i wear a size 18. God, you don't know how long it's taken me to say that with pride. But maybe you should know a little bit about me first.

i'm 15 years old. my sixteenth birthday is coming up in about a month. i'm 5'8" tall. and i weigh... well, that's not important. suffice it to say that i wear a size 18/20. now as to why it's taken me almost 15 long years to accept myself the way i am...

ever since i can remember, i was never as small as my friends. i was always the big girl. i can remember looking through my teeny bopper magazines when i was 10 or 11 and under vital statistics about a certain star, they would give the person's weight (like it really mattered). what i can't remember is ever weighing less than the boy i was currently obbsessed with. if that wasn't childhood trauma, i don't know what is. and it didn't help during those horrible years when i began to develop and become concerned with what the boys thought of every move i made. it was a very painful time in my life.

but what came next was almost worse: the dating years and high school. i watched my friends go off and start dating. it always seemed that when they liked a guy, he always liked them back and then they would start dating. in the beginning of ninth grade, i actually had a boyfriend. unfortunately, that was a short-lived experience and i came out still unkissed, which has been until recently, a very prickly thorn in my side. on the bright side, that boy is now one of my best friends and i can tell him anything. and most important of all is that he believes in me and i love him dearly. but back to the topic at hand.

all this stuff was happening to me and making me miserable. i never tried diets because i have no will power to stick to them, so i was fat and unhappy. then came the things that changed my perception of the world and my place in it. for my entire life, i had thought of myself as the shy, dorky, fat girl. but one day, i came home from school and found a magazine in the mail. it was called mode and it was for plus size women such as myself. so i started reading. what i found blew my little socially preconditioned mind. in this magazine were women who were big AND beautiful. and their clothes! i love shopping but up until this point in my life, all i could find in plus sizes were clothes designed for older women. what i dubbed, "grammy clothes." i went nuts. this was great! suddenly, i felt free. knowledge is truly power. i now knew that i didn't have to look like a twelve year old boy to be considered beautiful and sexy. it was empowering. unfortunately, i had no idea where to get these clothes at fairly reasonable prices.

now comes the second thing that really changed my life for the better: lane bryant. it is the most wonderful store in the world. i couldn't live without it. i found it one day while i was cruising the mall and i fell in love. their clothes are geared toward fashion-minded women who don't wear a size zero. (i really don't understand the concept of wearing a size 0. doesn't that mean there's nothing there?)i walked out of that store with renewed confidence in myself and a grumpy mother grumbling about her credit card bills, but my mother has seen what that bit of confidence has done for me and she supports me.

it's taken a long time but now i know that although i may not be the haute couture designers' idea of sexy, i am beautiful, sexy, intelligent, and all around wonderful. and i don't mean that in a snobby way. it's just the truth. and i feel good about myself. i've even got aspirations to be a plus size model and will be entering a model search this fall. i'm glad that the fat acceptance movement came when it did because it has made my teen years thus far a hell of a lot easier. and it doesn't hurt to have friends like jacquin (she wrote the "teen angst" submission). every time i see jacquin and how confident she is, i realize that big is beautiful and i become a little more confident each day.

Jamie Sawyer
Eve822@aol.com