Brick House

I've always thought the phrase “Low Self-Esteem” was sort of an oxymoron. To me, self-esteem is something you either have or you don’t. How can someone have a little bit of self-esteem? Does that really even make sense? Everyone has the God-given right to be happy. It’s even written in the United States constitution. It seems like every girl in America is conditioned from birth to equate their worth and happiness with their physical beauty. We’re even conditioned to believe what we should think is beautiful. In the new millennium the beauty and fashion industry has evolved to become more inclusive across the board. You can find plus size models everywhere. They are on magazine covers at the grocery store, on your bra tag in Target, and your local drug store cosmetics section. Attitudes towards what is beautiful is expanding and girls have more an opportunity to see positive images of themselves in every aspect of pop culture. Growing up “Big and Beautiful” was kind of another oxymoron. The words “Fat” and “Ugly” were basically interchangeable synonyms. We’ve all heard the term “Brick House” to describe the ideal female figure. There’s even a song about it. Ask The Commodores. No one ever referred to me as “Brick House”. I was also told “You have a pretty face” which pretty much dismisses the rest of you. It’s the standard “I don’t want to say you’re fat, so I’ll just say something nice” go-to compliment for fat girls. It’s really the ANTI-compliment and I’m allergic. It makes my fat rolls itch.

Growing up in 1980s Baltimore City was quite an experience. We may have been “poor”, but we were rich with community. I had no idea we weren’t rich because we had everything we ever wanted and needed. In my earliest years, I was raised in an apartment complex with my two older brothers in South Baltimore. Everyone who lived there was basically family (blood related or not) and there was a sense of community that just doesn’t exist these days. If any of us kids stepped out of line, anybody’s mamma could whoop your a**. The street light was the universal curfew, “Hot Butter Beans” outside was our #1 source of entertainment.

Getting roasted or “cracked on” was a way of life and part of the culture. It was expected. If you weren’t armed with fresh supply of “ya mama” jokes stashed somewhere in your back pocket, you were susceptible to your ego getting murked at any given moment (they don’t call it Murdaland for nothin’). None of us were exempt. If you didn’t develop a thick skin you were just S.O.L., and you got left in the sandbox dust. I was a chubby little girly girl who had audacity to be conceited and sensitive at the same damn time. You couldn’t tell me I wasn’t the smartest, the prettiest, and most talented girl in the world because I wouldn’t have believed it. I DREAMED BIG! I wanted to be a dancer, a figure skater, an actress, a singer/songwriter, a designer, and a novelist. No one could tell me anything, including my own mama. This attitude made me a target on the playground, but I was always able to hold my own. Although I had two older brothers, I never depended on them to defend me. I defended myself. However, it wasn’t the outsiders at the see-saw I needed to protect myself from. Sometimes, it can be your own family that will mercilessly rip you to shreds with their words.

I had an Uncle (my mother’s brother) named Billy (RIP). He’s kind of a legendary/tragic figure in my family. He was insanely gifted (he could make anything with his bare hands), but he was also a deeply tortured soul. Between the ages of 5-8, He would often terrorize me. But this one particular day, he was being uncharacteristically kind. He was visiting the townhouse we lived in at the time and he looked and me, smiled and said “Sunni, you remind me of a movie star!”

My face lit up, and I thought to myself “Finally! He has something nice to say to me!” Who could I possibly remind him of? Irene Cara??? Apollonia??? Lisa Bonet??? Afterall, I wanted to be a star, I was happy that someone else could see it too.

I asked, “Who, Uncle Billy? What movie star?” and he turned looked at me oh so tenderly, paused for a brief moment and replied……..”MISS PIGGY!!!!!” Then he proceeded to let out the most boisterous maniacal laugh I had ever heard! “HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

My spirit was crushed! I was humiliated and embarrassed by my own family. I was a little Miss Piggy and he was like the Big Bad Wolf coming to blow my little house of self-esteem down. I allowed it to happen because as a naïve 7-year-old girl, I didn’t know any better. The emotional house I built was only made of straw. I should have stood up for myself, but I didn’t know how. As a grown adult, now I see that Miss Piggy is fabulous! She’s strong, bold, outspoken, glamorous, and she goes after what she wants! She’s the sh*t! That was actually a compliment I should have proudly accepted. Back then, the worst thing is the world was to be considered fat and being compared to a pig (fictional or not) was mortifying. This was the beginnings of the systematic breakdown of my self-esteem. My own bothers started called me “Sunni Gail Piggs” and “Nasty Fat Nasty”. How cruel is that?! Little did I know at the time, this internal bullying was preparing me for the road ahead.

