What Stays With Them, Stays With Us

It stays with them. It stays with us. What you say not only directly to children, but also around them, and about yourself and others, stays with the little ones. And then they grow. And when they do, it doesn't magically go away. It stays in the back of their little and then bigger minds, and it can be a perfect breeding ground for mental health problems. So be kind: not only to children, but to yourself and to other beings.

I've been deeming whether or not to write this post, as it's been chewed and spat out by so many people so many times, but here comes another sleepless night (the fourth in a row if I'm counting correctly) and I've been feeling - as visual learners like to describe it - a little blue. So I guess it's better to write a text that's an absolute piss than to roll around on my bed, rethink all my life choices, mindlessly scroll through my phone or read a book about a guy whose life is all about money, sex workers and hard drugs.

When I was in the third year of primary school, I had a quite young teacher who was - in my eyes - gorgeous. I couldn't put my finger on what it was about her looks that fascinated me for a year or so, but it hit me when I saw a slightly older man, say in his fifties, who had the same quality: they both had acne scars! At the time I didn't know what they were, I just thought they were a cool kind of birthmark. And I loved it, I wished I looked like them. Then one day I mentioned the teacher to my mum. She couldn't really remember who I was talking about until I started explaining the classes she taught me and her hair and her chlotes: "Oh, you mean the one with the bad skin," she said. I couldn't get it out of my head for a couple of days. 

I kept asking my mum what she meant by "bad skin" and being a really cool, logical woman who works in a scientific field, she explained it all to me: why acne happens and how, that some people have more problems than others, why it bruises the skin, etc. Well, my little nine-year-old brain was absolutely bombarded for months and whenever I saw someone with skin problems after that - even if I knew them as a real person and not just a rando from the street - all I could think was "bad skin, bad skin, bad skin".

A few years later I entered my embarrassing "era", which I'm still trying to escape. As a teenager I developed a number of skin problems, one of which was acne. It wasn't as "bad" as my eight-year-old self would have liked, but I couldn't stop picking at my skin, which became barely visibly uneven. I still struggle to feel comfortable (literally) in my skin when the acne breaks out and I worry that it's causing some irreversible damage to the skin that may become more visible as I age and my skin loses its elasticity.

That's just one example, others include my mum looking in the mirror and saying how much weight she's put on and that she needs to "get back to eating well", my sister jokingly saying that I've got cellulite at twelve, my grandmother telling my cousin that "she's got a bit chubby" and society as a whole praising me and other young women for being underweight.

And yes, I am aware that children today are 'raised' by social media, television and unrealistic beauty standards, but we - as real adults - and especially parents and people who work with children, should work hard to break the cycle of insecurities that create more of them. Remember: children listen, they remember, internalise. What stays with them stays with us.