Can we ever like how we look?
Maybe, just maybe….
Does your appearance feel like an unending battle that you’ll never win? If so, I hear you.
Perhaps it stems from childhood taunts about your red hair or maybe you suffered with a skin condition (the kind I wrote about for The Guardian this week) and people made fun of you. Are you struggling with getting older in a society that prizes youthful female beauty above all else? Or is there something about your appearance that society has said isn’t attractive and that has made you feel consistently othered your entire life?
I know, that’s a lot to think about, and none of it is easy.
There were times when the pages of my teenage diary repeatedly read; “I’d rather die than be alive and this ugly.” Then as a young adult my Google search history was revealing as I constantly looked for answers to questions like ‘how to be pretty?’, ’do I need a tummy tuck?’ or the more hopeful ‘how do I like my appearance?’
As for the latter, the online content was often pretty stale. The advice often consisted of dry ‘expert tips’, unrelatable science and well, stuff that just didn’t work for me. Though I’m not fixed by any means ,I do wage less of a mental war on myself every time I look in the mirror. So if you’re looking for some practical ways to think about your appearance in a new light, then this is the very basic formula that has helped me - and that I talk about in much more detail, with more context and lots of lols, in my book UGLY.
Really think about who is making you feel bad?
To be fair, Spongebob does have boundaries…
I write about the concept of ‘second hand anxiety’ a lot in UGLY because I started to recognise just how much I was affected by things that other people said in my company. What is it? it’s anxiety that comes from other people and sort of sticks to you like a blanket of doom. This could be a mate constantly saying how much they hate their weight, a colleague bemoaning how ‘old they look’, or a family member (maybe even a child) saying something about your appearance. All of it stores up to make us cumulatively question our self worth and appearance and it starts to affect how we see ourselves in the mirror.
It’s not just people causing this anxiety either - TV, radio, social media (especially that one as we’re in a hypnotic brain state when we scroll so pick up a LOT subconsciously) - can also make you feel like you should be focussed or worried about an area of your appearance that didn’t necessarily bother you before. So, the first step is working out who and what is making you feel that way.TRY THIS!
Play detective for a week and keep a list of notes in your phone or notebook each time something or somebody makes you feel even the tiniest bit shit about how you look. Even if you just do that it’s massive because you then get to decide how to deal with it for the sake of your own mental health. The next step is creating a plan of how you minimise those influences or put boundaries in place to ensure this second hand anxiety doesn’t keep affecting you. That might involve cunning ways to change the convo when it comes up or practising a gentle way to tell a mate that her words are starting to affect you. Other steps might be ways to limit social media if you find it super addictive (I’ve had to do that myself btw.)Ask yourself ‘What have I really given up?’
I spent YEARS doing various kinds of therapy to try to rewire my brain to like my appearance, but there was one thing that clicked and made me realise I was being massively mugged off (that’s ‘hoodwinked’ for any non-uk readers.) What was that you ask? It was realising - when writing and researching my book - that the concepts of ugly and beautiful are legit just societal constructs. They are not universal truths. I was watching The Super Models documentary last night and it really hit home that if they’d been born 20 years earlier, they likely wouldn't have been considered beautiful at all.
It’s worth really sitting with that idea, because if the concepts of what’s pretty and ugly change so much, and so radically, then we have to be able to separate our self esteem from that - because what’s beautiful now might not be so in a year or a decade. Part of really getting clear on this concept was looking at what I’d given up because society had told me I wasn't pretty/acceptable enough.
TRY THIS!
This is tough - so go easy. But get that notebook out, and write down the heading, ‘If I was thinner/had bigger boobs/looked another way I would have…’ Then, create a numbered list of everything you’d have done or want to do if you’d looked another way. Here’s a few of my own examples; I would have worn a bikini like my thin mates, I would have gone on beach holidays instead of avoiding them, I’d have embraced my curly hair, I would have spent my teens/young adulthood automatically believing romantic advances were real (rather than automatically assuming they were a prank). Looking at what you’ve missed out on, or how you’re limiting yourself made me feel genuine grief. It broke my heart writing this list; none of us deserved or deserve to be made to feel like this. If you can, think about doing some of those things as you are now, regardless of what you look like.
Who benefits from us hating how we look?
We grow up with a set of beliefs about how we think we should look to fit the beauty standard. But where do those beliefs come from? Who created them? And crucially - who benefits from us hating our appearance?
Here’s a few of the main culprits for you - capitalism and multiple industries benefit because the more we hate ourselves, the more we’ll try to fix the issue and spend money doing so. We seldom think about it like that, but that is the truth; diets, Skims, cosmetic surgery, tweakments and the parts of the beauty, health, wellness, fashion and food industries often sell us second hand anxiety, because they want to sell us stuff.
Who else benefits from us disliking our appearance? Well, people in our lives might; a controlling partner who comments on our looks to keep our self esteem low and stop us from leaving them. Somebody on a dating app you reject might say something about how you look to make themselves feel better (I’ve had a fair few ‘you’re a fat bitch anyway,’ after saying no to dates.) Patriarchy - still looming and ever-present - also benefits if women stay small, obsess about their appearance and take up less physical, financial and political space (and is very closely linked with capitalism.) White supremacy (also linked closely with capitalism) has historically benefitted from keeping its reign on beauty standards ensuring that Eurocentric beauty was the only standard to aspire to. And to sell everything from whitening creams to hair straightening products and cosmetic surgical procedures to women of colour.
TRY THIS!
Write a list of what you think about your appearance in quite a simplified way. For example, ‘I look old,’ ‘I weigh too much,’ ‘I hate my freckles’ etc. Then, next to each one, answer these questions and really think about them: 1) Why do you think you look XXX? 2) Who benefits from me believing that? Doing this made me really angry; and made me more conscious of what was really being sold to me - whether it was a trend on Tik Tok or an airbrushed advert. If you’re struggling with this one I’ve done a lot of the answering/research for you in UGLY, it’s literally why I wrote it, so check it out.
If you’re thinking - holy shit this is a lot, and super intense, I wholeheartedly agree.
So I also highly recommend that you do the above with a support system; people you can really talk to, a therapist, a journal - whatever you need. This stuff is very confronting; I had therapy during writing UGLY (talk therapy and EMDR has worked best for me) which gave me the space to verbally process these experiences too. I also spoke to friends who got it, my then partner was a sounding board and I also journalled every day to get stuff out of my head.
I wanted to do this as a reference point (available to all) to provide a little help for anyone wanting to feel happier about how they look and to finally make peace with how they look in the mirror. Let me know if you think you’ll try it - or if anything has worked for you too!
