No, maybe I’m worth the weight I’ve sold,

In bathroom stalls at 10 pm, after too much high fructose corn syrup in my diet

And too little time to burn it off.

Maybe I’m worth the hundreds of ten dollar bills I’ve

wasted away on the perfect bra, the greatest blouse,

The high-waisted skirt that was going to make me look like I was on fire.

Look at me now,

I am fire,

I have scorched my heart and my throat raw to get where I am today and I am still not happy.

My BMI says I am average for my height,

even though my height is so non-average to my gender that I’m not entirely sure what average means.

Average is what my family insisted I needed to be over in school,

But to me, the rest of the world thought I should be under it when I’m standing on the scale,

Even if they never said so.

1, 2, 3, A, B, C was now 65, 64, 63,

No one dare stop me until I get what I want,

How can someone not call this an addiction.

Even I would.

And then they insisted that the scale lies,

That the beauty was is in the heart,

That never mind my body,

My worth is in my chest,

I knew my chest was empty too.

I knew they were just like the audience of an elementary school talent show,

In which a mother says to an uncle, 'don’t you ruin her dreams yet, she is still so young, just clap the whole way through and let your teeth clench your tongue’.

My scale is my stage.

I knew that those bathroom stalls were not only an easy way out,

They were an easy way in,

For the adipose tissue crawling through my ribs and making its way,

To the center of who I was.

For now when I run, my chest is heavy, my breathing is cut,

And nobody knows, but I don’t think I will live past sixty,

With the diagnosis of a fitness shop.

I don’t think I’ll be a mother,

Not because my body can’t tolerate birth,

But because I can’t guard a child that has my eyes,

From a world that clearly has none.

Because the weight of the planet is transferred,

From the outside of my stomach to the inside of my chest,

From the view of the world to only my own,

And this is why you need to know.

You need to know that my worth was never hanging on the underside of my arms, 

Or was it on the curb of my collarbone.

It was never in the way I bit my lip when I saw the least amount of food,

Or the control that I would more often lose,

Because when I was that hungry, I shouldn’t need control until my body said so.

And when I was running, I shouldn’t push myself more than I could go fuel-less,

Or maybe now a flight of stairs would not get me winded.

No, my worth was somewhere in my words and the way I moved my actual hips when I walked,

And the connection between psyche and psycho that was so clear, but then somehow lost along the runways on TV.

And just how I knew what was virtue and what was sin.

Oh, golden sin,

I have no muscle to prove my power against you.

One would think that good judgment would come in handy at 10 pm, 

but I did it anyways.

Now my question is,

Did you?