Trigger Warning: This piece contains a brief account of sexual violence.
When Laura Leigh Abby was a teenager, she thought she was just too much. “There was always this feeling of, ‘I should shut up. I’m too ugly. I’m too loud,’” she tells Mic. Abby describes feeling like she didn’t really make sense in a world that expects young women to be small, soft-spoken, and diminutive. “I was a five-foot-eleven teenage girl. I was not super skinny; I felt that I took up a lot of space in the world. I had this loud voice, this big energy,” Abby says.
