Well, see, I'm not what you'd call thin, or slim or skinny or whatever you want to call it. I've always been plump and never been able to pick up clothes from a store as easily as other girls, and while it's inconvenient and caused me to lack confidence, I got used to it.
It's not that I'm unhealthy or that it's hindering my lifestyle in any other way than the materialistic, but obviously losing weight has a permanent space on my to-do list. I've grown out of my teenage anxiety and gained a good deal of confidence that has served me well in college. Despite the room for improvement, I'm content with how I look.
My mum, however, doesn't particularly think so. Whenever she gets angry about something relating to it, she'll ask me if I'm happy with the way I am and I can never bring myself to say yes because I know that it's not the right answer for her. It's a touchy subject for me because she can get rather harsh when she's ranting about it (and I received plenty of teasing in primary school alone to have my own mother doing it too) and I try not to take any of it seriously when she gets like this because I know that she's just saying all of this in the heat of the moment and that she just wants what's best for me but it got...particularly nasty this time around.
I major in Advertising & Graphic Design. I perform relatively well and get good marks. But once I get out into the real world, when they see how I look it won't matter how good my portfolio or how extensive my resumé is. She asked me, if a company had to choose between my best friend (who's thin and pretty) and me, no matter how much better my work is in comparison, they'd choose her in a heartbeat. Because she was far more presentable.
My mum knows about my online friends, and I'm pretty open about it and talk to her about them sometimes, and she's taken me to the post office to send a few things out to them. She brought that in too. "You sit around on your arse all day talking to all these friends of yours who, for all you know, could just be an old man using a random photo of a girl to talk to you. And even if they are who they say they are, I bet that if they see you in person they won't want to be your friend anymore, or, hey! Maybe they will! Maybe they'll think oh well, she sends me all these presents anyway, so maybe I'll just ride on this for a while! Instead of wasting your time on this, you should get off your arse and exercise."
I'm also pretty vocal about my celebrity crushes. My family rolls their eyes when I talk about them, but they entertain me nonetheless. She once accompanied my aunt to London to see this small town actor my aunt liked and in the after-party, dragged her over to talk to him in person. She told me that if the same thing happened with me and James McAvoy, she'd do the exact same thing but it'd be an embarrassing experience because I don't look as nice or as presentable as my aunt. Beautiful people click with beautiful people, and I'm the farthest thing away from that. So why bother with the inevitable shame?
These three things are, currently, the highlight of my days. It was so obvious that she was just saying these things to deliberately hurt me (hell, she even said so) and I tried to not let it affect me as much as it did but, well, it did.
There was another thing she did/made me do that traumatized me a little bit, but I'm still unsure as to whether I should bother telling anyone. I feel like I'm fishing for a pity party as it is.