I was a size 8 when I graduated high school. You see, my boyfriend dumped me a week before my graduation, and I got really depressed. According to my mom, I got really thin. I don’t remember looking very thin because I wanted to be skinnier so maybe I could win him back. I started to paint my nails crazy colors – like blue glitter from Hot Topic – because the girl he was making out with the day after he broke up with me wore funky things like that.

I gained some weight back after I went to college. I worked on the newspaper staff, so there were lots of weekends where I ended up eating pizza and fried chicken at 2:00 in the morning. I ended up a size 10. All things considered, that’s not a bad size to be. My waist was small, but I hated my ass and my thighs. That’s where I’ve always carried my fat. That’s where I still carry my fat, and I never fail to point it out when people find out how much I weigh and say, “I don’t know where you put it!”

When I was pregnant, I put on a lot of weight – slightly more than the upper limit for “acceptable” pregnancy weight gain. I had to buy size 16 clothes for the first time in my life. I tried breastfeeding my son because I knew it would be good for both of us, but it didn’t work out. I had to quit after six weeks instead of the six months or so I’d planned on. That made losing the baby weight harder on me, and it gave me something new to be self-conscious about. Despite the fact that my milk supply was never enough to feed my baby, my breasts had ballooned to almost comic proportions. Once the milk was gone completely, I was left with wilted breasts covered in stretch marks.

I lost the weight I’d gained during pregnancy by the time my son was about eight months old. I’d counted the calories in everything I ate, and it worked for me. I can’t pass up baked goods, pizza, and fast food, so I made sure to plan accordingly when I knew I was going to splurge. I’d have a bowl of cereal for two meals to allow myself the extra calories I needed for dessert. It worked.

Then my grandfather died. I hadn’t admitted it yet at that point, but I was struggling with depression. My family came together in their collective depression to keep my grandmother alive in her grief. We went out for lunch together almost every day for months. No one wanted to be alone. It’s a lot harder to make healthier choices when your dining out at restaurants all the time, especially when you’re grieving and want comfort food. I gained a lot of the weight back that I’d lost.

Eventually, we stopped dining out so often because it just got too expensive for everyone. I went back to counting calories. I ended up weighing less than I’d weighed before I got pregnant! I was so thrilled. I was down to a size 8 again, something I never thought I’d see.

But I still have this little “pooch” of extra skin on my stomach from my pregnancy. It’s not fat – just excess skin from getting all stretched out by baby. No firming crème in the world can fix this. The only way to get rid of it is surgery, and I’m not going under the knife voluntarily. I dislike pain too much. But I really hate this skin hanging off of me. I used to be proud of my stomach. I know some women are able to view this pregnancy remnant as a badge of honor, but I’m still feeling rather superficial about it. It’s very difficult to find jeans that are cut high enough to cover this part of my belly but low enough so they don’t look ugly on me. There is a dearth of attractive jeans that will cover up my mom belly. Everything’s either super low rise or else made to be worn by someone’s grandma. So frustrating.

And let’s not forget my ass and thighs. God bless my husband, he says he loves my backside. And another man told me I have an ass like a gymnast. I think he was exaggerating, but it was quite a compliment nonetheless. I’ve had to content myself with the fact that I’ll never like the way my ass looks, but at least my husband does. And that’s what should really count, right? I mean, he’s the one who sleeps with me.

Of course, I’ve focused solely on the shape and size of my body up to this point, but there’s something else that makes me far more self-conscious. I have a hard time accepting when people tell me I’m beautiful, pretty, attractive, hot, etc. I can’t get past my horrid skin condition that has me covered in red splotches every day.

I’ve had the condition since I was a kid. I’ve been to doctors, dermatologists, allergists…none of them could help me. Some doctors ran me through the whole gamut of allergy tests and tried me on a number of drug regimens. One quack told me that I needed to soak in a tub with noncomedogenic bath oil every night. (I tried that. The only thing I accomplished was nearly breaking my neck trying to get out of the ridiculously slippery bathtub.) Nothing helps, so all I can do is live with it.

My husband says he doesn’t even notice my spots anymore, but I can’t see past them. They fade at night while I’m asleep, but they inevitably return every day. They pop up on my arms, my legs, and my chest. I’ve noticed they show up in higher concentration sometimes wherever I have stretch marks: my breasts, my stomach, and my hips. I get spots down my back and up my front. There’s usually a splotch or two on my face, as well.

I’m lucky that they don’t itch. That would be intolerable, and I wouldn’t stop going to doctors and getting tests run until I got an answer, even if it required having to go on national TV to have one of those famous doctors look at me for a primetime special. Well, they don’t itch most of the time. Some days, when they get really bad and cover most of my body, they’ll start to itch or burn. But that’s not very often.

No, my splotches are just ugly. My wedding photographer retouched most of our album pictures beautifully, but any candid shots taken by friends and family were ruined by the plethora of red spots covering my arms and chest. I try to Photoshop any pictures we take with our digital camera to minimize the appearance of my spots, too, but sometimes there are just too many.

So aside from wishing I had less junk in the trunk, I’m fairly content with the shape of my body, particularly when I’m wearing the right pair of jeans and a tight shirt. My hourglass silhouette is amazing. But I’ll never be happy with my skin. I guess that’s why I like fall and winter so much…because I can wear long sleeves and long pants to cover up most of my imperfections. Some of my sweaters are low-cut and show off the splotches on my chest, but at least they cover the spots on my arms.

I can’t even cover them up with makeup. Conventional makeup doesn’t provide enough coverage, and the special stuff they make for people with hideous birthmarks is too expensive and inconvenient to apply on a regular basis because I’d have to apply it over such a large portion of my body. I can’t even do spot coverage because my skin is so pale that the makeup is never light enough, so I have to apply it all over so there’s no obvious line where my skin is suddenly three shades darker than the rest of it.

I know my husband is happy with the way I look. I just wish I could get to a place where I agree with him.