Clothes, Curves, and Conformity

They say the body is a temple, but mine was always more of a battlefield stitched together with mirrored lies and stitched-tight waistbands, a warzone of whispers dressed as compliments. I was once the child they praised for skipping dessert, the girl who floated ghostlike through adolescence in boyish jeans and baggy shirts, barely there, barely taking up space. They applauded the disappearing act. Skinny wasn’t a body type. It was a virtue. And in the thinness, I found what passed for peace, not comfort, but quiet. No questions. No stares. No shame. Or at least, a shame compacted tightly enough to fold inside a size-zero tag. But it never felt correct. Even then, especially then, I felt like I was performing a girl who knew how to wear herself.

There is a myth I swallowed young, that somewhere out there were correct clothes. A sacred wardrobe of items that would finally make sense of my shape, my limbs, my mutinous meat. The right jeans. The right color palette. The right neckline for my "body type": a term that always made me feel like a specimen, something clinical, a frog being cut open in a biology class of the soul. But I could never figure it out. Not once. Not when I was skinny. Not when I grew. Not when I tried to mimic the girls on Tumblr with collarbones like wings and thigh gaps like exits. Not when I shifted to soft, womaned flesh and tried to summon power from silhouettes I didn’t believe in. Every outfit felt like a costume. Every mirror, a jury. What is the correct way to dress a loopy lump of shame? No one ever told me. They just told me when I got it wrong. The fitting room is not a space. It is a crucible. A small, fluorescent-lit cathedral where women go to flagellate their flesh in polyester and denim. I have cried in more dressing rooms than churches. Not because the clothes didn’t fit but because I didn’t.

Too big here. Too tight there.
Too visible. Too real. Too me.

Then came adulthood like an unwanted bloom, unplanned inheritance, grotesque in its naturalness, a body softening, widening, shifting into its own story. I did not consent to it, but I also did not fight hard enough to stop it. I grew. My body curved unapologetically, softly, stubbornly. There’s a quiet betrayal in realizing your bones have decided on curves without your permission. Your body, like a tree trunk, adding rings. No amount of running or regretting could smooth the new lines, the roundness that erupted like rebellion. Suddenly, my body was no longer an illusion I could control, it was an entity, with its own gravitational pull, its own hunger. What is the correct dress for a body that betrays the very myth of static femininity? The world offers rules. Silhouettes for apple shapes. Tips for minimizing arms. Ways to look thinner, taller, flatter, smaller. The implication: you are not correct. But here’s a trick to fake it. And the worst part? I tried. I really tried. I starved. I cinched. I flattered. I punished. I bought the shaping underwear and the “investment pieces.” And still, the clothes wore me like a costume of failure.

Even now, I walk through shops with the caution of a ghost. I don’t browse. I haunt. The clothes hang, smug and confident, whispering "Not for you. Not like that." The mannequins are calm. They know how to wear themselves. I never did. I still don’t know what my "style" is. I know what hides me best on bad days. I know what fabrics make me itch with self-disgust. I know which tops I’ve thrown into laundry baskets like surrender flags after a single wear. But style? That elusive, shimmering self-expression? I’ve been looking for it like a lost twin in a crowd. Clothing, in my youth, was not protection nor expression, it was performance. A fabric theatre of denial. I wore loose cotton like armor, denim like penance. Everything I chose was curated not to show what I had, but to pretend I had nothing. Breasts? A betrayal. Hips? A crime scene. The more I shrank, the more they smiled. And so, I starved myself on praise, measuring my worth in waistbands, hiding my shame in layers. Fashion, they told me, was freedom, but for girls like me, it was a cage with silk bars.

I watched myself thicken like a story too long to be trimmed. The mirror began to mock me. Not for what I was, but for what I no longer was: thin, praised, easy to dress. Clothing, once the tool of invisibility, now became confrontation. Nothing fit, everything hugged. My shape shouted. And society does not like loud bodies. 
To conform, I would have to contort. To be desirable, I would have to disappear again. It is to nod along as they hand you the corset and the caution tape and the spreadsheet of acceptable appearances. But how do you un-grow? How do you unsay your own biology? I found myself in fitting rooms turned confessionals, whispering apologies to my reflection. The seams of societal expectation dug into my skin like teeth. But conformity comes at a cost. And it’s not just money or modesty or comfort. It is selfhood. To be palatable is to be partially erased. And I don’t want to live as an acceptable excerpt of myself. 

They don’t want curves. They want control. 

