The scales budged a fraction to 167.9, although I don't know whether the reading was correct. Certainly I woke up (at 8.30 am, bright and breezy as if I'd had a long and restful sleep) with my head filled with dreams of locating to New York forever, and going to school here, and being the perfect child of my parents, with a part-time job at some kind of fashionable boutique in town, and an elegant capsule wardrobe reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn's. Sometimes I really wish I was a rich kid, although I feel the repercussions of my friends' experiences just as they do - someone's father cut them off: No more money for you, until you sort yourself out, and get your head together, and show me you can be independent. And ironically this morning, whilst we were out getting a coffee from the local organic cafe near our apartment, was the moment my own father decided to tell me that it was no longer okay to sponge off him financially. My university accommodation costs a third more than it did last year, and thus far I haven't been able (or have been refusing) to contribute. But I'm twenty-one, a good two years older than most of the second and first-years I know, and I see his point. I don't want to be a dependent either. It makes me feel insecure and young and humiliated. He said my sister (just recently eighteen) would be getting the same treatment and talk when she starts to move on in the world. The problem, from my point of view, is that my sister will remain in her cosy cocoon forever, cushioned by my parents because perhaps she's worth it more than I am. And I am not self-pitying - but she is the one out of the two of us with an agent, and a career planned out. On the other hand, I spend the majority of my time flailing about the direction my life is taking - I want to succeed; I don't know how to succeed; life is moving too quickly; I might as well not try at all.

The odd thing about my sister and I, from a psychological standpoint, is that we oppose each other somewhat perfectly. While she is small (5'8" and an American size 2) and takes up a lot of space in terms of personality, I am big but spend the majority of my time trying to hide it. On Saturday, whilst shopping with my sister's manager in a vintage flea market, I chose to walk through the mirror stalls and rows of useless dysfunctional objects in order to avoid the clothes section. Upon hearing me make the point that I would prefer to hide more often than not, that that has become my default, her manager responded that if I want to hide, I should. That is not the sort of advice one gives to someone with crushingly low self-esteem; it's the sort of advice that perpetuates the whole thing. God help me if I try to do anything else but hide. 

I find myself wondering, then, whether my compulsion to hide or make myself appear smaller is due to my own complexes, or due to others' encouragement of this sort of behaviour. In the past, my experiences of letting myself appear as loud and hungry and childish as I feel have always resulted in bad feedback. My weight, or rather my weight gain, is often the only way I am allowed to take up space in our family.

The aim is always, is it not, to take up less space physically in order to allow oneself wiggle room when it comes to expressing emotions. No one wants to hear an overweight girl complaining about her problems. But when a thin woman expresses her anger, her hurt or her joy, she's met with a very different reaction. This was something I observed at school. The fat girls who cried were shunned (and there weren't many of them); the thin girls who cried or yelled or complained were always coveted and immediately reassured.

I applied, on a whim, to the study abroad international exchange offered in the second year. Amongst my list of selected schools sit the Ivy League, which represents a whole other kettle of fish. Wouldn't it be just so, to spend a year at an Ivy League school, to study under great professors and mingle with the rich and pretty just one last time? I miss the upper-class education I so despised as an adolescent. I'd like a second chance to fit in, to wear pearl earrings at the weekends, to eat brunch in brasseries in Kensington, and to know that my life was just one fabulous thing after another.

As it stands, I feel pretty fucking average, and it's about time that changed.