Body image issues (or lack thereof)
Jan. 12th, 2022 08:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jajalalaHad a conversation with a dear friend (and some others) and it's rough to see them suffering from certain body image issues... I never know what to say, since I very much missed the boat on absorbing a lot of those societal/social pressures. My family never really made comments about our bodies, and I'm a lil predisposed towards indifference when it comes to peer acceptance. Plus my body doesn't have many characteristics that folks/society looks down on, so those sorts of judgements have almost never been brought to the forefront of my mind.
Meanwhile I have close friends who talk about hating their bodies, even when they know they shouldn't or agree fully with body-positive movements... Intellectually nowadays they've read all those tumblr posts like "love your body for what it can do" or "everyone is beautiful" etc and agree with the sentiments, but they still privately struggle after absorbing a lot of messages from society (or their mothers -_-) from a young age.
I listen, but I never know what to say when they're struggling. I don't want to do a knee-jerk "You're not fat!" or "You're actually gorgeous!" that treats their real insecurities as compliment-fishing attempts (and at least one of those friends has explicitly told me she likes that I let her express her insecurities without immediately shutting her down and pretending that society doesn't judge certain body types), but it's hard to see them and love them and legitimately think they're beautiful, even in a "non-conventional" way, but be unable to make them see themselves in the way I see them.
Meanwhile I have close friends who talk about hating their bodies, even when they know they shouldn't or agree fully with body-positive movements... Intellectually nowadays they've read all those tumblr posts like "love your body for what it can do" or "everyone is beautiful" etc and agree with the sentiments, but they still privately struggle after absorbing a lot of messages from society (or their mothers -_-) from a young age.
I listen, but I never know what to say when they're struggling. I don't want to do a knee-jerk "You're not fat!" or "You're actually gorgeous!" that treats their real insecurities as compliment-fishing attempts (and at least one of those friends has explicitly told me she likes that I let her express her insecurities without immediately shutting her down and pretending that society doesn't judge certain body types), but it's hard to see them and love them and legitimately think they're beautiful, even in a "non-conventional" way, but be unable to make them see themselves in the way I see them.