To conform is to consent to distortion. To be palatable is to be partially erased. And I no longer want to live as an acceptable excerpt of myself. But not all distortions come from magazines or mannequins. Some come from the mouths of people we love. Sometimes the cruelty doesn’t come from strangers. Sometimes it sounds like family, laughing in the kitchen. "You’re becoming fat," my sister says, with that casual sharpness, like she's tossing a pebble into still water not knowing it echoes like thunder in my chest. Like a joke. Like a warning. But I’m not becoming fat. I’m becoming. I’m growing into the body I was always meant to have: a body that is not small, or shrinking, or apologetic. A body that breathes louder than approval. A body that eats. And still, I want to scream: Please stop making fun of me. Please stop measuring me like a threat. Please make space for me. Not in your beauty hierarchy. Not in your ranking of who wore it best. Just in the room. In the conversation. In the world. Sometimes I want to snap back: “You’re just projecting.” Because maybe she is. Maybe she sees something in me she was never allowed to become. Maybe the joke is a deflection. But I remind myself: I’m not that mean. Not out loud. I remind myself: she’s had to carry the bad end of this body bargain too. She’s suffered, pinched, tugged, hidden, endured. I know. I saw. So I don’t bite back. I swallow the comment, let it slink down into the soft rot corners of my mind, where other jokes have pooled, congealed, tucked in the crooks and hooks of my inner architecture like rust. But silence is not forgiveness. It’s just delay.

We are told to love our bodies, but also to discipline them. To be sexy, but not fat. To own our curves, but only if they’re curated: hourglass, not hurricane. Fashion taught me that femininity is an aesthetic, not an experience. You are allowed curves, but only the ones that fit a dress.

But here’s the quiet revolution: I got tired of the performance. I started dressing for sensation, not surveillance. For softness, not strategy. I wore things that clung, not to hide, but to hug. To remind me that my body is not a sin to be forgiven, but a geography to be lived in. My thighs speak of miles walked. My belly tells tales of laughter and full meals and survival. My arms hold: not just objects or others, but me. Clothes are no longer a sentence. They are punctuation. They help me say what I want or choose to say nothing at all. In the end, conformity is a costume. One that itches, pinches, shrinks. But I no longer audition. Let the world try to fit me into its ready-to-wear ideology. I’ll be in the corner, wearing poetry, dressing for a truth too full-bodied to be zipped up. So now, sometimes, on good days, I wear things that do not make sense to anyone but me. A skirt that rides up. A crop top on soft flesh. A dress that hugs my belly like a secret. I do not always feel brave. But I do feel mine. There are still days I whisper apologies to my reflection. Still mornings when nothing feels like the right second skin. But increasingly, I remember this: there is no correct way to be clothed. There is only this strange, flawed, magnificent act of dressing the truth. Some days, I want to be invisible. Others, I want to dress like a reckoning. But now, I choose.

The body is not a problem to be solved, nor a mannequin to be corrected. It is an unfinished poem. A sentence that changes meaning depending on where you stand. Clothes are not the solution. But they are part of the metaphor. They do not define me but they can translate something I can’t yet speak. And I am learning to wear myself in full. No more "correct clothes." Only the sacred act of claiming the skin I’m in with seams that stretch and shirts that rebel, and a mirror that, some days, finally nods back.

My room, lit only by the war on screen.

I don’t know what’s harder to swallow, the numbers or the numbness. Every headline feels like a punch. Every image is a wound. Iran. Gaza, Palestine. The Big Bro, always lurking like the puppeteer who claims it’s just pulling "strings of diplomacy." The Holy Land bleeds. Again. But this isn’t prophecy. This is policy: carefully executed, morally bankrupt, and widely televised. They treat Gaza like a prison and call it policy. Hospitals in the north Gaza are bombed, children die beneath rubble. Israel calls it “precision.” The Pentagon calls it “unfortunate.” Weapons are sent, drones are flown. But, real weapons are the narratives,  ancient and modern, soaked in saviourship and oil. The U.S. vetoes ceasefire at the UN. Again. “Humanitarian pause,” they say, as if grief has a time slot. (Does it?) I sit with this grief like it’s a visitor in my chest. Not mine, but also unmistakably mine. Not from the place, not of the people, but I feel it. Empathy has made me a thief of other people’s sorrow and I'm not sure if that makes me human, or just haunted. Psychologically, I can’t unsee the pattern: childhood trauma scaled up to national identity, hunger of retaliation masquerading as self-defense, and the repetition compulsion Freud warned about; nations reenacting their origin on children. The Gazan child in the shelter. The mother clutching a limb that used to be her son. The Iranian protester hanged for dissent while Western leaders dine with his executioners. The West who still believes brown suffering is either a burden or a backdrop. The American drone, circling above like God: unconsensually omnipresent, necessarily indifferent, tragically flawed. And then there's the theatre: settler hypocrisy wrapped in human rights hashtags. Israel proclaims solidarity with Iranian women, cheering their bravery in the streets of Tehran while bombing Evin political prison where those same women’s futures are locked away. They mourn [read: use] Mahsa Amini in English, but their bombs speak in another tongue: occupation, not liberation. It’s like watching a pyromaniac campaign for fire safety. Justice, when spoken by an occupier, is a lie rehearsed for the camera. The only thing more permanent than Israeli settlements are the lies they’re built on. They do not want Iranian women free, they want Iran broken. Just like they do not want Palestinians safe, they want Palestine silent. You can’t preach emancipation while holding a smoking gun over someone else’s daughter.

