Written in 2019 and edited in spring of 2023
Note from the Author:
I Never Wanted This is a short story in my collection Pieces of Me, which was written as a final project for my creative writing grad class at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi. Pieces of Me is a multi-genre collection of stories, poems, thoughts, observations, and more. Some of the pieces are nonfiction, some fiction, and some are something in between. The next couple of posts on this blog will be from this collection as a way to have more to post while I finish up some of my current WIPs, but because some of the pieces from the collection are in the process of being published in various places I will only be posting the pieces that I will not be submitting for traditional publication.
I spent a majority of my life straightening my hair. Damage built upon damage. Products that promised silky and smooth locks. Taming sprays to beat my strands into submission. Freak outs when there was even the threat of moisture in the air that would ruin all my hard work to be perfect. Constantly brushing and drying, straightening and chemicals. Every last strand of hair in its place. And if I couldn’t keep it straight I hid it away. Under hats, in braids, one time I even came close to shaving it all off and wearing a wig. I tried to lobotomize my hair’s natural state of being.
I starved myself from a size 12 to a size 4 when I was still a child. A child. A child that was broken, alone, tired of having to fight for even an ounce of kindness. I was different so I did everything I could to shrink the gap between my better peers and I. Hours on tumblr wasted while I was wasting. Time was an enemy, sleep my only reprieve. Until I could sleep no longer from the sounds my own stomach made. I despised the mirror, but the scale was my friend. Obsessive until the forced end. As long as I was good the numbers dropped. Until they didn’t. And no amount of purging and refusals of offered food would make the number move. I thought that if I starved myself into looking like the girls in my class I would be loved like they were. If I was frail enough maybe people would be more gentle towards me.
I studied until it was detrimental to my health. If I could spend enough time on school maybe I would be smart enough to keep up without having to force myself to sit still in class. If my grades were better than everyone else’s maybe my teachers would overlook my distractedness. Late night after late night. Frustration after frustration. My grades etched into my soul like a price tag. Anything less than perfect meant the death of my future.
It was never what I wanted, but I knew that if I wanted to be accepted and loved it is what I had to do. They could forgive my forgetfulness and impulsivity if I was pretty enough, smart enough, skinny enough, liked enough, good enough. No sin too great as long as I was put together. Better than normal. Perfect. If I couldn’t think like them, act like them, be on time like them, focused like them, normal like them I might as well give up altogether. The fucked up part of all this? Sometimes I still wish I was the same as past me. Because all the hair straightening, all the starving, all the studying—all the masking—made them like me.
They accepted me back then as long as I wasn’t a threat to their own social standing. And what did I do when they thought I stepped out of line and they took me down? I ruined all my own hard work to get there in the first place. I am now the opposite of who I was and when they looked at me and told me I’ve changed I wish I had laughed in their faces. I wish I had proudly declared that I’m not the same girl and now I’m better than ever before. But I didn’t. I ducked my head and muttered weakly and wished I had skipped dinner the night before and straightened my hair that morning. Because part of me still yearns for the kindness that society showed me when I was broken and molded into shape.
Analysis of I Never Wanted This
I Never Wanted This is less of a story or personal essay and more of an exploration of societal pressures, self-perception, and what it feels like to constantly be having to strive for acceptance. I begin with an image of straightening my hair because hair is one of those personal features that society has deemed as a signifier of class, social power, race/ethnicity, and even cleanliness that seems to kind of fly under the radar when people have discussions about these kinds of topics. For me hair has always been a point of contention, with my peers and with my family. When I was really young, like before puberty, I had really smooth, silky, and naturally straight hair. My mother loved doing my hair in cute little styles and brushing it softly in the morning. But after I hit puberty the hormones that flooded my body also flooded into my hair, making it a frizzy, tangled nightmare. And the Texas humidity did not help. Growing up in the early 2000s it felt like a division of hair into two types which also fed into playground social hierarchy. There were girls with naturally tame, smooth hair, who resided at the top; and those with wild, frizzy, big hair who were forced to the bottom. There was no such thing as curly hair, there was straight hair and there was ugly hair. And I really internalized this because hair does a lot to add to society's expectations of beauty and perfection. And while I was growing up and even until I was nineteen I straightened my hair in an attempt to fit in better and keep my mom happy. When I finally decided to “go natural” I was met with a lot of pushback by people in my life, the loudest detractor being my own mother. It took about three years to finally get her to not voice her opinions about my hair. She still was saying with a derogatory tone that it looked like I (and I absolutely detest the thinly veiled racism in her comment on my hair and have been trying to educate her about why it's not only harmful to me but also to marginalized groups of people) “jerry-curled” my hair. She finally stopped saying this a few weeks ago because I finally broke down and told her that when she says things like that it was creating damage in our relationship that will not be repairable. Part of my healing journey has been shedding the toxic ideas about hair that were shoved down my throat as I grew up.
Similar to hair, weight has always been a big issue. And I’m sure I don’t have to deep dive into what I mean by that, but for any readers who do not know I suggest looking it up, there’s millions of educational resources out there that tackle this topic. One key aspect, however, is that when you live in a bigger body people are very cruel. And for those who have a hard time accepting that, there builds a dangerous desperation to be accepted and loved by attempting to achieve a specific body size and shape. The obsession with weight in society creates a brokenness and a longing for gentleness afforded to those who “fit”.
Along with physical appearance there is also a pressure to perform whether it is socially or academically as I display in this piece. I wanted to show how much I hoped that by achieving academic success, I would be able to compensate for being less valuable than my peers and maybe even gain approval from others. The fear of falling short and the belief that anything less than perfection would jeopardize my future is a key feature to this piece.
And even though at some point I “let go” of it I still had this desire to fit in but by that point it was overshadowed by the shame of not being able to. Overall, I wrote I Never Wanted This because what I did want was to shine a light on the detrimental effects of societal pressure and the sacrifices made in the pursuit of acceptance. I feel that exploring themes of self-identity, body image, intelligence, and the dissonance between societal expectations and personal authenticity has the potential to change things and maybe even make society a bit better.
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