My life has been filled with Big Bad Wolves, huffing and puffing with their words of ridicule, hatred, and negativity. I never built a house strong enough to withstand the pressure and still as a grown woman allowing other’s words and opinions to deeply affect me. When I decided to enter the modeling industry, my house of self-esteem was made of the sticks and stones I collected throughout the years. The modeling industry itself is a Big Bad Wolf, and the plus industry is not much kinder. I found this out the hard way. In attempts to land a modeling contract with in January 2007, I took the Chinese bus, with only $20 to my name, to an agency open call in NYC I was invited to. I wore my lucky yellow leather coat, matching hat, and grey snakeskin knee-high boots. It was bitterly cold with ice and snow on the ground, but I was determined make it because it was going to be my time. A taxi driver took pity on me and only charged me $12 to take me across town. When I walked through those agency doors, they didn’t waste any time brutally ripping to me to shreds. “You’re too big”, “You have on the wrong bra”, “You shouldn’t have come”, “This is not your time”, “If you were a size 16, you’d be it!”, “You need to work on your middle” they huffed and puffed. I walk out those agency doors with my little pig tail between my legs and $8 left to find my way back to the bus stop in China Town. The only thing they DID like about me was my outfit.

Tre Lynn Photography

Ever since then, my attempts to build a “brick house” was purely physically driven. I thought that if I give this “pretty face” the body to match then finally I would be worthy and a complete whole person. I try not to be half assed about anything that I do. So, when I decided to lose weight, I went all in! I seriously trained like I was going for Olympic gold. My trainer was savage. There was never an excuse good enough for why I couldn’t train and nothing I did impressed him. If I ran a mile, he’d say “Now run 2 miles!”. I was convinced that he hated me. I mean, why else was he putting me through such physical torture? But in the end, he’s the one who turned out to be a sheep in wolves clothing. He was tough, and I nearly died a few times, but he was only making me stronger…physically. He saw in my what I didn’t see in myself and I reached heights of physical fitness I never thought was possible. This girly girl who thought she didn’t have an athletic bone in her body was now running 4 miles before her second daily bootcamp class. My highest weight was 347 pounds. Even with all that work I put in, I never reached my goal weight of being under 200 pounds. According to those bogus BMI charts, I was supposed to be 160 pounds. Laughable! I was 160 pounds in in the 3rd grade! I had one of those body composition tests done weighing in at 216 pounds. It turned out that I was at 23% body fat. So, what did that mean??? It meant that I was no longer technically fat! I wasn’t fat anymore! Wait, “I’m not fat anymore???? That’s not what the mirror told me. I had been fat most of my life. I really didn’t know how to be anything else.

Not being fat was kind of hard to accept and it took a while for my brain to catch up to my new body. There was a bunch of access skin hanging around my mid-section. I had “worked on my middle” to the point of exhaustion and no amount of size planks or bicycle crunches was ever going to fix it. I could literally tie the sagging skin from my lower stomach into a pony tail. My body was hurting my feelings! I had worked too hard not love what I saw in the mirror. To me it just looked like I had a smaller fat body. There was nothing I could do, so I had surgery to fix it. My recovery process what brutal and I ended up developing a blood clot that could have killed me. It seemed almost impossible to keep the weight off if I didn’t keep up with my clean diet and 3 workouts a day. It felt like I was dangling from a cliff with my bare hands trying to maintain. The attention I started to receive was like a drug. Finally, I felt validated and like a human being. In general, I was treated with more respect with a smaller body. Having unlimited clothing options was OVERWHELMING! I no longer had to be as creative with my outfits because fabulous things came in my size. I could shop wherever I wanted! I could put whatever I wanted on my plate, and no one would look at me sideways. People would make eye contact with me when I looked for my seat on an air plane. I could walk into ANY clothing store and no one assumed I was shopping for someone else. It’s the little things! Even though I had lost well over 100 pounds, it just wasn’t enough! I became OBSESSED! I weighed myself twice a day. If I gained/lost a couple of pounds, it would affect my entire mood for the day. If I gained the slightest bit of weight, I would either stop eating or work harder in the gym. The lower the number on the scale was, the more I felt like a person. The smaller the number, the more I was able to erase those feelings of invisibility in adolescence. The smaller the number, the more permission I gave myself to feel bigger. For the first time in my adulthood, it felt like I truly mattered in the world. In my mind, the number on the scale became a direct correlation to my worthiness of love. Even though I technically wasn’t fat anymore, I still saw a fat girl on the mirror, and to me fat equaled unworthy. I never gave myself a chance to even enjoy it. The perfectionist in me still wouldn’t allow me to be satisfied with myself.

