I am olive-skinned.
There’s nothing special about my features; I look like any other Egyptian.
I have oily skin.
I’ve had acne since I was a teenager,
And I didnt know how to deal with it.

I was bullied at school a lot as a kid.
“Wash your face! You look dirty.”
“You look like so and so, but she looks cleaner than you!”
These are the kinds of things I would hear as a kid from my colleagues and sometimes even my own family.

I was an active child when I was young.
I did gymnastics and never skipped a lesson.
However, I wasn't blessed when puberty hit me,
As I gained an enormous amount of weight.
body image, social stigma, social pressure, bullying

I was born with an autoimmune disease,
That attacks the thyroid gland.
I started showing symptoms when I was 5 years old.
I was a fat child.
I’ve been fat for as long as I could remember.
I was bullied ever since I was little,
By everyone in my life,
Because of my weight.

I am a curly-haired girl.
Everyone calls my hair scraggly.
Everyone insists that I should straighten it,
But I don’t want to.

I’m really thin,
And I always get bullied because of my body type.
My friends are always joking about it and making fun of me.
I try to play along and pretend it doesn’t upset me,
but I can’t.
body image, bullying

The boys were scared of me;
They’d run away from me and yell,
“She’s going to eat us!
Don’t piss her off because she’ll eat you if she’s hungry!”
body image, bullying

The problem is that my voice has always sounded like a baby’s.
I’ve gone to well-known doctors in Egypt.
They told me that this was just what my voice was like.
Nothing more or less.
body image, bullying, masculinity

I have always been a little chubby, ever since I was a little kid.
I started to develop breasts as a teenager.
The condition I have is called “gynecomastia”, or “enlarged breast tissue in men”.
Although it’s prevalent among men, I was subject to a lot of ridicule from classmates.

I had thick hair as a child.
I hated how much it hurt when my mother washed, brushed, or braided it.
I could never wear it down like my sister, who had beautiful straight hair.
One time at the beach, when I was 15 years old, a tourist stopped and asked me,
“How do you make your hair curly like that?”
body image, hair, beauty standards, bullying

When I was in college, a joke started about someone in our group and spread throughout the entire university:
“Is that your body, Ahmed, or your mother’s?