We are a species addicted to binaries. Freedom fighter vs. terrorist. Democracy vs. dictatorship. But the psyche doesn’t work in binaries. It works in shadows. And those shadows are now weaponized. And behind those shadows are older ghosts. Colonialism didn’t die (it just rebranded). Mandates became states. Settlers became citizens. Victims became “threats.” The maps we fight over were drawn by imperial hands and the blood never dried. Settler colonialism is not just land theft. It’s soul erasure. It’s building identity through the erasure of another. It’s why Palestine is framed as a security threat and never a site of mourning. And the erasure isn’t just in bombs. It’s in borders redrawn quietly on school maps. In names replaced, not with bullets, but with bureaucracy. It’s when you search for Palestine on a map and it autocompletes to "Israel." It’s when centuries of poetry are overwritten with concrete zoning laws. It’s when a language is spoken softer each year until even memory mispronounces itself. Genocide doesn’t always scream. Sometimes, it edits. Sometimes it resizes a people into footnotes and dropdown menus. Sometimes it just changes a place’s name until the survivors forget how to go home.

It’s why even Gazan hunger is politicized like their bodies are insurgent. Capitalism sells it all back to us as spectacle. Bombs drop, and defense stocks rise. A child’s death becomes content. The grief economy thrives, algorithm-fed, advertiser-approved. We’re not watching war. We’re consuming it.

And what about nukes? The glowing god in the room. The crown jewel of deterrence. The ultimate flex no one wants to actually use, but must keep polishing. We watch them posture over buttons they’ll never press, because they know the market dies the second they do. No banks. No CEOs. No headlines. No hashtags. No "freedom." No "democracy." No saviors. Just radioactive dust and the sudden absence of war profiteers. They edge toward annihilation like horny apocalypse salesmen, selling fear in billion-dollar contracts, knowing full well the end won’t leave anything behind not even a body to bury the dead. And maybe I’m wrong. But if I am, it doesn’t matter. Because there won’t be a judge to correct me. No tribunal. No camera crew. No reparations. Just silence. And maybe a mushroom cloud standing where memory used to live. Nuclear war isn’t strategy. It’s suicide in a suit.

They say the land is holy but it drinks blood like wine. They crucify the innocent and call it national security. They pray with one hand and reload with the other. Even God must be exhausted from being used this way. This is not prophecy unfolding. This is profit orchestrated. They might air-drop aid an hour after air-dropping bombs. They want to keep them hungry just not starve them to death. Not yet. Because, lines drawn in dust now dictate who deserves to live. And, Europe will send statements, maybe a bit of aid. Condemnations, not consequences. And, UN, a body built on the graves of war, now a hospice for dying resolutions. Countries too busy shaking hands and selling drones. I never accepted the narrative of this war being a one of faiths. It’s a war of father wounds. Of power misused and myths abused. We’ve mistaken vengeance for justice. We’ve built national identities out of unhealed grief. 

