The Price of My Skin and Bones

This personal essay talks about how, as a teenager, you start noticing little things: being told to dress or act a certain way, seeing how society judges people differently based on their gender or appearance, and feeling pressure to look or behave “correctly.”

At sixteen, you realize that your body is no longer yours.  

It happens in small ways at first. Your gym teacher tells you to cover up even though the boys around you run shirtless. You feel your spine stiffen when you’re told to “sit like a lady,” when you’ve never thought of sitting as anything but sitting. You stand in the mirror, counting ribs or shoulders or scars, tracing the borders of yourself like a strange country you have to learn how to govern before somebody else conquers it. 

You learn quickly that the body speaks even when you don’t, and it’s never saying nothing. 

It becomes clear when you scroll past headlines on your phone: a lawmaker somewhere deciding who can marry whom and another arguing over what a uterus can or cannot carry. People in ties and microphones debating skin, gender, hair, and the way somebody holds someone else’s hand. In school, they call it “health class,” but it’s really a kind of quiet war. They tell you to protect yourself from disease, from pregnancy…from yourself. They tell you to keep your knees together. To say no. To wait. As though your flesh is a loaded gun, and your desire is a kind of trigger someone else will inevitably try to pull. 

You begin to notice who is allowed to take up space and who is asked to shrink. Boys are told to grow into their broad shoulders, to become warriors and providers, presidents and heroes. Girls are told to become soft enough to forgive the world for what it takes from them. And if you’re neither or both or something else entirely, there’s no script for you at all, only suspicion, only silence. 

In the locker room, the air smells like metal and sweat. You see the politics of the body up close: who gets complimented for muscles, who gets mocked for hips, who covers their chest in towels like armor. You hear whispers about who is “too much” or “not enough,” about whose body is public property and whose is invisible. You learn to laugh before anyone can laugh at you, to weaponise your own insecurity before someone else does. 

Your young mind is sharp enough to notice the contradictions. You are told to express yourself, but only if it is palatable. To be proud, but not arrogant. To love yourself, but only if you’re easy to love. You realize every inch of you has a price, and the currency is attention, approval, control. 

One day you begin to imagine different futures. A world where stretch marks are no longer apologies, where no one legislates what happens between your ribs and your skin, where the mirror does not feel like a judge’s bench. You wonder if you have to wait until you’re older to make that world a reality, or if it could begin right now, with you. So, you start small. You stand taller, even when your shoulders want to collapse. You wear the shirt they said was “too loud.” You learn the names of the bones beneath your skin and love each one. You begin to unlearn shame the way others unlearn lies. You refuse to let the weight of other people’s laws crush the fragile kingdom of your chest. 

Your body is not a battleground. Your body is not a debate. Your body is not a metaphor for somebody else’s war. 

You are young, and you do not yet know what power feels like, but you know enough to know you deserve it. You are the only citizen of yourself. You are a nation of bone and blood and breath. You are both flag and flame, border and rebellion. 

And for the first time, you begin to believe that no one, no teacher, no law, no stranger on the street, has the right to vote against you.

About the Writer: Adela is a high school writer who writes with an unapologetic tone, which features very often their written works, such as personal essays.