Love Is Great, But Sometimes Acceptance Is Enough: On Body Neutrality
By Libby Moore
When I was 13, I would spend most of my Sunday doing my hair for the upcoming week. Washing, blow-drying, twisting it up in rollers, sitting under the salon-hood that I had found in my grandma’s basement, and finally, obsessively doing touch-ups with a flat iron. Best case scenario, there would be no trace of these curls that so starkly set me apart from my peer’s naturally straight or wavy hair. Worst case, it would rain on Monday and all of my efforts to make myself beautiful would be gone the second moisture hit my head, and I would feel like a frizzy, ugly mess again. As my friends began to fill out in middle-school while I remained tall and slim, I couldn’t help but feel like Slenderman whenever we posed for pictures to post on Facebook. My nose became a source of embarrassment. I was obsessing over everything I wasn’t, and picking at everything I was. Even though I hated my body because it didn’t look like my friends’, because I didn’t attract the boys that I wished I did, I was in denial about my poor relationship to my body. I thought that if I didn’t have an eating disorder that looked like the kind I had witnessed growing up, the self-loathing I had for my appearance wasn’t an issue.
Over the years, I started to see beauty standards change in the media. I finally saw people who looked like me on TV, in magazines. More importantly at the time, the boys I liked actually liked me back. I gained a new-found confidence in my body as it finally felt appreciated, and therefore allowed me to love it too. More types of bodies and faces are being shown now. Not in mockery like those I had come face-to-face with on cruel tabloid magazine covers as a child as I waited behind my mom in the grocery store check-out line, but as representations of what is beautiful. It encourages us to love ourselves because every body is beautiful.
But despite this, the old childhood wounds never really healed, the cut of rejection, an absent-minded comparison with a stranger online would cause them to open again. To me, the temporary peace I found through the body positivity movement was skin deep and fleeting. The overarching and well-meaning message of loving one's body still focuses on the way it looks. It centers the individual’s ability to receive love and self-acceptance on the concept of desirability, even if it is desirability from the self. Each time I would catch myself criticizing my looks, I felt a tinge of failure, a cognitive dissonance between the beauty I should recognize in the mirror, and my inability to shake comparisons stemming from the ever-changing beauty standards we’re constantly inundated with.
I can’t lie and say that my looks don’t matter to me, they do. But the aesthetics of my body can no longer determine how much I can be at peace with myself. When I discovered the concept of body neutrality, I felt a light switch on inside of me. This movement shares body positivity’s goal of improving the mental health of the individual through self-acceptance but differs in that it de-centers placing value judgements on the body. My body simply is. It’s what I grew into, the most visible part of me, but it doesn’t make up all of me, and therefore can’t be the reason I feel good or bad about myself. Now, when the body is focused on, it’s with the drive to do things for my body rather than how can my body contribute to my self-esteem. Function over form. Self-worth is instead developed through my friendships, my compassion for others, trusting my life experiences and the skills I’ve worked hard to improve. More intently, I’ve started to listen to my body instead of forcing it to bend to my negative thoughts. Feeling good is the priority, looking “good” is a plus. I eat foods that I love, walk in my neighbourhood, swim in cold water, laugh until I feel my sides cramp up, all for my body and for myself. Practicing square breathing as my therapist called it, inhaling, holding the breath, exhaling and holding again all for four counts which allows me to help my body when the buzz of anxiety begins to take hold in my chest and stomach. Even when my body acts in ways that are disagreeable in the moment, it has my best interest at heart, and so, I should have it’s as well. There is no greater romance than between a heart that beats for you, and only you. ◆