Hungry for Summer

Looking out at the water is like peering off at the end of the world; it seems to stretch forever, coating the horizon in a sparkling blue-green. The Atlantic Ocean on the Long Island coast isn’t exactly the cleanest water. It isn’t the turquoise of the Caribbean; it actually often teeters over to brown. It doesn’t actually get warm enough to swim in comfortably until around late July; anything beforehand is borderline frigid and painful. However, something is cleansing about it, jumping into freezing water became a sort of ritual, a rite of passage that meant it was officially Summer. The top layer of the sand feels like walking on lava, but once you sit down and dig your toes in, it cools and refreshes, like its own dry cold plunge. After what I imagine to be centuries of teenage rebellion taking place on these bluffs, the sand is littered with evidence of the human experience. You have to be careful for shards of glass from beer bottles, little pieces of plastic from bags of chips, and runaway fries. While the air has a chill in it, common for late spring by the water, the sun beats hot, illuminating the beach in a spotlight of Vitamin D, and slowly warming the water from the outside in. 

I read recently that about 50% of preadolescent girls dislike their bodies. I was shocked upon reading this percentage, not because it was high but because I thought it was shockingly low. I truly don’t think I can name a single girl I knew growing up who wasn’t in that 50%, who, when the Summer came rolling around again, felt nothing but joy at the thought of showing her skin on the sand. 

My first serious encounter with anorexia, where I first started thinking that I might have a problem, was in 8th grade. I was going dress shopping for my semi-formal dress, and I remember feeling utterly terrible about myself. I told myself I would buy a dress two sizes too small to motivate myself to lose weight before the dance. I was 13. Evidently, this intense weight loss didn’t happen at the speed at which I thought it would, and about a week before the dance, I realized it still didn’t quite fit. I didn't eat a single thing for the entire week leading up to the dance, and I almost passed out after. I was so hungry, I remember getting angrier than I had ever been at my friends for taking too long to leave the dance. I was someone I had never met before. I was mean. This was when I learned that anorexia changes a person, their personality, that is. 

After the dance, my mom drove my group of friends and me to our local diner for chocolate chip pancakes and french fries. Eventually, all of my friends finally left our middle school gymnasium and squeezed into my mom’s minivan. I sat in the passenger seat, arms crossed, staring out the window. 

The drive to the diner was loud and rowdy, everyone hyped up by our first real dance experience. A lot of us just had our first slow dances. One of us even had a first kiss. But not me, I was completely silent. 

When we pulled into the diner parking lot, my mom grabbed my hand, signalling that she wanted me to stay in the car for a minute after my friends got out. She yelled out the passenger seat window, “Call me when you girls want to be picked up!”, then rolled the window down and turned to me. 

“What’s gotten into you? Did something happen?” 

“I’m just so hungry.”

This became a sentence that left my mouth quite frequently. 

There is something truly singular about the experience of growing up by the beach. My entire adolescent life was structured around being bikini-ready. Winter was for restricting, experimental diets, and extensive workouts. Summer was for comparison, fuel for the next Winter. It became almost animalistic, a bear hibernating in hoodies and sweatpants until the reveal of all my progress could be made on that first sunny day at Smith Point beach. But in the moment, it never really felt like progress. Body dysmorphia ran rampant in my high school, moreso than the flu, and I always felt bigger than the other girls. I’m pretty sure every girl felt this same way. We all thought eachother was smaller than we were, and ourselves the biggest girl in school. 

The thing about growing up by the beach is that, once you’re able to drive, every event takes place at the beach. It was one of the only places we could go where we weren’t under the supervision of adults, where the energy was always good, and where we could be rowdy outside without getting the cops called on us. School-sanctioned activities centered around the beach were never easy for me, regardless of magnitude, but it didn’t get bigger than senior skip day. Every high school in a 20-mile radius met on the same day at Smith Point, adolescent rebellion shimmering through the air. My friends and I sat with the other kids from my small town high school, and I remember being hesitant to take off my cover-up. That awkward moment when you arrive at the beach and have to strip down, lose the disguise of your T-shirt and shorts. It always felt to me like a thousand eyes were boring into me, like every head on the beach swiveled in my direction to critique my stumbly undressing. Additionally, my friend group had grown scarily competitive around our bodies, as well as our struggles with eating. We were in a constant battle, a tug of war, over who would bring up the topic first.

