Inspired by =LovittGirl's dirty little secret series. She's a beautiful woman, whose honesty and courage are nearly as admirable as her loveliness.

I'll open with my only true flaw, the darkest of my dirty little secrets, which isn't such a secret to a lot of people who know me, but which definitely causes me to feel the most shame. It'll get a lot lighter from here on out, but for now, I've got to get this off my chest.

I don't like my body.
The extent ranges from mild distaste to vehement loathing, and has been an intermittent part of my life for the last nine years. I often go through long time periods where I'm comfortable with myself, but once or twice a year my negative feelings about the way I look rear their ugly heads, and I'm miserable for a while.

This is a hard subject for me to talk about, and there's a good chance I'll be deleting this journal entry or heavily editing it soon after I post it. I've been going through one of my self conscious, mirror-avoiding phases lately, and it's hard to keep it bottled up and hidden away from everyone.
I'm completely secure in nearly every other aspect of who and what I am, and I don't like admitting to having such a serious issue; I've found that having this sort of issue is something that makes people think less of one. The fact that I don't like my body is something I try to hide, and feel pretty terrible about when it pops up. I dress and behave as though I'm comfortable with the way I look, and most of the time, it isn't just an act. However, that comfort is born not of liking the way I look, but of tolerating and accepting the fact that I'm five feet nine inches tall, weigh 150 pounds, am larger than the majority of people my age, and can't find a part of my body other than my neck, collarbone, arms, hands, feet, and ankles that I genuinely like.

No amount of compliments, reassurance or positive feedback about the way I look can help or correct the way I feel. I've received so much of it, and I'm grateful to each and every person who has offered me support and kind words. Unfortunately, being comfortable in my own skin is something that has to come from me, and me alone, it isn't something I can be given.

It never occured to me that there might be something wrong with the way I looked until I was twelve years old, when I contracted a fever that raged through my body for a week and shrunk my five-foot six-inch 130 pound body to 118 pounds. When I came back to school, weak and miserable, my gym teacher looked at me and said, "Megan, you're so thin - you look like a whole new person."
And thus, self-esteem issues that plagued me throughout my adolescence, drove me to eating disorders, and cost me a ridiculous amount of my time and my favorite high school boyfriend were born.

A normal human being who put themselves through the exercise and diet regimens I subjected myself to as a teenager would have lost a ridiculous amount of weight, but I didn't, and it drove me crazy.
Unbeknownst to me, there was a reason why I measured nearly five feet nine inches tall and built like a Clydesdale in a family of slender women with an average height of around 5'3", had no chest, and couldn't lose more than five pounds no matter how hard I tried.

When I was nineteen, I found out that I have Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome, a hormone imbalance involving higher-than-normal androgen (male hormone) levels. I'd been presenting general symptoms for years, such as periods of mood swings that can be mistaken for bipolar disorder or cyclothymia and practically nonexistent breasts, but I didn't have any of the classic signs, which include ovarian cysts, hirsutism, weight control issues, acne, and a host of serious health problems, until I was eighteen.
Even after I developed a cyst the size of a baseball, doctors were still reluctant to test me for PCOS, since I presented with none of the other physical symptoms.

Turns out I'm lucky to look the way I do, as 50% of women with PCOS are obese and even more are overweight (especially ones whose imbalances are as bad as mine), but I don't feel lucky.
Medication has given me my life back, almost completely banishing my cysts and correcting my mood disorder, but there are limits to the wonders it can perform.
It can't give me back my body (I suppose back isn't the right word to use, since I never had the large breasts and slender form other women in my family are blessed with, in the first place), and I wish it could. I don't know what it's like to wear a bikini to the beach or to look in the mirror and be proud of what I see from the neck down. I'd love to know what it's like to be thin, to be like *miss-mosh, `ulorinvex, ~Bellefast, or any one of fifteen different models I can think of off the top of my head. I don't even necessarily want that... hell, I'd be happy if I could get rid of the things I don't like from my waist to my upper thighs or grow a decent chest.

My feelings about my body obviously prompt questions about why I model nude. The answer to that is a simple one, and it has nothing to do with validation and compliments. Women are inundated with images of unrealistically thin, flawless women who have very little in common with them physiologically from every media vehicle in existence. There are very, very few examples of larger, but still healthy women being portrayed in a manner that flatters them and makes them seem beautiful.
My goal is to create images that women can relate to by portraying a more human sort of beauty, showing them that an everyday person with flaws just like theirs can be beautiful, too.

I used to think that if, by my example, I could prevent just one other woman from developing the sorts of issues and going through the pain I've battled for the last decade, putting myself out there would be completely worth it. I'm not so sure of that anymore.

What I am sure of is that feeling bad about myself is a waste of my time and energy, but as hard as my brain tries to stress that fact, my less rational emotional processes aren't buying it.