Before heading off to another Memorial Day weekend in fabulous Sunland, I of course had to purchase yet another bathing suit. By the amount of swimwear I’ve accumulated in the last three years, one would think that I just love to prance around half naked all the time. Not exactly, but summertime events such as the Sand Bar or Seafair are like bathing suit fashion shows–God forbid you wear the same suit two days in a row.

I haven’t purchased a quality suit in a couple years (by quality, I mean anything outside of the $40 suits Target offers in approximately one million styles and colors), so I bit the bullet and headed to Macy’s to purge the slightly more expensive swim department.

I accumulated probably 30 bathing suits before heading to the fitting rooms to try them on. While I was throwing off tops and bottoms, cringing, smiling and turning in the mirror, I could hear two other girls in the dressing room next to me.

“This one doesn’t make me want to puke,” the girl trying on swimsuits said to her by standing friend. (Us females usually like to drag someone along for an opinion). “I don’t look terribly fat in this one,” she said when she put the next one on. And on and on with every negative phrase including fat, ugly, bulge, stomach. Blah, blah, blah.

Now, I saw these girls in the department when I was picking out suits for myself, and both of them were probably 19 years old and 30 pounds lighter than me. It overwhelmingly depressed me–every girl is guilty of it, but it’s just so damn sad that we have such a low self opinion of our bodies. And even if you’re 115 pounds, you can’t be happy with how you look in a swimsuit. Self esteem and body image gets better with age, but then you look back and only wish you could or would have been happy when you had the body you did at 19.

I wanted to shout to them over the dressing room, “I’LL TRADE YOU!”

But then again, they probably wouldn’t have understood why I’m self conscious either because clearly I look exactly like this in my new suit:

Currently Feeling: Chipper and cheerful. Probably cause I fell asleep at 9 p.m.
Currently Anticipating: Spa day and the Sex and the City movie tomorrow at Big Picture with my marketing team.
Currently Dreading: Cleaning my room and locating my car key.