The weight became even harder to keep off while I was married. Most people thought it was because I was happy and in love, but it was the exact opposite. My ex-husband pretended to be supportive. He acted like my biggest cheerleader while sabotaging me in the process. I would ask him to go to the gym with me, but he never thought he needed to go. According to him, he wasn’t just a man of God, but he WAS a GOD and the gym was beneath him. We seemed to be total opposites when it came to what we saw in the mirror. When he looked at his hanging gut, he saw a six pack. That’s the one thing I did envy about him was the way he saw himself. I supposed that’s what attracted me to him the first place, because it damn sure wasn’t his looks, money or lack there-of. He believed in himself fiercely and I was hoping some of that confidence would rub off on me. I ask him to go to the gym with me and he would say “I don’t need to work as hard as you do” he would tell me, while he stuffed his face with Reese’s and pepperoni pizza. I’d come back from the gym and he’d say “You’re too hard on yourself, you’re beautiful like you are” while handing me a bag of peanut M&Ms (one of my favorites!) He convinced me that my trainer was no good and was working me too hard, so I stopped going to my work out classes. He stressed the fact that he was my husband and he knew what was best for me. He took my scale from the bathroom and hid it from me because he thought it was mentally unhealthy to weigh myself every day. The same year we were married, I was nominated for a fashion award for the second year in a row. I had gained about 30 pounds since the last awards show and I was embarrassed for people to see me. Even though I had purchased his ticket to the show, he was able to convince me to convince myself that I didn’t need to go. Suddenly I stopped wanting to go anywhere at all. I finally had an acceptable body to model swimsuits, but he forbid me to, saying it was disrespectful to our marriage. He thought everyone in the industry was the devil trying to possess me with their demonic influences. If I wasn’t wearing what he thought was appropriate, I was being a bad wife. I was forbidden to work with other photographers, especially male, because “there was no purpose”. I had to make a choice. It was either my marriage or modeling. I chose my marriage. Afterall, it still seemed like modeling still wasn’t choosing me. I did receive a great deal of backlash for losing weight. There were rumors that I had weight loss surgery or that I was sick. Some people even complained that I wasn’t plus size anymore (size 10/12 is still plus size). I was dropped from a contract with no explanation and I was even told by some that I was more beautiful bigger. What a mind f*ck! I went an entire year without weighing myself and when I finally did New Year’s Day 2014, to my horror it was revealed that I had gained 80 pounds. I cried hysterically! I felt like a complete failure! 5 years of hard work down the drain in less than a year after vowing that I’d never be 300 pounds again. In efforts to try to console me he said, “You may be 300 pounds again, but it doesn’t look like the same 300 pounds”. I was so ashamed, and terrified of going back to feeling like a ‘nobody” and losing respect everyone who looked to me as an inspiration and being laughed at my everyone who thought I was a fraud. 4 years later weighing 339 pounds, after being isolated from my family friends in a house woods in Powhatan, VA, my eyes that were wide shut finally opened. When I finally had the courage to tell him I wasn’t happy, he said “Well I didn’t expect you to blow up and get fat, but I’m still here”. Wearing a shirt with the word "BYE" on the back, I left 2 weeks later and never looked back.

My first time modeling a bathing suit (2018). Photo by Charles Barsella

As 2018 comes to a close, and I realize I’ve been doing it all wrong. Being a “Brick House” has little to do with psychical attributes. I’m learning to build a strong foundation from within and what loving myself truly means. My resolution is to uplift myself and put an end to self-criticism. I’m becoming comfortable with my body, now at a healthy size 18. For the first time since leaving my marriage, I’ve been able to say “I’m beautiful” out loud. I’ll keep saying it until I actually mean it. Each affirmation of love I give to myself is forming the destructible bricks that will rebuild my life. With these bricks, I will build a house of self-esteem so strong that no Big Bad Wolf will have the power to blow it down ever again.