To make this story even more pathetic, I really like stripes. For more than a quarter of a century, I looked longingly at clothes with horizontal stripes and never bought them because I believed I did not deserve to wear them, all because some teacher whose name I donβt remember told me I shouldnβt.
I glance back at the teenager on the bus and think about how she gave away her budding power to a faceless fashion dictator, and then gave away the remaining scraps of her power to her friends by letting them decide if she was qualified to wear a bikini.
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Every time we start a sentence with βCan I get away withβ¦β we are disempowering ourselves. Despite the multibillion-dollar fashion, advertising and social media industries trying to convince us otherwise, there is no damn rule book. There is only one rule: If you want to wear a bikini, wear a bikini and be fabulous. If the bikini fits your body, you have a bikini body. You do not need to pass a test, meet external criteria or get anyone elseβs approval.
By the time I get off the bus, Iβm fuming. Iβm so sick of being told there is something wrong with me. Iβm so over being ashamed of my body in its natural state, of feeling like I have to hide it, pluck it, conceal it, starve it, shrink it. By adhering to these pressures, Iβm essentially letting other people control me.
Iβm so frustrated. Why do I give my power to industries, and society in general, to decide if Iβm enough? As long as I allow this to happen, I will never be able to like my body. Or myself.
I pop into my favourite clothes shop and buy myself a T-shirt with, wait for it, horizontal stripes. I ask the shop assistant to cut the tags off. I walk out of the shop wearing it and it feels like one of the most rebellious things Iβve done in my entire life.
Edited extract from Goodbye Good Girl, Hello Me (Penguin Random House) by Kasey Edwards, out now.
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