One of the things that I’ve always found fascinating is the way life works, because in so many ways, as much as we have control and choice to do as we wish, so many things are beyond our control. And one of those is the body you find yourself in. It’s the little physical things that are so intricate and unique to you, and essentially forms your physical identity.
But the thing is, as much as we know we should be embracing it and loving ourselves, all that hashtag body positivity, I think it’s safe to say most of us are in a very complicated relationship with our body image. And I’m definitely one of those people.
Let’s begin with some context, and go back along the timeline…
I think it’s safe to say I was never a skinny nor a fat child. But, I’ve always had my chubby cheeks (I can confirm there hasn’t been a moment in my twenty-two years that they disappeared, and I’m rather glad they haven’t). And to be fair, as a child, I didn’t even care or notice, because I was too busy playing and scraping my knee every time I fell or putting on lipstick and playing dress up. As the years went on, and life happened, I moved countries, and my life really changed dramatically, from the simple things to the more complicated things. And to be honest, when you combine unexpected change and a child that’s dealing with a lot of emotions, I neglected myself a lot and began having a complicated relationship with everything including my body. I had started to gain a bit more weight in general, nothing at that age that was really worrying, and my self-esteem wasn’t at its best.
And then I got my period for the first time. And somehow along the way, within the next year or two, I can’t even pinpoint when this happened because I have no actual recollection, I really gained a lot of weight, and ballooned massively. It wasn’t the best time in my life and I think what I found the most frustrating was not knowing why or how it all happened. And slowly, the people around me began getting worried about my health and they repeatedly would tell me to do things to lose weight. And being the self-destructive teenager I was, I would get angry at them and not listen and just wallow in sadness and anger. It would make me so frustrated when people would say ‘Oh you don’t even eat a lot…’, and I would want to scream back, unlike what you might assume, I don’t sit and inhale 15 cheeseburgers in one go and sleep all day.
As I grew up, my weight kept fluctuating and my body changed quite a lot, I grew to be embarrassed and ashamed of my body, choosing to hide it and hide myself because I didn’t feel confident in myself at all. I would spend my days trying to find new diets that would help me, start doing workouts and new sporting activities that I would eventually give up on, hated going shopping for clothes especially because I thought I was too big for everything, wouldn’t even look in the mirror in case I saw my stretch marks, and when I think about all that, it really makes me sad for my younger self.
Because nobody knew how much I hated myself underneath.
But the beautiful thing about life, is that at some stage I really grew up. I hit this point in my life where I really didn’t care at all about how I looked, the stretch marks on my body didn’t faze me, the way I looked in clothes didn’t faze me, and this body I was in didn’t faze me. And I credit a lot of that to my diagnosis of PCOS, as well as the maturity I gained in how I view and want to live life. It became a realisation that what I am is what I am, and yeah I can probably go on a strict workout and diet plan and become skinnier but that doesn’t and wouldn’t resolve a lot of problems that lay within and behind the weight gain.
And whilst I began to embrace myself and my body for what it is, I felt like I left a lot of people behind and ran ahead. I still to this day see so many people, whether it be friends or family, strangers to known people, all battle with body confidence. So many people that are so sad about how they look, wishing they could be someone else or look like someone else, or wanting their flaws to disappear. And I could compliment them all I want, I could point out every single beautiful thing about themselves and I could wish they would see themselves through my eyes, but that doesn’t help. Because sometimes we, as humans, only choose to see what we want to see. We become so wired to notice the little flaws in us, that we forget to admire the things that make us so beautiful. We get so submerged in this imaginary world of what we could be that we forget to realise the reality of what we are. We make ourselves so unhappy that we forget what it even means to be happy anymore.
And I get its easy for someone to say love yourself, love your body and post inspirational quotes about how you need to embrace yourself, but for someone thats scarred themselves by constantly putting themselves down, for someone thats been taunted their life by bullies who have body shamed them or for someone that engraved in themselves they are never good enough, this can be very hard.
But the harsh reality is, as much as you want, no one is going to love yourself and your beauty and your flaws, your perfections and imperfections like you could. It doesn’t make a difference in life if everyone else in your life finds you beautiful if you don’t yourself.
And it’s not something you can change overnight, it takes little steps along the way to come to a place of having a healthy relationship with your body image and confidence, and some of you may get to it, and some of you may never reach it. but the point is along the way you heal and somewhat find a source of happiness in the way you feel under your skin.
As someone who is currently on that journey, and will probably be for a long while, trust me when I say it really makes a difference to embrace yourself.
Am I completely happy in how I look? No. Will I ever be completely happy in how I look? Probably Not. But really, a part of it, is realising I never will be and that’s okay too. It’s just that I’ve learnt to prioritise what’s important in my life, and keep at it.
I am, and I will be focusing on prioritising my health, feeling and being healthy is where it’s at, because one thing I’ve really learnt is to differentiate between health and body image. And right now, I just really want everyone to take a step in the direction of self healing and heading towards body confidence because we all deserve to get out of this complicated toxic relationship with our body, and let it become a loving, nurturing, healthy relationship.
It’s your life, live it and love it,
The Girl With A Name x
(PS, I haven’t signed off like this in a while, so we’re bringing this back! And also, for anyone that’s a bit confused about the PCOS (Google it for now), I will be writing a full length piece on it at some point).
The Girl With A Name 