Why I Stopped Talking Badly About Myself

graphic by samantha currier

When I was younger, my favorite thing about myself was that I was skinny. I didn’t give it much thought until I noticed how often people commented on it; it was the part of myself that I received the most compliments on, seemingly the most valuable fact about me. I grew to learn that society rewards people for being thin. I remember most of these comments coming from older women who had told me, “enjoy it while it lasts,” or “I wish I could still look that skinny.” 

I began to worry: what would happen if I couldn’t be skinny anymore? Could I still be beautiful? 

I recall one time at dinner when one of my dad’s friends said that boys would be knocking down the door to date me one day and that his daughter didn’t get many invitations to dates because of her size. Adults commented on my eating habits, advising me to enjoy the foods I like before my metabolism slows down and it becomes more difficult to lose weight. 

I wanted to hold onto what I thought could make me beautiful. I wanted to have control. 

As someone who is thinner, I have never faced any discrimination based on the size of my body, and I’ve benefitted from its privileges. I was one of the lucky ones. However, people’s assumptions about thinness opened up a tidal wave of unsolicited comments about my body; telling me I looked anorexic, assuming I was happy and healthy just because I was able to fit the barely attainable level of skinny. 

This was before I had even gone through puberty, which was most likely stunted because of the weight I refused to gain. I began a vicious cycle of stepping on the scale weekly to see how long I could go without reaching a certain numerical weight, trying to see how little I could consume each day, sometimes only eating carrots for a meal, and, of course, feeling like garbage every day. My body was punishing me for all the ways I tried to harm myself by denying it of its needs. According to my doctor, I was malnourished. 

Once my lifestyle became unsustainable and I had enough of feeling exhausted and nauseated, I began to eat more and grew into a body that no longer belonged to a child. I realized that the unattainable beauty standards in place are so much more being skinny. Body types have been used as trends for our consumption, shifting from the “heroin chic” thin 90’s supermodels to the influencer or Instagram baddies who have perfectly-sized round butts and boobs with inexplicably teeny waists accompanied by flat stomachs. Aside from unattainable body types, many other beauty standards are eurocentric and reinforce white supremacy. Now there were even more things to worry about. 

I didn’t realize how much people’s comments about their bodies influenced the way I viewed my own, and I didn’t realize how voicing insecurities about my own body could be unfair projections onto others. 

One day when I was in high school still trying to hold on to an identity based on my appearance, I looked down at myself and said, “I feel fat today.” 

My best friend replied with hurt in her voice, “if you think you’re fat, what do you think about me?” I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t like that, that nobody’s worth is based on their size, and that she would always be beautiful to me. But nothing sounded right when I tried to explain that I only hold these toxic expectations for myself. What I should’ve said instead was, “I’m struggling with the way I look today.” In reality, I was looking for validation and selfishly looking for someone to refute my own claims. 

Equating fatness to something bad or undesirable is straight-up not okay. I was giving voice to the internalized fatphobia that had made me miserable for so many years. My insecurities weren’t just hurting me anymore--they were hurting the people around me. The more I gave them legitimacy by expressing them as true and inherently bad, the more I believed it.  At that moment, I realized that I would never speak about someone else the way that I spoke about myself...so I stopped talking badly about myself.

Over time, I realized how normalized and ingrained in our society for women to bring up their insecurities or talk badly about their bodies. It seems like a natural part of existing at this point. This isn’t our fault--women have been conditioned from the time of birth to pick apart any imperfections so beauty can be sold back to us. Our insecurities fuel industries dependent on them; with billions of dollars, at that. Insecurity can be so easy to feed off of and it can be so easy to project onto other people. Just like the infamous scene in Mean Girls, one comment about physical insecurity can devolve into a whole conversation about how much we hate ourselves. 

Shit-talking your own body has become especially popular on social media in this age of self-deprecation. There are endless TikTok trends that focus on highlighting beauty standards, like the “side profile” challenge where attractive people turn to the side to showcase their chiseled protruding jawlines. As a result, many others spoke out about how much they hated their “soft” jawlines. I didn’t realize that my big cheeks and soft jawline that I got from my mom could be such flaws in the eyes of others. There are also trends to show off a “back profile” or what people see when looking at someone from behind. Sometimes, talking about the ways we are unhappy with our own bodies makes others notice things about themselves that they never even considered to be bad. 

Unlearning years of fatphobia, capitalism, and beauty as self-worth is a strenuous process. One of the easiest ways to combat self-hatred that corporations profit on is to stop contributing to it. I stopped saying, “Oh, I wish I could eat that '' and making self-deprecating comments to find validation. I stopped trying to look in the mirror every day and convince myself that I am the most gorgeous person in the world. Because, honestly, most of the time I don’t feel that way. And I don’t really want to. I want to move through this world knowing my worth and knowing that my appearance has nothing to do with it.  

The most freeing thing is to be able to view my body not as an object of beauty, but as a canvass of my creativity, an ever-changing being, and the vessel that holds my most important ideas. It’s the same body that allows me to write, walk through nature, and store every emotion I’ve ever felt. Now that I can appreciate what my body does for me, I’ve never liked myself more. 

We could all benefit from being nicer to our bodies and not talking so badly about them when they do so much for us. So stop talking so badly about yourself! It’s not an easy fix to unlearn the ways the world has conditioned us to make us feel bad about ourselves all the time and it’s totally easier said than done, but loving yourself will set you free.