Dear Brenda,

Why should my only good dress be black? Is it because that would hide me in the crowd? Make me disappear? Or because no matter where I go, who I’m with, what I’m doing, I’ll always fit in?
And what does that say about you, Brenda? Reading your poem, I wonder why you feel so ashamed to dress in color, and show your body. What makes you so afraid to hear your mother call you “ewe gee el why”?
I’ve always heard people say ‘your body is a temple,’ but what confuses me endlessly, and most likely you too, is why all people lie. If your body is a temple, why do you starve it? Why do you squeeze in your stomach compulsively to fit in your “dirty olive and the cinderelly.” Because while at one moment you’ll feel chic and pretty, you’ll soon realize that ‘“that kind of thing feels like a hundred shiny-headed waifs backlit and skeletal, approaching. Dripping in unison, murmuring, “We are you.”’
You see, we are more alike than you may think, Brenda. I too suffer from the “anti-obvious movement,” where being healthy suddenly feels unhealthy. Where walking out in a shiny gold dress would be “sheer matricide.”
What specifically stuck out to me was when you said, “It would kill her if you were ewe gee el why. And is it a crime to wonder, am I.” I’ve found that body shame is one of those things that nearly everyone feels, but seldom discusses. The internet might voice it’s demands of awareness, but when it comes to word of mouth, people go silent. I guess it makes sense; your body is the most personal thing you have. And it’s easy to see why people nearly obsessively worship it everyday with the industry of high fashion and makeup. Every magazine steals your eyes with your ‘formerly-obese’ celebrity now boasting a size 2 and telling you that their ‘secret to success’ is on page 4. Because success nowadays is measured through shrinking your waist and painting your face flawless.
I’m so sorry Brenda, for you, and me, and every other person on this world who feels unheard in their pain. At least I can tell you that I know more people than I could ever explain who feel the same way. Just two years ago I was shipped away to rural Pennsylvania for two months to help my own views of body image. There, I met about thirty women of all ages and backgrounds who taught me more about myself than I’d ever known before. Thirty people who never in their life would have met unless they all happened to suffer the same pain of feeling uncomfortable within their own skin. It was there that I learned that body shame is a whole lot more than people wanting to lose weight. It was people who no matter what they did, eat, or wore, would never be able to escape what they saw in the mirror. A life where your eyes lie to you, and worries become physically imprinted in your brain. Where what you touch is not actually there. It was in Pennsylvania where we were expected to finish every last serving on our plate in order to leave the room, even if we didn’t like olives. Two months of fighting our own heads with a disease nobody could see except ourselves.
Brenda, your poem stook out to me for so many reasons. Primarily, because you understand just how ridiculous people sound when talking about fashion. Why there is no good reason to obsess over a dress, yet why everybody does it. You understand the actual fear that lies behind the letters “ewe gee el why,” and how judgements can control somebody’s life. A body is the most personal thing a person will ever have, and people go to extremes to conceal it behind fabrics and pattern that are not their own. Brenda, I see why a black dress is your one good dress. It’s the kind of dress that will help you blend it and forget about your own body. And in this day and age, being unnoticed and unworried is one of the most precious things a person can ask for.

Yours truly,
Jaq