“Am I sick?”, Carolyn asked her mother as she looked at her back in the mirror.
Elizabeth Austin had spent much of her life feeling that her larger body was a problem. Since childhood, she had received comments about her weight and developed a difficult relationship with food, so when her daughter grew up naturally very thin, she thought that at least she would escape that kind of insecurity.
But the opposite happened.
At 14, Carolyn began seeing posts online that associated thin arms, prominent collarbones, or a bony back with illness. She even compared her body with photos of celebrities and wondered whether she looked “too” thin.
For Elizabeth, it was especially hard to hear her say that because Carolyn had been diagnosed with leukemia at 8 and spent years in treatment. She knew perfectly well what her daughter looked like when she was truly sick, and that was not the case.
It was then that she understood something she had not expected: she had grown up feeling that she had to make herself smaller, while her daughter now felt that she was too small.
The two arrived at the same mirror from completely different bodies and ended up asking themselves the same question: “Is there something wrong with me?”.