A brutally honest conversation about body love, from a woman who has never been content with how she looks.

At 16, I distinctly remembering thinking I was fat at 140ish pounds. But weight wasn’t the only thing I noticed. My widow’s peak and cow’s lick didn’t match well with my fine, limp hair. I couldn’t quite nail what clothes made me feel good in my skin. My nervously bitten nails looked unfeminine and dirty. The muscles in my stomach were buried. Boobs didn’t fill out a B cup bra. Makeup was a game of experimentation that often ended quickly with impatience and smeared eyeliner. One eye was bigger than the other.

Wishing I could look more like her, or her, or her, was a conversation constantly had in the recesses of my still-developing teenage mind. I looked at my thin friends, magazines, but most of my desire for an attainment of beauty came from an inward dissatisfaction.

Not much has changed

Fast-forward to 35, and the conversation still hasn’t stopped, albeit in whispered, more mature tones.

But the problem is, I’m no longer only comparing myself to people the same age as me, or slightly older, but to those up to 15 years younger than I am.

Women who haven’t had babies (save for the exceptions), whose skin hasn’t yet wrinkled, whose boobs haven’t deflated, whose eyelids haven’t drooped, whose lips haven’t thinned.  

These are the women who have grown up with social media. Who have watched endless TikTok tutorials in their ample amounts of relatively free time about contouring, dressing, eating healthily, exercising perfectly. Who may have more money to throw at beauty treatments and gym memberships because they don’t pay for rent, for children.

As a millennial woman, I’ve got no chance of measuring up to their fresh, supple youth.

Women the same age as me, and older, must be feeling the same, as everyone seems to have medicated age with money. Money on botox, fillers, nips, extensions. On better clothes, better makeup, better toiletries, better highlights, better nails.

We’re getting older, and we don’t like it.  

My neck is getting that chicken-skin, loose look. Wrinkles on the top of my head greet me every time I look in the mirror. Eye shadow can’t be seen as my hooded eyelids close further over my eye. My hands are weathered from an autoimmune condition I can’t fix apart from moving to Miami, or somewhere hot all the time. The double c-section scar at the wobbliest part of my tummy has produced a shelf to place my coffee cup on when I sit. I have counted about 50 grey slivers of hairs dotting my dark chocolate, thinning hair. And oddly, my kneecaps are starting to look like those of a hippopotamus.

No longer youthful by nature, but also not willing to make my appearance a big chunk of my budget. I think every month, I spend an average of £20 on how I look. A trim of the toddler’s amount of hair on my head, some Olay night cream to smooth on my face and neck, Lidl’s knock off shampoo and conditioner, drugstore mascara promising me the lift of false eyelashes, and perhaps a pair of H&M mom shorts that hide my pooch.

A mirror held up to our minds

So, I’m left here in the middle, feeling like I’m about to drop further on the roller coaster of attractiveness I never reached the top of.

To be very honest with you, writing the above has brought little tears to my eyes in the middle of a coffee shop. It’s a brutally honest confession of how I feel about myself, that is internally played on repeat.

I don’t write it for an inbox full of complements. Genuinely, your comments won’t fix me, only I can attempt to do that.

The reason I write this for you is that I suspect my feelings might mirror how countless women feel about themselves. Not everyone, but lots of us.

But in our body positivity movement age, we feel nervous to voice our displeasure. How dare we betray feminism by saying we don’t like our bodies?

If we’re going to ask the question of whether we can truly accept our bodies, then surely, we’ve first got to start by shining a light on how we actually feel. How it feels rather depressing that an internal dialogue of hate is bubbling away within us. That we’d never speak to another woman the way we speak to ourselves about how we look, brutally.

Once that mirror has been held up, then what?

Is there a fix?

Is it possible for a woman who has never loved her body to accept it, even to embrace it?

I can’t say, because I’ve not done it, not yet.

Doesn’t it annoy you when people give blanket answers about what you should do when they don’t even know you? When they give you advice without spending countless hours, days, months, and years studying you?

I won’t do that. But I will say that I’ve done a lot of reading this week online, trying to absorb accounts of both young and middle-aged women who have learned to love their bodies.

Many middle-aged women talked about speaking kindness to their bodies, out loud. Thanking their scars, their wrinkles, their age spots.

Some said they stand in front of mirrors and reflect on how each part of their bodies reminds them of where they have been, what they have enjoyed, and survived.  

Many regretted being so hard of themselves in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, and are determined to speak with compassion over their present bodies so as not to make the same mistake of discontent in the future.

When I read accounts of younger women who said they have learned to love their bodies, I found many of them talked about refusing the patriarchal beauty ideal.

Beauty standards (you need big boobs, skinny waist, smooth skin, glossy, thick hair, and so on) are tools of oppression built into our society and embedded into our brains. Jessica Defino covered this in depth here, and it’s so worth a read.

Younger women’s accounts of enlightenment are full of powerful statements about acceptance and love and pride in their bodies.

But are their attempts to defy patriarchy, sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and capitalism, to love their bodies, just words? Do they really love their bodies, with all their quirks? Or are they just talking the talk in hopes of deliverance from negative self-talk?

Who f*cking knows. They seem happier with their bodies than I do with mine, so I’m going to learn from what they’re doing – positive talk to drown out the negative.

My way forward

Here is what I do think I know.

We live in a culture that prizes a beauty standard and constantly pumps out this standard through social media, and classic media.

Our only hope of body love is to speak to ourselves the opposite of what is being preached. If there is no defiance, we’ll lose the battle and hate our bodies, constantly covering up this hatred with money, a capitalist society’s utopia. Money makers want you to feel unhappy with your body so that you pay to fix it, filling up their pockets with your body displeasure.

But hatred of our bodies also keeps us entwined in ourselves, rather than the world around us. When we are caught in an endless spiral of negative self-talk, we ignore the real problems in this world. The problems we can valiantly work to solve with freed up mind space undistracted by our temporary bodies.

Maybe the answer lies in the adage of ‘fake it till you make it’ – telling ourselves what we love about our bodies until we eventually believe those things to be true.

Maybe we need to come off social media to silence the images of what we need to look like to be happy.

Maybe we need to stand in front of our mirrors each morning and evening, studying our naked bodies, speaking compassion and thanks for all they have done for us.

Maybe we need to learn what is going on with women around the world to widen our perspectives on what really matters.

Maybe even, we should miss a nail appointment or avoid buying a new product, just as a means of experimenting with our thoughts, our beliefs about who we are, why we spend.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m by no means saying women shouldn’t spend money to make themselves look a certain way. To each, her own. Truly. I’m just wondering if rather than being pulled along with the tide, we should stop and consider why we do what we do. Get a bit introspective, analytical, curious, about why we do what we do.

So, can we love our bodies, if we presently don’t? I think so. I think there is hope. But I doubt it will happen without work, without grit, without determination to defy.