My name is Andrea. I've always been very hairy due to my hirsuitism, an effect of my thyroid condition called hashimotos, which makes me grow excessive hair all over my body. I'm latina, so my genes were already predisposed to make me have a lot of thick dark hair on my body, but hirsuitism has amplified that. Growing up, I was teased for my unibrow, chin hairs, and my moustache in school. Though they weren't excessively thick, they were noticeable for a girl like me, especially growing up in an especially white community. I started plucking in fifth grade. It was easy enough and I didn't mind the pain. Anything to keep people from talking. I don't remember when I started shaving my legs, but I know it was soon after that, because that same year, I started shaving everywhere. I started developing at a very early age, and as a child, it was impossible to keep up with all of the very adult grooming I felt I had to do just to look acceptable in my own eyes. Even at that age, you're exposed to "perfect" bodies so often and almost no real ones, that all you can see when you look in the mirror is all the things that you aren't. You look at all the reasons the women on TV and in films and on the covers of magazines are beautiful and they become all the reasons you're not. Despite the fact that they have completely different bodies than you and it takes personal trainers and dieticians and hours of preparation and makeup and grooming and perfectly fitted clothing and photo distortion to make them look like flawless godesses, you somehow think that the ugliness you see in yourself is YOUR shortcoming. I shaved a lot growing up and through highschool. It took me hours to do every single time. I would always get ingrown hairs, rashes, razor bumps, pimples and whatever other terrible thing a razor can give you. If I hadn't shaved, I would hide my legs in pants. It never looked my legs were really shave as fresh thick prickles of new hair would poke through my skin the second a chill in the room gave me goosebumps, even if it was while I was cleaning up from shaving. I hated shaving, but I hated being hairy more. Hairy legs meant no shorts in the summer. A hairy tummy meant no crop tops or bikinis. I went to theme park that also had a water park, with my best friend when I was thirteen, and she pointed at a beautiful girl in a bikini and said "that girl would be really pretty if she didn't have hair on her stomach." I looked down to see some barely there blonde fuzz on her belly. I was as covered as a person could be that day in the summer, without getting heat stroke. I knew I wanted nothing less than for someone to see me. My hiding and self loathing grew throughout highschool, dying down in college as I started to become exhausted with the amount of time I had to dedicate to shaving without any sort of tangible payoff. I was growing more and more into a feminist but still had some setbacks, as the biggest part of my journey was finally having the strength to walk away from religion. Once I had, I was free to start openly engaging in the body positive movement. And I think that's where I met my biggest disappointment of all. I would look through post after post, article after article of these proud "body positive", "inclusive" feminists and with each one, grew more and more in my shame. "Fat girls are beautiful" would be followed by perfectly curvy "plus size" models in flawless makeup, with no pot bellies, no sagging or droopy rolls of skin, and most consistently, not a single speck of body hair to be found. I grew more and more certain that my body was ugly until one day I finally snapped. I stopped shaving and I stopped hiding it. I was uncomfortable and nervous for a while, but I did it anyway. I had made a decision. If nobody is going to call hairy girls beautiful, then I will. If nobody is going to share...
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