Okay hello lovely people! Did I do it right? Are you watching? Are you watching?
Oh, but first canI rehearse it please? Wait...once... Hello lovely people
Nope messed it up! Down and then across because that's people who have stubble
on their chin and people who don't
Okay I'm gonna write it down. Hello lovely people! Rght, everyone, this is the
lovely Annie who I am absolutely delighted that I get to meet in person.
You're one of my favourite people on the Internet! You're my favorite person on the internet!
We're so cute, love it!
So, tell the people what you do
Alrighty, so I have a channel called Annie Elainey and on it I do similar to you
I guess where I talk to y'all about my disability stuff and basically
share my life with y'all. Delightful! Today we are gonna talk about, since
we're both lovely disabled people, what it's like trying to have a positive
body image when you have disabilities which can be complex, very very
complex and we're currently at VidCon if you're wondering why I'm with an American
You just did a panel about body image gender. Yeah, body image, gender,
presentation video
One of the things you talked about was the hashtag
love my disability which to some people can seem
like a very strange concept. How could you love a disability? How could you love
something that's so terrible and awful and yes having a disability isn't
necessarily the greatest thing in the world
No. But also it's just if this is the body that I am in I feel very powerfully
about my body that I must make a conscious decision to always love it no
matter what and my body ,due to my
disabilities we both have connective tissue disorders and I also have a nerve
condition as well, my body has changed a lot. It went through a period where I was
really really thin I was eighty eight pounds
six stone. I am 5'9 and I was incredibly thin and one thing that
people kept telling me they kept reminding me was that I looked terrible
and nobody believed that I could have a positive body image. They thought it was
a terrible thing for me to say "no I love my body" and I did and I bought dresses
that fitted me I got some new stuff that had the same style it went in at the
waist and it had a big skirt but now my waist was tiny and I had to buy
children's clothes. Daily, from my family, from wider family, from friends, from
strangers: they felt they had to remind me that my body was horrible "but you
don't like it do you? You don't like it? I mean because you're too thin and it's
just sticky out here and..." No! Screw you! This is my body, I love it I don't care
what you think! How did you go about that? How did you? Because like that was a huge
journey for me to like find body peace that way
So like I'm assuming it was probably like eating eating disorder recovery I'm
assuming. I didn't have an eating disorder.
No? Just because it was for me
cuz I was like that's why I make the assumptions we both have connective
tissue disorders but I when I was from age 12 to 21 had non disability related
like eating disorder body dysmorphic disorder and body
dysmorphic disorder is when you look in the mirror and you see something that
isn't there like a hallucination, so I would look in the mirror and see
like a monster I would see something like a 600 pound rhinoceros thing
my brain, my mental illness, told me everybody who looked at me was nauseous
at the sight of me they would say and that
every one that I passed inside their heads were thinking she doesn't deserve
to be here I wish she wasn't here I don't want to see her I'm gonna vomit
and so it very much made me feel like I was not deserving of taking up space
I was not deserving of existing I was not deserving of being seen but
long story short there it wasn't until I was 21 and someone was like "Are you
okay? Something's wrong with your brain." and so when I got confronted for the
first time about possibly being mentally ill that's when I decided to really
proactively do self therapy and recover and this happened before I started
losing abilities so through recovery process I found this euphoria of
like "I'm here, I'm alive and I deserve to love myself, I deserve to love my body no
matter what state it's in." So that's what I found through that I found "You
know what, body? I love you and no matter what you do, no matter what you look like
and no matter what you experience or go through I'm gonna love you anyway ."
and so then when finally losing abilities came along I had that foundation.
I have a similar thing in a way but having from a very young age I wasn't diagnosed until
I was 17 even though I had masses of symptoms my whole life, I wasn't
born right let's be honest. They told my mother in the hospital I was not okay.
They didn't know what was wrong with me but I was just not okay. my grandfather
was a doctor he looked at me and he was like something wrong with that baby
mother's like yeah so everyone keeps saying and so I knew my whole life like
that is not okay with my body but when I was being told from the outside from my
teachers and so um was that I wasn't doing enough I wasn't trying hard enough
I wasn't good enough I think also because I've always been quite I've
never struggled with a mental health issue so I guess the stuff that works
for me doesn't work for other people necessarily but for me having been told
that over and over and over mentally made me stronger because I was
like well screw you or you're gonna see
you know I mean she's not gonna do well in these hats issues I was like well I'm
gonna race them now oh my god and they talk about me in aids
that's like that's what's in you like I never meant on these like family hikes
and it was like okay I mean I struggle to walk like a hundred meters but all right
and I'd be like 7 at the back dragging myself along and I
was like you know what body good on you good job you've made it this far
I knew that my body was putting in a hundred percent effort all the time
always here always trying I knew that I was always trying I matter what anyone
else said to me and then even when I got ill and they were very much like oh you
don't need to take your a levels anymore it doesn't matter like what because my
life is stopped what do you think is gonna happen I have to continue across
this point after spending two years in a dark room because I can I can sit up
without vomiting or passing out and I can have light sound or touch because it
gave me immense pain I say you know what I'm going to take my a-levels god damn
it so I lay in a dark room dictating and a lady wrote down my exam results and
everyone told me I couldn't do it you know what I got a hundred percent.
