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Self esteem and image are something that if you asked me about I would probably tell you are not a real factor in my life. That I don’t really care what other people think of me or how I look, but when I think back over the years, the things that really stick with me, and the memories that are most glaring in my mind tend to be of incidents where it becomes very clear that I am, or at least believe myself to be the fat kid.

The first time I recall being aware of my size was during a school trip I went on. I think it is important to note here that I am pretty sure that this is actually coming from two separate trips from two different years, but my details on them are so sketchy I don’t know, in fact the only thing that really sticks out from the two are the two instances I am going to talk about, which tells you just how strongly they impacted me.

I think part of the problem with the school trips was the fact that I wasn’t a student at the school. I was home schooled at the time so I was already sort of an odd man out. I had several friends at the school, but I knew I wasn’t part of the jokes and the group the same way everyone else was. Mind you I wouldn’t change me education for anything it let me breeze through High School and a very difficult College with little to no struggling, but I am again off topic.

So I had to be between the ages of 12-14 during these memories. The one I think of as happening first took place at the hotel we were staying at while visiting some old Civil War sites. It was late at night, and everyone had come down to pool to go swimming. I went down with everyone, but did it in jeans, a tshirt, and socks and shoes. Just so no one got any ideas on my stance on getting into the pool. Everyone started swimming and I remember as one person after another gave up on trying to convince me to swim, and I made excuse after excuse. Once most of them were in I waited for an opening and slinked away to watch from a balcony. I remember sitting up there making sure not to get to much into the light so no one would see me and try to make me come down. I knew I wasn’t very fat, that I wasn’t crazy overweight, but I was just fat enough to look different than all the other kids. Big enough that they’d notice and probably talk about it. So I hid from all the kids up there for about an hour then slipped back into my room and went to sleep before anyone got back. In the morning I just made sure to let everyone know whether they asked or not that I was just tired and went to bed early.

The second part of this, and again I don’t remember if it was the same trip or not, came once I got back and got the pictures. I knew I wasn’t skinny like the other kids, that I was “husky”, but until this point never really thought I fat, just that I was built bigger than the rest of them. When I got the pictures though, it was devastating to me. Because I was looking at them and I kept noticing something very different between me, and all the other kids. When I was next to them, no one else (not completely true, a few others did in retrospect, but at the time I believed this) had a pop belly sticking out, or had a chubby looking face. I didn’t want to see a single one of those pictures again.

It’s like I said before, I was always aware that I was bigger, but it never previously registered that it was being overweight that made me bigger. Once that got into my head and it never got back out. I went through periods after that when I was fairly normal sized or even skinny for a few months, but I always ended up back at a pudgy overweight, I did everything I could to keep that information from myself, but when I looked in the mirror it’s all I saw.