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In my personal opinion, I
believe that a lot of people suffer from this problem where they honestly can’t
say anything good about themselves without making it into a joke. For example, just
the other night, I asked my housemates (H) and (S) about what they thought
their best features were.
Their response:
(H) – “Hmm? I don’t know...
But I do wish my eyes were a bit bigger.”
(S) – “I honestly don’t know. I think I’m kind of
weird. I don’t know why people like me, even.”
They both responded with a vaguely
amused tone and a kind of casualness that made it hard for listeners to say or
do anything but shrug their shoulders in a ‘What can you do?’ fashion.
In all honesty, their
replies weren’t anything I haven’t heard of before. We hear this sort of talk
almost everywhere; in secondary schools, universities even at work or in malls
and cafes.
We seem to have this habit of downplaying ourselves to the point
where it’s much easier to list out a series of what’s wrong or bad with us
rather than what’s good.
So why do we do this?
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According to Harriet Morris, the author of ‘The A – Z of Better Body Image: 26 Ways to
Look Great and Feel More Confident’, we now live in an era where (with the
help of photo editing tools such as Photoshop) we can enhance and beautify any
image to make it look perfect.
In addition, our media has also become heavily
saturated with visuals of ‘airbrushed perfectionism’, and our own dependency on
the internet has made comparing our bodies to these digitally altered images a
social norm.
Long story short, we want a better body image because
we crave for the confidence a ‘perfectly toned, tanned, beach ready body’ can
supposedly give us. At least, that’s what I feel we’ve been led to believe.
Of course, when we compare ourselves to a standard of
beauty that not even supermodels can achieve naturally, we often find ourselves
extremely lacking.
‘My thighs are too big.’
‘I hate my freckles!’
‘My body is too chubby.’
We end up finding more and more things about our body
that don’t match up with the media’s idea of perfection. Our self-confidence
also nosedives because without really realising it, we’ve been indoctrinate to
think that if we don’t look like supermodels then we’re automatically
considered ugly.
What we have to remember is that ‘body image’ doesn’t
equal ‘body confidence’. Unlike trying to achieve an impossible body image, you
can actually develop body confidence. Just like its okay that you’re not 100%
confident about getting an A on a test, you just need to be confident enough.
It’s okay not to love every part of your body 24/7. We all have
those days. Days when we wake up feeling so 'meh' that getting out of bed seems much
harder than helping Mulan defeat the Hun army. What’s important is that we
should detach ourselves from the toxic idea that the doctored images we see
online are what we need to strive to achieve.
