If You Miss the Old Cheryl Burke, Please Unfollow

I joined the show in 2006 thinking it was going to be one season and then I’d go back to my life as a competitive dancer. But I won back-to-back seasons and people started paying attention. I was not prepared for what it meant to become tabloid fodder in the era of Star magazine and the National Enquirer, a world that felt like it was waiting for a successful girl on TV with curves to gain a few pounds so they could run a headline about it.

In 2008 I was dancing with former track and field Olympian Maurice Greene for season seven, and I remember turning on my TV one morning and seeing my name on the chyron: Is Cheryl too fat for TV? I will never forget that. I was 20-something years old, hormonally changing, finally living outside the rigid constraints of the competitive dance world for the first time, and my body was on the news. And then, because apparently that wasn’t enough, two of my male costars, both pros on Dancing With the Stars like me, made comments about my weight on the press line after a live show. It got picked up everywhere. Have I had my own personal conversations with these specific people? Absolutely. Do I forgive them? Absolutely. But it’s still shocking.

No wonder I developed body dysmorphia. I had the seeds of it before TV, but this multiplied it by a million.

What kills me now? Genuinely makes me furious? That people look back at photos of me from that era and say I looked so much healthier. I was drinking every single night. I was eating Del Taco at midnight to soak up the alcohol. Are you kidding me? That’s the body fans are nostalgic for? I was the alcoholic Cheryl back then, the party girl barely surviving some of those live shows. Every photo from that era—the ones where people now say I looked so good—I was basically hungover in. That is the version they are telling me I should return to.

They have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. When I was on Dancing With the Stars, I hated everything I saw. I don’t have any enemies, but if I did, I wouldn’t wish the disgust I had for myself back then on anyone. It’s wild how people on the internet think they own you, or even know you.