have to remember that gaining weight is nothing to be ashamed about.
But most importantly, we have to remember that our bodies are perfectly imperfect – the scars, rolls, marks and blemishes are stories that our bodies tell, and that’s one of the most beautiful gifts life could give us.
No matter how many adverts and campaigns try and tell you otherwise, your stretch marks are not going anywhere, so it’s important to take the decision today to learn how to fall in love with them.
Do you have a story you’d like to share?
Get in touch by emailing platform@metro.co.uk Share your views in the comments below.
MORE: Ashley Graham proudly bares post-pregnancy stretch marks as she continues keeping it real
MORE: ‘I’m a plus-size, woman of colour over 30, but I can still be a beauty queen’
MORE: Mum’s treatment to remove stretch marks leaves her with serious scarring
source https://metro.co.uk/2020/03/21/celebrating-stretch-marks-act-defiance-12398115/?ITO=squid
0 Comments