Something that I find extremely tragic is that almost every one of us feels ashamed or unhappy about our bodies in some way. I have never known a girl who doesn’t have something about her body she’d like to change, and I’m sure most men feel the same way. At some point in our lives, if not for all of our lives, we are haunted by the parts of our bodies that we don’t like, whether it’s our legs, hips, ears, acne, hair, or even the way we smile or the way our face gets pink after exercising.
For me, self-image negativity comes from seeing a picture of myself. I walk around all day not knowing more than what window reflections and bathroom mirrors tell me about my appearance, and I’m usually happy with seeing myself only a couple times throughout the day. Sometimes I’d rather trust that I look the way I imagine myself to, and be blissfully ignorant of how I actually look. But when I see candid pictures taken of me by friends or family, I am always surprised with what I see. I think, “does my rear really look like that when I stand that way??” or, “is that what I look like from a side angle when I am looking down?” And then I immediately feel silly for caring what my side-angle-looking-down posture is like. Other people don’t think I look strange because that’s what I look like all the time to them, but to see myself from that candid, cruelly objective point of view of the camera, it’s like I’ve never seen myself before. Suddenly my rear doesn’t look as trim as I imagine it does, and my hair isn’t as perfect as I think it is, because the camera tells me things that the mirror doesn’t.
When I was younger, another huge source of self-image negativity was shopping. When I was 13, and had just started to go shopping, I went to all the popular stores and tried on the clothes that were prominently featured on the mannequins. Time and time again I suffered crushing disappointment when the clothes I tried on didn’t look good on me. It baffled me that the clothing looked so good on the mannequins and the magazine models, but they looked horrible on me. Shirts were too tight around my chest but too loose around my waist, pants were too tight in the butt and hips but too loose around the waist, and dresses either swallowed me whole or squeezed my chest so hard I looked like I was about to attend a Renaissance convention. I began to believe that my body was “wrong” because of how hard it was to find clothes that flattered my body.
Between clothing stores and advertising, it’s no wonder that most of us hate parts of our bodies. We’re raised to believe that physical perfection is something to strive for, so that we always have a hanging carrot of motivation for self-improvement, exercise, and healthy eating. But we are never able to attain perfection, because it only exists in the carefully manicured images of mass media. Even the models in the pictures aren’t perfect, because they don’t walk around with airbrushed faces. The body perfection that we value as a society is impractically out-of-reach because it’s impossible to imitate these mass-mediated images of beauty, and it’s unhealthy to want to change our genes and our appearances. We are so unfair to ourselves by collectively believing a narrow range of body types to be “better,” because this is just not true.
Even without mass media, I think we’d still be unsatisfied with our bodies. I’m fairly certain that women have been despising their bodies since the beginning of human kind, way before magazines, billboards, and TV. We would still think that the grass is greener on the other side because we are not taught to appreciate ourselves. Self-appreciation is too often mistaken as narcissism, and we are much more comfortable with self-deprecation and sarcasm. We build self-esteem merely as a tool for success and achievement in the world, but our confidence is often hollow because it lacks unconditional self-love and self-appreciation. We seek legitimacy in society through our status, achievement, and appearance, when we should attain legitimacy in our own eyes by realizing that without our resumes and our reflections, we are worthy of love. We need to change the way we look at and think about our bodies, and give ourselves the appreciation and respect we deserve. Self-love in the face of our imperfections is more beautiful than any image of perfection we may idolize.
