I think I was in sixth grade.
My grandparents used to come over regularly. I remember exactly what I was wearing that day: overalls. I loved those things. They weren’t just in style, they made me feel playful and capable. Accepted by my peers and comfortable in my body at the same time. They were easy to move in, easy to exist in.
I loved them.
I ran out into the hallway to say hi.
The hallway in my parents’ house connected everything–the kitchen, dining room, pool room, living room–before stretching toward the bedrooms and my parents’ office. The floor was black slate tile. Cool. Hard. In the center stood the front door: a massive wooden door, two or three times the size of a normal one. Heavy. Formal.
That’s where my grandparents were standing.
My grandfather looked the way he always did: knit short-sleeve sweater with a few buttons, slacks, slip-on shoes. Casual. Comfortable. At ease.
My grandmother was different. She always was. She was elevated. Blouse. Dress pants. Hair done. Makeup on. A purse on her arm. Good posture. Poise. Put together in a way that felt deliberate. She moved through the world knowing exactly how a woman was supposed to look.
I ran toward them, happy.
She stopped me by the arm.
She looked me over and told me I was dressed wrong for a girl.
She said I looked like a boy. That the overalls made me look chubby. That I wasn’t showing off my figure, and that it was important that I did. As she spoke, she held my arm and ran her fingers along my elbows, pressing into the skin.
They were dry. Cracked.
She told me I needed lotion. How would I ever expect to find a husband with elbows like that? Who would hold my arm and walk with me? Who would marry a girl with dry elbows?
It’s a strange memory to carry.
At that point in my life, I weighed ninety-something pounds. I had no figure to hide. Flat chest. Small hips. My hip bones stuck out. You could see my spine. My ribs were often visible despite that I was active. Healthy.
No one had ever called me overweight.
But standing there, I felt it.
I felt hideous. I felt wrong.
The overalls changed instantly. What had felt joyful and free when I put them on that morning became something else entirely. A prison. A reminder of how much I was not a woman. How much I was not sexy or poised or perfect like her.
I was straight up and down. A pole. A lump.
Dry. Cracked. Clay to be discarded. Something that couldn’t be molded into anything better.
I believed she might be right.
I feared that I would never be loved. Never be held. That I would walk alone for the rest of my life.
It’s devastating how quickly a child can absorb a verdict like that. How fast something simple, fabric, skin, posture, can turn into proof. How easily joy can be replaced by shame.
Something was taken from me in that moment and how quietly it happened is the devastating part.
I carried that feeling for a long time.
Long after the hallway. Long after the overalls were gone. Long after I learned how to dress myself correctly, moisturize properly, perform femininity in ways that passed inspection. The fear stayed lodged somewhere deeper than clothes or skin.
That I might walk alone for the rest of my life.
In my thirties, I signed up for a nude portrait session.
A small group of us gathered with a photographer whose presence was gentle and reverent. Before the camera ever came out, we talked. About our bodies. About shame. About the stories we’d been handed and the ones we’d been carrying without question.
It was the first time I told the story about my grandmother and the overalls out loud.
It cracked something open in me.
The grief came fast and hard. I cried in a way that surprised me, like my body had been holding its breath for decades, waiting for permission to exhale. Facing myself without clothes was difficult. There was no fabric to hide behind, no posture to correct, no performance to maintain.
And I did it anyway.
Those photos were not about beauty in the way I had been taught to understand it. They were about presence. About being seen without negotiation. In them, I saw a body that had carried me faithfully through so much–through shame, through fear, through years of believing it needed to be improved before it could be loved.
In that room, through that lens, something loosened its grip.
I realized I had found what my younger self feared might never exist: someone who would walk with me. Someone who loved my dry, cracked elbows. Who would put lotion on them without commentary. Someone who didn’t mind hairy legs, unplucked eyebrows, messy hair. Someone who saw past the surface and loved the depth.
It became painfully clear then that my grandmother couldn’t understand that kind of love. That for her, worth lived on the surface. In polish. In presentation. In being chosen for the right reasons.
That realization is sad. And I hold it gently now.
What hurts most isn’t what she said, it’s how long I carried it. How deeply it settled into my body before I knew I was allowed to let it go.
Those photos helped me do that.
They didn’t fix anything. They didn’t erase the memory. But they returned something to me. A softness. A permission. A sense that my body was never the problem.
Standing naked in front of that camera, I wasn’t proving anything.
I was releasing it.
And in doing so, I finally understood that I was never meant to walk alone, not because someone else would save me from that fate, but because I no longer believed it was my destiny in the first place.