“Aren’t you hot?” a girl asked me,

“I’m fine,” I replied. 

And I honestly was. It was only early May, and especially by the water, it wasn’t even all that hot yet. If anything, there was a slight chill in the air, blown in consistently from the waves. 

“Okay, well, I’m going to go walk over to the Mount Sinai tent; their music is better.” 

The rest of my friends agreed, and so they were up, ready to walk about 50 feet down the beach. I had friends who went to that high school, it being only one town over, but I wasn’t sure they’d ever seen me in a bikini before. I couldn’t be the girl still wearing her cover-up for much longer. People would know why I was wearing it. I was terrified of the way my body would look in motion. Sucking in and walking makes for quite the awkward gait. I felt that all too familiar feeling of sheer panic boil up inside me and coat every cell in my body. I became so lost in the thought of which parts of me would jiggle with movement that my friends ended up leaving without me. 

This wasn’t a one-time thing; missing out on something fun because I was scared of how my body would be perceived became a pattern that was almost impossible to break upon arriving at college. I spent my entire life adamantly refusing to go to pool parties where there would be boys. I refused to wear shorts to school, no matter the weather. I would sit and sweat in my jeans, all under the guise of comfortability. I never went out to eat with friends, never enjoyed ice cream at the close of a Summer night, never got snacks at the movies.  

Apparently, 62.3% of teenage girls are actively trying to lose weight, with 58.6% of girls dieting and 68.4% exercising with the goal of losing weight. The media is so obsessed with the problem of obesity and weight gain in America that we have completely ignored the other end of the spectrum – the glorification of losing weight. Fatphobia, as well as the sexualization of women, runs rampant in our country like a disease. It’s in our news outlets, in our government, in every ounce of media we consume. It is embedded in everything, especially in the early 2000’s. The media told us young girls, that if we weren’t stick thin, we were borderline worthless. There even became a term for it: “Early 2000’s Skinny”, a phrase referring to the trend of toxic obsession, often associated with the 90s trend of “heroin chic”. As I grew up, the models seen online changed slightly, making it so that women were now expected to be both skinny and curvaceous. This somehow made the reality of being a woman, let alone a woman going through puberty, all the more confusing. If you were too skinny, it was said that you looked ill, bony, you had no ass, no tits. If you were too big, you were chubby, needed to lose a few, who would want a girl like that? 

Now that I’ve grown up and have moved away from the beach, it breaks my heart to think back on. I loved the beach. Loved feeling the sand between my toes and the sun beating down on my shoulders. Loved that split second before a wave came, where I had to decide if it was an “over wave” or an “under wave”. Loved the sound of seagulls squawking, the way my hair felt after being submerged in saltwater, the tired drive home where my car got covered in sand. I loved it all, and it kills me that this love was tainted by something as simple as my body. 

Instead of spending time with my friends that day, I sat and drank on a towel by myself, hiding underneath an XXL T-shirt. I felt the world spinning under me, alcohol filling up my empty stomach, a stomach I refused to fill in case I looked bloated in my bikini. I drunkenly stumbled from my spot on the beach to the water. I passed by groups of teenage girls, trying to guess their weight in my head as I strolled past. 120. 115. 135. The waves were unusually small that day, so I was able to lie on my back, hands and legs outstretched, floating on the murky water. I felt the cold water caress every curve of my body, every inch that I hated. The water held me, it whispered that it loved me, that I was perfect, that I was beautiful, that I was enough. It lightly caressed every stretch mark, every square inch of cellulite. It left feather-light kisses over every scar, every assumed imperfection. It held me, not with struggle, but with a gentle care that I felt from my scalp down to my toes. I started to cry and stared up at the clouds as I felt my tears drip down my face, mingling with the bobbing of the ocean. A part of me will be here, in this moment, forever.