I’ve never been any good at math, but I’ve always been an expert at dividing myself. I divided myself into categories of like and dislike, love and hate. I did this until I was just the sum of it all. Disliking myself became something I could solve. The media around me seemed to agree with me. The billboards I pass when I drive tell me that if I don’t like my nose, I can fix it with a nose job. YouTube advertisements that play before every video I watch remind me that if I don’t like my body, I can fix it by joining Noom for as little as $10 a month. It became an equation, one that was simple enough for me to understand. If you don’t like “x,” fix it with “y.” I was stuck in a loop, wondering how many grueling hours at the gym it would take for the equation’s application to my life to lose meaning, until there was no “x” for “y” to fix.
I realized that the world was attempting to capitalize on my own self-hate, selling me solutions to the problems they created. It was during this time that I, through various social media platforms, discovered the body positivity movement. At first glance, it seemed like this community was everything I needed. This social movement focused on acceptance and love of all bodies. This movement rallied against unrealistic body expectations for women. However, as time went on, it became increasingly difficult to see myself within the movement. The movement was created for and by communities with marginalized bodies. I felt I was taking up space in a community that wasn’t meant for me. It also became nearly impossible to live out the movement’s self-love mission in my own life. Most days, I didn’t even like myself. How was it possible to feel positive when the bridge from hate to love felt so far?
These self-love communities showered me with love, but I felt like a failure for not being able to keep up this positive mindset in my daily life away from social media. As I began distancing myself from this always-positive mindset, I tried for progress over perfection. In my journey to not half-like myself, neutrality became the goal. For me, body neutrality meant not actively focusing on loving my body, and instead diverting that focus to feeling neither love or hate for how I looked. I experienced a key breakthrough when I realized that I didn’t need to be positive about my own self-image every second of the day. By being neutral about myself and more specifically my body, I was able to stop dividing myself into likes and dislikes. I saw my body as more than an aesthetic goal and instead was able to appreciate the way my body aided my life and my overall quality of life. By learning to be neutral about my body, I achieved the goal I was aiming for this whole time. There was no x for y to fix. Gone was the practice of dividing myself: I finally liked my whole self.