Jonathan Lung
How My Picky
Habits Shaped My Life
“
You need to put on more weight, boy”, my father would say to me at the dinner
table. It was 9 o’clock at night, and I was exhausted from football and
schoolwork. Logically, people would assume that I was starving because I was a
teenager and a football player, but I have a small appetite. Ever since I was a
child, I cried and threw a tamper tantrum whenever I was fed something I was
not familiar with because of my picky nature. No matter how appealing the meal
looks if I am full, I will not even touch the food. Consequently, I did not
gain the weight that my dad desired in a healthy son; instead, I was a skinny
child. Many people described me as a living x-ray and comment how I eat “just
like a bird.” For most of my life, I lived under a pressure to grow bigger to look
healthier. But, my stomach would not let me stuff more food to grow. No matter
how much I worked out, starved myself, or any other method to try to get myself
to eat more, I always eat the same small portion every meal. Every meal, I can
see in my dad’s eyes that he is disappointed in me for not being a bigger,
stronger man that he thought I would be. Honestly, I am disappointed in myself
for my picky eating habits. While people would see this as a social pressure or
see my father at fault, I see it as a problem in me instead. It is not a
problem of self-image that is truly at the end of this problem; it is my own
body and my health that I have inhibited through this mental barrier.
Consequences of my actions includes, but not limited to: being the smallest
member on the football team, one of the shortest guy out of my grade, and one
of the skinniest guy out of my school. No matter how appealing the meal looks
if I am full, I will not even touch the food. It is my own stubbornness and my
own picky nature that has caused me to regret some of my experiences, but I
will not let it stop me. I shall prevail.
Solid job, Jonathan! I can see how your post relates to gender and social notions of masculinity. However, I think (if you were to revise this post in the future) you could make that connection more prevalent or explicit, especially near the end of your post. (Also, consider adding some paragraph breaks!)
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