GENERATIONAL BLUEPRINT

Isabelle Snyder

On Saturday mornings, the air smelled like black coffee and dread. The black-and-gray scale was forked out of the garage like a ritual, a verdict. Numbers announced across the kitchen like stock prices. Clapping for the losers. Silence, heavy, loaded silence, for everyone else. Characteristics, such as fat, ugly, and pig, ruminated inside my picturesque brain. These insults were casual and conversational amongst many. The way you’d comment on the weather. And somehow, I absorbed it as the answer to a question nobody thought to ask about my own body.

I was maybe eight, maybe nine.

Cross-legged on the carpet, a bowl of Cheeto Puffs balanced on my knee, watching bodies in crisis on the television screening of My 600 Pound Life. Old enough to do the math. Old enough to feel the equation forming in the chest like a cold stone. I cried while I ate. I ate while I cried. The reaching into the bowl felt like the last thing I was allowed to do freely, and even that felt borrowed.

So, I ran.

Day and night, up and down the sketchy, Lapland Dr until my lungs burned and my shins ached with the specific pain of a body being punished preemptively for a crime it hadn’t yet committed. Every lap is a negotiation. Not me. Not yet. Not ever. Please stop. Why me?

Twelve years old under fluorescent dressing room lights.

My grandmother’s face said everything before her mouth did. The image ingrained in my memory is a farmer inspecting their fruit for rot.

The dance studio was floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and the other girls were like stems, and I was something else entirely.

My instructor passed me and said, almost as a gift, "Tuck your little belly in.” I tucked so hard I held my breath through the entire combination. The aerial, soaring things were for the stems. I understood without being told that my body had been quietly removed from certain categories of possibility.

The dizziness of starving yourself is not cinematic.

It is the floor tilting like a ship's deck. Your thoughts are going soft at the edges, not peaceful but waterlogged. An eye that twitches steadily, like a small animal trapped beneath the skin. A hand that shakes when holding a pencil, turning your handwriting into something a teacher holds up with a question on her face. You press harder, tearing the paper. You sit on your hands and wait for the period to end, and tell yourself: this is fine. This is working. This is the price to be skinny.

I went to six prom dress stores for my Senior Prom.

Stood in fitting rooms while attendants returned with apologetic faces and the same sentence in different arrangements, “We don’t carry that in your size.”  I sat on the floor of my bedroom the week before prom, holding a dress that zipped halfway and felt, with complete certainty, that celebration had been written for a different kind of girl.

I went anyway. I always went anyway.

Laughing the loudest, taking up space with my personality since my body had already been deemed too much.

There were nights the noise got so loud inside my head.

The only thing that seemed to quiet it was pain. Extra insulin shots, 2 to 3 additional painkillers on top of the prescribed amount, laxatives, and purges. That is how desperate a person can get to escape their own mind.

But here is what I am slowly learning, without a map to guide me:

These stretch marks, silver tributaries along my hips, are not flaws. They are a record. These curves are geography. The shape of a person who survived a childhood that tried its hardest to convince her she wasn’t worth surviving for.

The generational blueprint handed down to me was never mine to begin with.

It was theirs, and I am done inheriting it.