10 Signs You Were An Early Bloomer

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1. Your nickname was inspired by your behemoth size.

Mine was The BFG. From the book. And I’m certainly not complaining; it could’ve been much worse.

2. Pubes.

What do you know? It’s a Tuesday afternoon at Thought Catalog and I’m writing about pubes again. Bet you thought I exhausted this topic, huh? Well you were wrong.

As I was saying, I bloomed early and so, naturally, my pubes sprouted at the ripe age of 9. If you’re a dude then you were probably showing your pubes off to your friends. If you’re a chick, you were hiding them for dear life.

3. You received an uncomfortable amount of attention from guys.

Being an early bloomer means you inevitably stuck out like a sore thumb. As one of the tallest and most mature-looking girls in your class, you attracted unwanted attention from guys. It doesn’t matter that you were 11-years-old; if you had a butt, older guys thought it acceptable to tell you to wear tighter jeans.

4. You started wearing a bra only after your friends held an intervention.

Another unmistakably early bloomer trait is having an appearance that is flagrantly inconsistent with that of your friends’. That was certainly the case for me when I was in 5th grade and, I won’t lie, it’s deceiving. Because looking all day at prepubescent, flat-chested girls 4-inches shorter than you, you’d THINK you look relatively similar to them. But then your swollen nipples rear their little heads through your pastel petit bateau, prompting your best friend to tell you that it’s time you wear a bra.

5. Eyebrows burst forth; poor grooming ensues.

When you’re 12 and your eyebrows start to resemble a caterpillar infestation on your face, you make decisions to rectify this that you perhaps wouldn’t have made had you been a couple years older. So next time you see what looks like a 17-year-old girl walking with six other girls (all a head shorter than her), holding a stuffed animal, sucking her thumb, and flaunting eyebrows that look like this:

don’t fret or judge. That was me 13 years ago.

6. A Hulk Hogan-looking mustache was perched above your lip, like so:

As an early bloomer, you inevitably have a mustache, but again, your poor discretion that comes with being so young compels you to tackle this ‘stache the wrong way. Instead of waxing that baby off, a 7-year-old you takes to bleach—the less painful option. What ensues is blonde, thick, and sits above your lip.

7. Perhaps you have bad posture now.

True, some early bloomers have great posture, but the odds are working against us. The odds being:

  1. You are 6 inches taller than all of your friends, feeling self-conscious about it, and trying to fit in with them.
  2. You are actually almost a full foot taller than all of your friends and so you have to literally and constantly look down if you want to see or talk to them.

8. You played forward in 8th grade basketball, despite being an abysmal athlete.

And furthermore, you were accepted onto the basketball team in 8th grade, truly a feat in and of itself. By 9th grade, when most of the girls your year had caught up to you in height, you didn’t have a shot of making the JV basketball team. In short, you peaked in 8th grade.

9. You identified more with the counselors at your day camp than you did with the campers.

It seems I’ve always had this ahead-of-your-time quality—in my opinion, a term much more flattering than “early bloomer.”

10. At 9-years-old, you fooled older men into kissing you.

And afterwards, you always felt a TAD sexually assaulted.