Tw: body shaming, depression
By: Yashika Singla
When you are in school, you have a very utopian idea of what all in life can you pursue. I was
one of those kids, who always felt, as if no activity in entire world was above them, if I put
my mind to something, I could easily achieve it. And this tendency of wanting to excel in
various fields translated itself into exploring different extracurricular niches. Things were
good for me as I found a comfort spot in Public Speaking and Writing and Quizzes above
other domains, and then…
My mom discovered a passion for running. And I am a total couch potato, but somehow to
watch my 40 something year old mother just rushing into a new hobby and excelling there
motivated me so much that I decided to sign up for my School Girl’s Football Team. This is a
good time for me to mention that I am someone on the heavier side of weighing scale, my
physique is definitely not one of those athletic kinds, and I did not have much exposure to
sports in general, apart from playing copious amount of leg cricket in PE period.
The selections, the turned out to be maybe worst part of my entire life, not because of fellow
team mates or the coach, or the selection procedure or anything. It was essentially due to
classmates around me. When you have been a nerd all your life, and then you try to step into
a role that is by virtue of a coolness quotient held by the good-looking kids, it does not evoke
the most positive reaction. What followed was an intensely painful week of being
nonchalantly body shamed by people I thought were friends, “hey, look there a balloon is
kicking a ball”, “the actual goalpost are dimples in Yashika’s chubby cheeks”, “you are in the
team just so you can cover entire goalpost with your body size”, etc. I spiralled into a bad
mental space of self-doubt, angsty poems, lack of adamic motivation, isolation and regular
breakdowns without any particular trigger reasons.
Obviously as a 9th grader, being subjected to this was my cue to giving up, but then I did not.
The sole reason being that one morning session of football practice had made me feel really
good about my body, and it was rare. To have that experience where you accept your body the
way is it was so new to me, that the intensity for it drove me ahead to keep persevering.
Definitely I was not the best kid in the team, and the team itself was not a state level winner
sort of team, but that does not diminish the euphoria of getting to the field and just being in
ones’ own element.
The entire shift in vision and the development of a more confident, affirmative and healthy
relationship with my own self was my biggest takeaway from sports, it made me much more
accepting to my flaws, and that span of year I was into sports is a part of me that I would
carry forever.