Fossils of Adolescence

Uncovering treasures and trash from my teenage years.

Hello! Just want to give you a little heads up (TW) that this essay explores the topic of body image and the influence diet culture had on young girls in the early aughts.

Michelle xox

---

Baby Leo

I recently sorted through several boxes of mine in my parents’ basement. I’m referring to the large, robust Rubbermaid kind that can hold 70L of anything and everything you can’t let go of. They’d been collecting dust for decades, towering in the family basement like a mini version of the Gatineau Hills. I’d been intending to sort through them for a while, but it never seemed like the right time whenever I went back home for the weekend.

When the time finally presented itself, my mother and I went all in. She wiped down the boxes and created a sorting system: keep, toss, recycle, donate. Costume jewelry from Aldo? Donate. Textbooks from high school? Recycle. Stilettos beyond repair? Toss. Spice Girls dolls? KEEP! I discovered a gold mine of childhood trinkets, letters, photographs, and well preserved nineties toys. I’m talking My Little Ponies, Pogs, Beanie Babies, Trolls, an original Simba plush toy, a plush monkey backpack, a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio poster, and every single plastic wrapper of Spice Girls candy I ever ate. Pure gold.

I love strolling down memory lane. I love remembering and reconnecting with former, much younger selves. I think about the relationship between identity and memory a lot. Is the present self the result of things we experienced, good or bad? Is there really an authentic self to return to, before the passage of time influenced how we move through life? If identity is ever evolving, how does that affect our relationship to the past? It’s a good thing my mother was there to keep me on track and snap me back into reality whenever my contemplations went on for too long. We had work to do. I would have spent days sitting on the basement floor, analyzing each object as if it were a precious fossil.

Somewhere amid the sticker collection, countless photographs and The Wizard of Oz picture book, I found diaries from my teenage years. Bingo. “Here’s the good stuff,” I thought. I flicked through them to confirm that they were indeed “the good stuff.” I brought them back to Montreal and read them carefully, at which point I also confirmed that they were the heartening stuff, the cringey stuff and the messy stuff. A couple of things struck me after diving into my teenage archives. First, my sense of drama. Turns out I’ve always been a storyteller. Sometimes I wrote in French, but the majority of my entries were in English, my preferred language for prose. Even though my diary was private and not intended for someone else’s eyes, I wrote in a conversational style with readers in mind.

Here’s an excerpt written by my thirteen-year-old self.

“19th of June, 2001

15 days (since my last entry)! Lot’s of things can happen in 15 days. School is almost over. In two days. Lot’s can happen in two days! Something like a phone call. Not any kind of phone call, oh no, this is a special phone call. A special friend of mine is supposed to call me. And may I say that friend belongs to the opposite sex? Mom won’t be too crazy about that, but who cares?”

Remember when we used to wait for phone calls? I’ll never get those hours of yearning and desperation back.

Another thing I noticed was the overall intensity of that era. The hormones were raging. The emotions ran deep. The highs were HIGH and the lows were LOW. How fun it was to jump on a friend’s trampoline (“C’était foule trippant!”). How fantastic it was to download the newest version of MSN Messenger (“J’ai downloadé la nouvelle version de MSN pis ça rock au boute”).

How consuming it was to worry about my body: “(...) Plusieurs personnes me disent que je ne suis pas grosse. Quand je me regarde dans le miroir, je ne vois pas ce que les autres voient. Je me vois empirer.” (Several people tell me that I’m not fat. But when I look in the mirror, I don’t see what they see. I see myself getting worse.) 

I was twelve.

Not gonna lie, I was saddened to read that entry. I’d forgotten about those feelings. Children deserve so much more than worrying about what they look like. That’s the thing when you dive into the past… sometimes you come across things you’d rather forget. 

Growing up, we didn’t have a scale in our house. Weight was never a topic of discussion. My mother wasn’t the type to spend time in front of the mirror, asking whether or not a dress made her look fat. Still, I know I wasn’t the only tween fretting about her body back then. We didn’t have social media in the early aughts, but we had magazines, movies, video clips and ads exhibiting the bejewelled navels of young women wearing low-rise, pubic-bone grazing jeans. Thinness and flat stomachs were the goal. Diet culture and fatphobia were alive and well. It’s still the case. Our bodies didn’t look like Christina’s on the cover of Stripped? We must be fat. We must not be worthy. Let’s not take up space, shall we? Better yet, let’s lower our voices, let’s whisper, let’s be silent. Only then will we be worthy, beautiful and liked. Only then. 

Nothing I’m sharing here is particularly explosive or unheard of. I had blocked it out of my mind, but I’m not surprised my body was a concern considering how much time I spent in front of the mirror back then. I’m aware how harmful diet culture and beauty standards are. I have enough life experience and knowledge to recognize the performance of toxic beauty standards in a nanosecond, especially on social media and whenever I watch The Kardashians. I don’t believe in diets. I don’t weigh myself. I don’t count calories. I don’t deprive myself of poutine. I don’t care about the stretch marks on my skin.

And yet… I still spend too much time in front of the mirror. I still spend too much time thinking about what my body looks like. I constantly vacillate between two states: 1) Wow I love my body, it’s so strong and capable, I’m so grateful to have it, and 2) Maybe if my stomach were a little flatter and the fat on my hips would melt away, my life would be better (??). Maybe I forgot about the twelve-year-old because she never really left. Maybe she’s always been there, small and silent, unnoticed in the background of my mind. Or maybe I’m constantly battling the algorithm, conveniently showing me a spandex-wearing Kardashian with a Barbie doll-like body whenever I feel down. Maybe it’s a combination of both.

One of my good friends from high school recently sent me and our fellow girlfriends a video she took in 2002. The video was taken at school, in the hallway in front of one of our lockers. There I am, fourteen years old, with one of my BFFs, both of us sporting braces and outfits I can only describe as our “skater girl” era. We’re standing side by side, swinging our arms and pretending to be… I’m not sure. Washing machines? It’s goofy. It’s uninhibited. Fellow students are in the background, either staring at our theatrics or talking amongst themselves. We don’t seem to care what people think. We’re taking up space. We’re definitely using our voices because we’re laughing hysterically.

If twelve-year-old me is lurking somewhere in my subconscious, I like to think that fourteen-year-old me is there too, encouraging me to keep using my voice, to keep taking up space, and to pretend I’m a washing machine from time to time.