so it's just defiance my father my positive body image is because yes you said I
can't so I'm gonna prove to you that I will you said I can't love this so I
will goddamn love it every morning when I get dressed I have to get dressed in
front of the mirror I can't feel most of my body so like if I'm putting on tights
or something I have to be in front of a full-length mirror so I can see them
getting out my legs and do I'm doing and every morning and look at myself in the
mirror and I pick what I think looks really great today and I just stone it
for a while yeah it's terrible I go to the loo and
okay give it and then I'm like my chauffeurs today Jessica looking good and its
truly it's like a daily affirmation yeah positive affirmations whenever I am
in front of a mirror I look at myself I find the part of myself I like the most
in this moment well that is my hair or my nose mm-hmm
or just I look great in this dress and I look at it and I go that's a good point
I've liked what people should be practicing to try and like start like
really what's the word I was used to use retraining your brain because I think
disability by default has a lot of people immediately hating their bodies
which if you hate your body you have the right to but I always think that it's
just better for oneself to like try and like you know evolve from that place
because I don't think that hate is a healthy feeling for like anybody to feel
especially in regards to themselves so one of the ways to combat it is to practice
loving yourself practice looking at yourself in the mirror and even if you
have to fake it like and even if you're lying to yourself you're gonna give
yourself a compliment Just the days when I look awful
and I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like you look horrific
but that is a great eye color I mean that beautiful Jessica what I'm blessed
and I I think it is the outside world comes and they tell us you should want
to look like this you should want to have this body you should want to be
this weight you should want to have that hair color bla bla bla bla you should
feel bad about your disability you should feel bad about the way your body
looks and I'm just like no thanks I don't really want to
doesn't sound very fun to hate myself but
thanks for the advice right but then if we want to talk about like bad hair days
that cuts me I mean it does I have like dysphoria with like a bunch of different
parts of my body and I think like there's that intersection of like gender
and which we talked about on Annies channel yes gender scription so I'll
have problems with like my hips and like that all the bumps of my body and I
will have problems with it sometimes and it depends on the day some days I'm like
okay I can work this Beyonce it up and then a lot of the times just no a lot of
times it just does make me feel very uncomfortable and it doesn't feel like I
feel like I'm living in a body that doesn't represent what's inside I I have
to just work through it I have to figure out a way to continue going on my day
because it can get so bad like anxiety mental illness that you're like I don't
want anybody to see me I just want to stay alone and not move on with my life
and not not go on with my day that's when you know you have to kind of be
your own parent yeah be your own partner yeah if you you got to think of yourself
like if you were not you if you saw your friend thinking the way you think about
yourself what will you say to them and it would
be encouraging it would be supportive you got to be able to treat yourself
like yeah like you're in a relationship with our side which you are outside of
your body and I really feel very protective of my body like when I'm
saying when I was really skinny and everyone was being so rude I would take
that but I would almost like disassociated from my body and I'd be
like I'm not gonna let this mean comment filter through to the part of my brain
that handles how I feel about my body I'm just gonna take it I'm just going to put it in a little box
and I'm just going to put it on a shelf somewhere in
my mind there is like a little room full of boxes of horrific things people have
said to me and I'm just like I'm just going to lock that room then leave that be. and never deal with it don't need to
go and deal with that I think that's fine sounds like you got it under control I trust
you sounds like you have it on lockdown of like locking bad things away
I think you just literally let it yeah let it let it fly off it's like time
they you know they dissolve with time okay I hope it doesn't catch up with you
one day someone unlocks the box oh wow this is a positive note to end this on isn't it
so thank you very much for watching this potentially rambling video about body
image and disability I hope that you connected with some of it that you could
kind of recognize where we're going with this but I really want to know what your
coping strategies are what are the things that you do to make you feel
great about yourself me curling my hair and red lipstick me positive
affirmations wearing clothes that make me feel good and do practicing being
proactive and continuing to live my life even if I don't feel entirely
comfortable with my body at the time I'm gonna wear what makes me happy no
matter how much other people might be right we're today Jessica thats a bit of a odd
I mean there are maybe too many bows on that it's eight bows too much is it no
no it's never too much hi Rachel good to see ya
you can find her as well gonna put her channel down in the description you can go leave her some
comments like HI RACHEL also please go and check out Annie and the video we
made for our channel which had more of an LGBTQ+ stanch so goodbye my darlings
we shall see you next time