It’s a comforting sentiment, isn’t it? The idea that your younger self is somewhere looking up in admiration at the person you are today, in awe of the stronger, wiser woman you’ve evolved into. We see the phrase thrown around on social media almost daily: that there is a younger version of you who is so proud of who you’ve become. And whilst that affirmation might ring true for some of us, there are others – myself included – who are acutely aware that there is a younger version of ourselves somewhere looking up at us, absolutely horrified.

My younger self wanted one thing more than anything in the world: to be thin, and beautiful, and to have the life that comes along with being thin and beautiful.

When I was in primary school, I would go to bed every night and fantasise about the woman that I would one day become: she was tall, with long shining limbs that cut gracefully through the air. She was stylish – the best of Barbie’s wardrobe in real size, effortlessly cool. She had a dazzling smile and bright sparkling eyes – blue, usually. Her satin hair bounced breezily down her shoulders, a stray golden wave brushing her collarbone. Her hips swayed with the natural step of the heels she wore every day. Her lips were glossed. Her lashes coated. She was a picture-perfect model of what my womanhood could be.

The projection wasn’t based on how I might realistically look when I grew up. It was a vision pieced together from countless images of culturally confirmed beauty: cover girls and pop stars and plastic dolls. It was based on the women who embodied the beauty standard well enough to be main characters, to be desired by men, to have life happen to them.

Once I looked like that, I would be popular.

Once I looked like that, I would be wanted.

Once I looked like that, I would be happy.

Fast forward two-and-a-bit decades, and I am nothing like my younger self once dreamed I would be. I am not thin – at a UK size 18, I am the biggest and softest I’ve ever been. I don’t have blonde hair or blue eyes (being mixed-race with Caribbean ancestry made that result pretty unlikely). I am not living in a hetero-normative fairytale: married to a prince whose babies I’m raising as we frolic blissfully into our happily ever after.

I am a chunky, hairy, queer feminist woman who has spent the last ten years unlearning every lie that diet culture and patriarchal society condition us to believe about beauty, success and self-worth. Younger me is quaking.

I am the type of woman that my younger self would have laughed at. The type of woman who my younger self would have side-eyed judgmentally in the street. The type of woman my younger self would have been disgusted by the idea of becoming. And I am 100% OK with that – because my younger self didn’t know shit.

And I don’t say that to shame her in any way – it’s not her fault that she thought the way she did. She’d spent her entire life absorbing the messages that we all receive about how women should look, and behave, and love, and be. She was a product of her conditioning, and she was only ever doing the best she could to get girlhood ‘right’. But at 32, I know better.