Body insecurities don’t just go away.
Mastering self-love doesn’t mean the problem is solved.
People make overcoming body insecurities sound so easy. As if one day, if you wake up and start loving yourself, everything will be alright. As though years of feeling inadequate will suddenly turn into love and positivity.
No one ever tells us that body insecurities are a roller-coaster of positive and negative emotions. There isn’t a happy destination at the end of that roller-coaster. Instead, there is a process of learning to love. We learn to love our selves, love ourselves, slip into negative thoughts, and learn to love ourselves again. We do this over and over again until learning to love ourselves again after slipping, is easier than the last time.
There are times, however, when we slip real bad. For instance, I might wake up loving how my face looks one day, and the very next day, I want to change everything about my face. Sometimes it gets so bad that I seriously start contemplating getting a plastic surgery to fix my imperfect features. I was even about start googling the rates for a surgery when I decided to sit down, and introspect what I was just about to do.
When people talk about “self-love” or “acceptance” they make it sound like an end product but in my experience, it is not. I have been dealing with body image issues ever since I was a pre-teen. By the time I reached high school, I realized that there was no single definition of beauty and that all bodies are beautiful in their own ways. Happy ending, right? No.
At least once everyday, I look in the mirror, I find something to correct.
My chin is too round.
My nose is too droopy.
My eyes are small and my sparse eyebrows aren’t helping.
When I was in middle school and high school, I tried all sorts of exercises to fix my body — neck lengthening exercises (yup), nose straightening exercises, acne clearing remedies, etc.
I thought my body was such an abomination that even when someone gave a a compliment, I thought it was only out of pity. In fact, my own self-esteem was so low that the first time I felt that I can look beautiful, is when a boy told me I was cute.
Things got better when I got to college, though. As I saw other women embracing their shapes as they come, I began seeing my body as a beautiful one instead of one that constantly needed improvements. Also, it made me realize how much of an impact representation can have on body image. As I saw more and more women who had the same body type as me flaunting it rather than hiding it, I became more inclined to do the same.
It didn’t end there, sadly. I did not wake up everyday feeling ready to walk the runway. Some days, I would hold up the fat beneath my thighs in order to picture how great it would be if my legs were more toothpick-like.
In my rational mind, I knew that ideas of beauty were promoted by big businesses and brands who gain profit by making people feel inadequate. There was never a definition of beautiful. It was invented to make money, sell products, and let certain people feel superior to others. But when you spend your prime childhood years hearing from advertisements, television, movies, and society that the way you look is not good enough, it stays with you for a long time.
There is never going to be a time when I am not going to succumb to negative body image. And I am pretty sure a lot of other people with body image issues can agree. It is not a mountain that you climb over and get it over with. It is a fight. We have to fight negative thoughts every day to feel comfortable in our own skin. We have to see biased advertisements everyday that tell us we are not adequate and remind ourselves that it is not true. We have to be the one who tells their friend that they are beautiful when they say they don’t like the way they look.
Most importantly, when you are slipping into that dark place of feeling ugly or not enough, it is essential to remember that it will pass. The I hate how my ___ looks, will pass. The next day, or after a few days, you’ll begin to love that very feature of yours, or another feature. The important thing is that you will make it out stronger than the last time.
