Learning to Love Myself

A personal essay by JC Eastwood


Transforming my self-loathing into something more.

Nineteen. Nineteen minutes to run a mile and a half. 

Exhausted and wheezing, I paused to rest near a tree as even the girls passed me by. A poor attempt to pretend re-tying my shoes fooled no one. Embarrassed, my little grey plastic inhaler remained in my pocket and when I returned home, I remained in my room. That day, I was not only embarrassed; I was embarrassing.

My parents couldn’t know about my pitiful track time. My father was the famous local basketball coach and my mother, a former swim instructor. Being an athlete wasn’t forced upon me, but it was expected. It was in my blood. It was in my DNA. But, it was not me. I was me. Criminally undersized, fitfully clumsy, and physically handicapped. Even as a fifth grader, I understood that I was just…me.

Three months passed and nothing changed. I was in middle school, but the beige dirt track was still the scene of some of my worst nightmares. On the first day of PE, I ran the mile and a half in eighteen minutes - just one minute faster. A small victory or yet another disappointment? I chose the latter. Broken, I returned home and tried to pick up the pieces. I didn’t tell my parents about that time, either.

The Mirror

Naked, I stood before the mirror in my bathroom and stared at all of the flaws so openly visible before me. God must have made a mistake when He made me. My eyes passed over my small, bony shoulders, down my thin arms, back up to my tight, flat chest, and then down to my definition-less stomach. No one ever talks about the body image issues that boys go through.

There was a visible twinge of shame as I averted my gaze, accompanied by an immediate, overwhelming amount of self-loathing. As I stood there, I became even more keenly aware that I was not who I so deeply desired to be. As the mirror slowly began to fog over from the still-running shower, I turned once again to face the boy I knew and hated. Looking deep into his eyes, I noticed for the first time a feature of myself that I admired. Beneath the chocolate brown iris and within the dark coal-black pupil, I recognized an inner strength. With newfound resolve, I clenched my fists and thought, “Enough!”

A New Change

The next morning, the same dusty, old orange school bus dropped me off a half hour early like it always did, but while my classmates turned right towards the cafeteria, I turned left towards the track. My bus pass had become my ticket to a new world. A world I was only just discovering.

Walking out across that dark green grass, still wet from the sprinklers that morning, I felt the moisture slowly seeping into my sneakers. Kneeling, I placed both hands on the beige, hard-packed sand of the track, the way I had seen on TV, and imagined the pop of the starter’s pistol. Knees pumping, arms swinging… I ran until my lungs closed shut. Covered in sweat and wheezing, I would then walk to class.

As the days dragged on, I felt the iron shackles of my physical limitations loosening. I felt myself running faster and further. I felt amazing. Pretty soon, I didn’t need my inhaler anymore. Pretty soon, I wasn’t hiding my times from my parents anymore.

Inner Peace

An attempt to prove everyone else wrong had become an attempt to prove myself right. When I next stood in front of the mirror again, I didn’t look at the bony shoulders, thin arms, and flat chest. They were still there, but I instead looked straight into my own eyes. It was there that I saw my greatest quality.

By the end of that year, everyone else knew it too. I had outrun my asthma, improved my mile and a half time to ten minutes, and made the middle school track and field team.

Enough.