I sometimes fear words like freedom, equality, rights, justice, dignity have no meaning for the survivors of war. They sound like museum artifacts... polished, untouchable, behind glass. Or worse, like cruel jokes told in boardrooms by men in suits who’ve never buried a child. To the survivor, justice isn't a courtroom. It’s the dream of waking up to silence instead of sirens. Freedom isn’t a flag. It’s walking to school without stepping over rubble. Dignity is not theoretical. It’s not having to dig your brother out of concrete with your bare hands while the world debates the semantics of genocide. What does equality mean to the girl born in Rafah, whose life expectancy is shorter than the flight time of an Israeli drone? What do human rights mean to a boy in Tehran who tweets the truth once and ends up on a noose list? Israel says it stands with Iranian women. Then bombs a political prison where their futures are held in cages. It tweets about justice while shooting journalists. It speaks the language of emancipation with a boot on someone else’s neck. This isn’t solidarity. It’s settler supremacy with a PR strategy. Every time a drone circles overhead, it brings more than death... it brings psychological residue, the kind no ceasefire can scrub. It teaches children that the sky cannot be trusted. It turns the sun into a trigger. In some places, war is not an event. It’s an inheritance. Babies are born into rubble and raised by grief-stricken ghosts. These words, in the mouths of politicians, sound like broken teeth. They’ve been chewed and spat out so many times that even the letters feel hollow. I want to believe in them. I do. But I also want the people who speak them to bleed a little truth when they do. Because to the survivor, language is dangerous. Every promise becomes propaganda. Every speech a funeral in disguise. And I wonder... when they do these things, do they even think about the future? Or do they think about it too much, just not with us in it? Maybe that’s the cruelty. Maybe it’s not that they’re short-sighted. It’s that they’ve already imagined a world where the broken don’t belong. Where the bombed don’t rebuild. Where the children pulled from rubble are never meant to grow old. This isn’t collateral damage. It’s future-editing: a quiet genocide of memory, of lineage, of hope. This is not about ending a war. This is about erasing the people who might write its history. Because to erase a people, you don’t just kill their present. You kill their possibility. But it’s more than even that. Erasure doesn’t always wear a uniform. Sometimes, it shows up as silence where song once lived. It’s in the coffee shops that never reopen, the bookstores that never reprint, the newspaper headlines that will never again be written in a mother tongue. Genocide is not only murder; it’s theft of texture. It’s the vanishing of the neighborhood soundscape: a child arguing in dialect, a grandmother yelling from a balcony, a political debate at a lunch table, between flavors that no longer exist. The future isn’t just made of time. It’s made of language, habit, ritual. And when those go, it doesn’t matter if a few people survive. Survival without culture is not life; it’s exile in your own bones. They talk of peace. But what peace can grow from scorched syntax? You don’t need to burn every body to end a people. You just need to erase the places they gathered. War erases most completely culture, culture cultivated with time and labor of love, culture in its mundane, unremarkable, daily form. War doesn't just kill bodies, it annihilates possibility. So maybe justice isn’t a word anymore. Maybe it’s a scar. Maybe dignity is the silence after the last scream. Maybe rights are only real when they’re not negotiated over coffee between diplomats. And maybe, just maybe, the only honest word left is survival. War is not just violent, it is surgical, structural, strategic. When we talk about war, we’re not just talking about geopolitics, we’re talking about future birthdays, graduations, weddings that will never happen. The moral dead. The evil imagines itself victorious. We are just debris in its path.

And then there are those who say nothing. Who change the channel. Who ask for “context” only when the bodies aren't white. Those who measure outrage in proximity as if humanity were a postcode. Those who deny what they see because acknowledging it would cost them comfort. Because truth has a price, and they’ve already spent their empathy elsewhere. Silence isn’t neutral. Silence is permission. And denial? Denial is the luxury of those whose walls are not shaking. Every time someone shrugs and scrolls past a dead child, every time they say, “It’s complicated”, they are choosing the side of the sky with the drones. History will not forget the bombs. But it won’t forgive the silence either. (Desmond Tutu: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”)

Sometimes I fantasize about global group therapy with a longing for collective reckoning. Everyone sits down. No cameras. No flags. No fucking weapons. Just stories. Just pain. Just truth. We listen. We rage. We cry. And maybe; just maybe; we interrupt the script. But here I am. Watching another livestream of suffering I can’t stop. Sharing a post that feels like screaming into space. We cry in stories, we rage in comment sections, and think it counts. We’re pixel-deep in empathy. But pixels don’t rebuild cities. Lighting a candle for people I’ll never meet and wondering if light even reaches where the drones go. Maybe healing isn’t light. Maybe it’s just surviving long enough to remember how to sing. Maybe the future still has space for the people they tried to erase. War makes poets out of the powerless. And I am tired; tired; of writing elegies. (But, am I going to stop... I do not think so. I wish this was fiction. I wish I was being dramatic. I wish I could log off and find the world softer, smaller, safer. Which is a privilege in itself, wishing that. But I can't. And maybe that’s why I write. Not because I believe it will change anything but because if I don’t speak, the silence will grow teeth.)

You’re reading this on a charged device. I am writing this on another one. My manager pings me on the background from hers. Somewhere, these batteries came from a mine. Somewhere, that mine displaced a village. How many borders did your silence cross today? Don’t tell me you’re tired. Tired is a boy pulling his sister from rubble with his bare hands. This body carries headlines it didn’t ask for. This skin remembers explosions the news already forgot. I keep thinking of how they said "never again." But never again for whom? Apparently not for Palestinians. Not for Iranians. Genocide, we learn, is a matter of branding. If the dead wear the wrong flag, they are statistics, not even stories. And the bombs are smarter than the men who justify them. The only intelligence they have is artificial. If this exhausted you, good. If it made you uncomfortable, good. That means your humanity isn’t lost yet.

- Oizys.