To All the Body I’ve Never Loved Before
It’s the oldest phrase in the book, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” and I imagine you haven’t heard it since about middle school. If you’re anything like me, I bet you’ve spent most of your life thinking this applies to what you say to others, and nothing to do with the words you exchange with yourself. I’m going to go out on a whim and say that most of the things you say to yourself, you wouldn’t dare say to anyone else, much less a friend or someone you care deeply about. So riddle me this, why is it okay when we say them to ourselves?
I am someone who absolutely loves handwritten notes and words of affirmation (aka my love language), which means this is how I show and receive love. I would never in a million years give someone a letter tearing them down for their body and all the flaws that I see, or literally say anything negative in a letter of affirmation. Nor would I be thrilled to receive a letter that said the same about me. So again I ask the question, why is it okay for us to do this to ourselves?
As I’ve gone back and read my old journals, I have decided that the majority of these entries can be best classified as hate letters to myself. Now why on earth would I sit there and write hate letters to my own self about my own body? Believe me, it wasn’t intentional, it was simply natural - natural enough to become an unbreakable habit. The things I wrote simply reflected the way I truly felt about myself and how I viewed my body when I looked in the mirror. I was never intentionally trying to tear myself down, I was just so convinced that my perception was also my reality. I couldn’t separate the lies from the truth because I had been talking to myself this way for years and years.
For example, in the fall of 2017 during the middle of my junior season, I wrote these words:
“If I don’t have my skinny a** body, what do I even have? Nothing. I think about food so much that it’s annoying and causes me to overthink. I wish I was normal and would just eat whatever I want and not worry so much about it. I don’t love my body right now, in fact I don’t even like it.”
You're probably thinking that this sounds incredibly dark and dramatic, and I agree. But it's also exactly how I felt at this time in my life. Reading back this entry made me realize a few things:
1. how terribly I not only thought of my body, but also how I talked to myself; 2. how much I actually believed the words I wrote; 3. the long lasting impact the words we say to ourselves can have; and 4. I’ve spent the better part of my life believing that if I don’t have a certain body, I have nothing to offer.
No one ever actually said these words to me. They only held so much power in my mind because I allowed them to, which meant I was the only one who could undo the damage. Since I wrote those sentences I have had to work on actively unlearning and unbelieving that they hold any truth. I don’t see myself being able to write those words down today in complete sentences, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t days where I don’t have similar thoughts. This shows that growth and recovery aren’t linear, and they take conscious time and effort. I didn’t wake up the following day suddenly feeling happy in my body. It’s taken over 3 years of waking up and actively trying to talk to and treat my body better, and I didn't truly start trying to change until about a year ago. I’ve failed more days at this than I’ve gotten right, if I’m being honest.
Like I said, this isn’t a transformation that happens overnight and there’s honestly no secret formula to changing the way you think about and talk to yourself. It's been very hard to change (or even budge), but I want to share something I've been doing to help with this process. One of the main things I have found to be helpful is writing positive affirmations to myself. I try to write 3 per day, and they look something like this:
“I am a good friend and care about my friends deeply,” “I am a hard worker,” & “I love my height.”
At first I had to convince myself that these positive affirmations were actually my truth, and it felt uncomfortable to speak nicely to myself. But guess what, it got easier. Sometimes none of them are about my physical appearance, and they’re strictly based on my qualities as a human being. Other days, I like to acknowledge the hard work that I do put in, and will hype myself up with compliments to my body, because someone's gotta do it, ya know?
There isn’t a right or wrong way to do this exercise, and you’ll know what you want to say to yourself when you pause and take the time to do so. I like to do this in the morning when I first wake up along with writing 5 things I'm grateful for - it sets a positive tone for the day. This definitely won’t solve all your problems, but it’s a very good place to start.
I do have good and bad news for you. The good news is whatever mindset struggles you’re facing are not permanent. The bad news is that the shift to a more positive mindset and self talk won’t happen instantly, BUT it definitely won’t happen if you never decide to make a change. It might take a couple months, or maybe a couple years depending on the length of time that your habit has been ingrained in you. All you can do is take this 24 hours at a time and try to win the daily battle. I continue to wrestle with negative body image more than I would like to admit, but I've found it helpful to try to contain those thoughts into moments, rather than letting them linger throughout my entire day.
I know that most of the time, these negative body image thoughts or feelings are temporary, and they do not define me or how I view myself as a whole person. I’m still working on retraining my mind, and I have a feeling I’ll never be done with this process, nor do I ever want to be. I am not where I want to be in terms of the way I view and talk to myself, but I am so thankful I’m no longer spending my spare time writing hate letters to my body.