It has been a while since I wrote about this stuff. If I’m being entirely honest (which I try my best to be) as soon as I posted this blog on Facebook and actually had people enjoy it and respond to it, the insecure, terrified part of me freaked out under the pressure of actually having some readers, and it gave me writer’s block for weeks. Or not exactly block. I’ve had plenty of ideas, and plenty to say, but the words are sometimes hard to put together. So I’ve just decided to go for it. Put something out there, maybe it will help get me going again. Oh, the never ending doubt of a person who doubts themselves.

I started to write this blog in the hopes of starting a discussion about societal standards of beauty, and when I started I wasn’t really sure what form it would take, as is the case with how I do most things in life. Heart’s in the right place, but where to start?

Now I know, I want it to be accessible and relatable. I want to express feelings that I know many women feel. But for me the best way to do that is to get personal. It is the way that I communicate. Share your own experiences in an honest and open way and hope that it will speak to others. And so I hope I can do this without it just becoming a sad diary of my insecurities and fears. If it ever seems that way, bear with me, I will usually have a point to make at some stage. Because we all have insecurities, both physically and mentally, but I feel that we live in a culture which encourages us to only show our best side, our prettiest picture, our happiest memories. With the advent of social media and selfies, everyone can project an image of themselves to the world, and whether that image is accurate or representative is becoming increasingly irrelevant to many. You may wonder at the importance of this, and think that it is not a big deal, it’s not real life and everyone knows that. And rationally, consciously, most of us do. But I wonder what insidious damage is being done to our psyches, both collective and individual.

For this new blog, I had the idea of going home to my Mum’s house and digging out any photos I had of myself from my teenage years/early twenties, as it was only in my early twenties that I started to use make up. Now, I grew up just before/in the middle of the advent of mobile phones, computers and social media. It all began when I was a teenager but hadn’t really taken hold yet. These days I imagine a teenager probably has hundreds of photos of themselves, plastered everywhere in the hyper-reality, or even just hidden in secret selfies on their phones. We now live in a time where capturing our own image is a much more acceptable pursuit than it was ten, twenty years ago. This is possibly more to do with camera phones and the ease with which we can now photograph things than any more sinister reason, although as to the effects this narcissistic culture is having on our collective psyche, we can only wonder (well I can, because I’m not a psychologist). And wonder I will, but for now, back to talking about myself (see what I did there?). 

Not only did I grow up before camera phones, I was also rather camera shy given the fact that I thought I looked like an ugly monster, like so many teenagers the world over. I avoided cameras as much as possible, and when I was captured I often looked tortured, angry or just plain awkward, and I hated every single one as every photo of myself just proved to me what I already knew to be the sad truth, that I was ugly.

I went looking for the photos in my Mum’s house, assuming I would cringe and feel embarrassed to put them online (all in the name of journalism), but a very surprising thing happened, something which has shown me how far my self-esteem has come, but also how much damage was done to me by the power of the media telling me how I should look, and the isolation I felt from my peers. Looking at them again, over ten years on, I thought I looked fucking adorable in every single photo. Even the ones where I’m spotty and angry. Even though I’m uncomfortable. And it is not about looking pretty, or not pretty. It is because it is me. A little bit of my history. A time I never thought I would want to remember. I can see the happy(ish) individual I am today in that girl that I know was so full of sadness and doubt. And yes, I know it’s a typical thing for people to look back on old photos of themselves and realise they weren’t as fat as they imagined,

but this was different. It wasn’t just that I looked at the teenage me and saw how un-monster like I really was, and that it had been a figment of my low self-esteem and a reaction to being bullied. It was that I could see myself in that girl. See how far she’s come, and that the person that I am now was there all along, just crushed under low self-esteem and self-hatred. Now I’m not saying ‘society’ is to blame for all of this, but I know I would have had a much happier adolescence if I hadn’t spent most of my time thinking I wasn’t a ‘real girl’ because I didn’t conform to what the standard of beauty and femininity was. It horrifies me now to think about how much I cared. How much I longed to be ‘pretty’ while still refusing to try to fit the ideal. For longing to be accepted for who I was, longing to be who I was, while hating myself for being myself in the first place. It seems ridiculous to me now that I cared at all.

But in another way it doesn’t, because I remember how shy, terrified and hopeful I was when I went to secondary school, naively remembering teen films I’d seen where everyone got along and you made life long friends (I was weird, and watched Grease a lot as a child). When I think of that timid little girl starting school with all those hopes and dreams, and I think of what happened to her, how cynical and angry she became because of ridiculous standards that were bigger than her or her bullies, my heart breaks a little for her, and for other girls going through the same thing right now, and for every girl that has gone through it. And as I have said, I can only speak from my own experience, but I would say that every girl will have their own stories of trying to fit these standards, even the girls who picked on me in school. Because why did they pick on me in the first place? Because of these ridiculous standards. Where did they learn these? The media? Their families?

In this way we are all victims of something much bigger than ourselves. Because you may read this and wonder if any of this really matters, when there are so many terrible things happening in the world, things arguably more pressing than this. But to that I say these are the things that shape our lives, and how we feel about ourselves and others. And isn’t that important? The tired phrase that you can’t love others until you can love yourself is tired for a reason, and in a world where perception and representation has taken on a heightened role, and vanity and power are very much interconnected; I think we must look back at ourselves, through no filters, no sepia haze, and not through the eyes of others. Just look, and like what we see. How many of us can say we can?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhNupae2RIE