Hi there.
I do know how you feel, I really do- I'm 17 and covered in them. I can thank my rapid growth spurt/gaining a lot of weight when I was around 10 or so for them.. no babies here. I hardly even noticed them at my higher weights because I avoided looking in the mirror so much. But after I lost the weight and started scrutinizing every inch of my body, I discovered that I had them everywhere! I was about 14 or 15 at that time, actually, and I felt horrified about it all. And I started obsessively moisturizing, massaging, exfoliating, etc. the marked areas that I hated the worst.
A couple years later, I can say that I honestly don't care about them anymore. The obsessive moisturizing, I must say, probably did help because many of them faded so much that they're hardly noticeable in most lights.. but that's beside the point. I eventually realized that nearly everyone has them and if we all obsessed about these perceived imperfections we have, we'll all be miserable! Better yet, I realized that most other people(especially the ones that matter) don't
care that we have them. "You are your own worst critic" is really a statement that holds true in this situation. Ask most people how they feel about their stretch marks and they'll answer with something negative, then ask most people how they feel about their partner/friend/family member/acquaintance/a random person on the street having them and the response? They don't care!
The stretch marks I've always hated the worst are those on the inside of my upper arms- countless silvery little squigglies from my armpit to my elbow. For the longest time I absolutely refused to wear anything that didn't have sleeves that extended past my elbow. It was actually just recently that I realized how little I care about them now.. It's not the end of the world if I flash my upper arm stretch marks anymore. I'll happily wear tops that don't cover them completely. And there have been many times that I've worn such tops and random guys have hit on me! I have no interest in that in general, but it made me laugh to myself- this "flaw" that caused my a lot of negative feelings, that I obsessed over, felt miserable about.. those guys either didn't notice or didn't care. This "flaw" doesn't define my worth.
I'm sorry you feel so bad about your stretch marks. A shift in how you think about them might take some time and effort, but it's definitely a shift that's much more conductive to happiness than berating yourself about what is in the big picture nothing more than some squiggly lines on a person who has so much more to them than that. I hope you can find some peace about it all- all the best to you.
