I grew up hating my hair.
It was very painful when my mother,
Would try to brush it.
Whenever I tried to be okay with it,
People at school, family and family friends would make fun of me.

My family was always very critical,
And they tended to make fun of people.
I was born with flawed joints.
I could walk very well and run and all that,
But when I stood,
My knees bent backward,
At first sight, it looked like my legs had been amputated.
My family always called me “Miss knees,”
And my mother always made fun of me in front of my siblings.
She thought I was inverting my knees like this on purpose.
She once even called me “disabled,”
And told me to straighten my knees.

My mother had always wanted a daughter with European features.
Luckily, I was born with European features.
People couldn’t even tell that I was Egyptian.
But, unfortunately, I had curly hair.
I got all sorts of comments from my family and people I wasn’t even related to.
“Poor thing. She’s beautiful but she has bad hair.”
Can you imagine a 6-year-old getting her hair done at the hairdresser’s almost every week?
body image, hair, bullying, beauty standards

I’m sorry it took me a long time to come to terms with you and accept you as you are.
But don’t be upset.
We still have the rest of our lives to love each other.
I’m sorry about the things you had to listen to.
The racism you faced.
body image, beauty standards, bullying, racism

My hair changed as I got older. It became frizzy and messy.
My mom always tied it back for me.
It made me cry because I wanted to let my hair down like the other girls.
I didn’t like receiving comments and getting weird looks from my relatives.
“Why is your hair so messy?”
“Brush your hair.”
And other comments I still remember until this day.
body image, hair, bullying, beauty standards

I’m not fat,
But I have a weird, balloon-like stomach.
Know what a beer belly looks like?
Yeah that’s it.
Even though, I swear to God,
I’ve never so much as tasted a drop of beer.
body image, bullying, beauty standards

I suffered a lot in there.
My mother didn’t visit me for 6 months.
No one but her visited me.
My father visited me twice in 10 years.
He wasn’t taking it well.
prison, bullying, parents, gender violence, sexual violence, addiction

Baba used to beat me up for being fat.
When I was around 13 or 14,
Mama was convinced that I won’t get married because I’m overweight.
body image, bullying, beauty standards, physical violence

I was small in size from childhood up until I went to college.
My brother was a bit like me.
He is a year older than me.
His body started to change around puberty,
But mine didn’t.
My sister is 8 years younger than me.
They were both chubby,
And I was skinny.

I’m 16 years old.
People have made fun of me ever since I was little.
My father was very short,
And I was born a twin.
To make sense of the way I looked,
They used to tell me,
That my twin brother was trying to absorb me,
When we were in our mother’s womb.
But what happened was that he absorbed my food instead.