- Do I hate my body right now,
today, currently, this very moment in time?
Yes, yes I do.
And that's okay.
I'm the kind of ill where you can feel all of your nerve,
but for some reason
particularly the nerves inside your face,
like inside of your face and all of my freaking teeth,
every single bit of my teeth
just feels horrifically alive with the shuttering cold,
'cause there is a ball of spiky ice in my chest.
And if I am getting another freaking
three month lung infection, again,
then I'm going to scream not particularly loudly,
'cause you can't actually scream that much
when you have a lung infection.
I'll be honest, your attempts to blow up a balloon
or something like.
(Jessica spits)
Also laughing for some reason,
I can't laugh when I have a lung infection,
because then you just start coughing
and run around on the floor.
But there'll be an attempt
to may even have a temper tantrum, quietly,
because I mean I probably just be probably go on the floor.
You know, when life gives you lemons
but you've got a chronic illness
so you're too tired to do anything with them.
What better time to talk about body positivity?
The good, the bad and the ugly.
That wasn't meant to be a punchline,
but that's where we're at right now.
So where should we start?
What is body positivity?
My own personal journey with it with how I look
or the truly important part like how I feel about my body?
But I guess we should break things down,
make sure we're on the same page.
Hi, I'm Jessica Kellgren-Fozard.
Fun fact, I don't have a middle name,
although I did used to make one up
and pretend that I did have one,
to encourage my friends to tell me theirs,
it was always far more exciting than Jessica.
I was born with two genetic disabilities.
One affects my nerves and the other my connective tissues,
and organs and I mean blah, blah.
I little got great bones.
My bones are actually really strong.
I have great teeth as well, very strong teeth.
But the rest of me physically I would not put money on.
Don't back me in a fight.
I can't pass a hearing test, I can't see out of one eye,
can't actually feel my fingers.
I have limbs that point in the wrong direction.
Occasionally my daily pain level rises so high,
that all I can do is lay on the floor and moan
and sometimes my jaw dislocates when I eat.
That's fine.
And you don't need to feel any kind of way about it.
You don't need to feel sad for me.
You don't need to tell me I'm amazing
just for getting out of bed today and it's fine
and you don't need to tell me that I look great.
Yeah, look at me, I've got makeup on.
But I haven't washed my hair for a week.
Also, I currently have flu, like actual Influenza,
I've just taken a lot of meds but it really hurts.
But just as the looks obsessed society,
we're so driven to tell someone that they look great,
or they're beautiful or they're dressed fabulously.
'Cause we can't even begin to fathom
that they could be happy any other way.
Yeah, we tell people that their flaws are beautiful
as a way of telling them that their flaws are irrelevant.
But no, they aren't.
Like I have a disability and it alters my life.
It isn't irrelevant when I tell someone
that it was a struggle for me to get to an event,
because there was an access issue,
I had a brain spitting migraine,
and they say, "well at least you look amazing".
What they're actually doing is crushing my flaw down,
and I don't want that.
My flaws aren't beautiful but they aren't awful either,
they just are and they are things that I must live with,
and use to take them out of the equation is to diminish them
and to diminish the fact that I need to find a way
that is outside of the normal way of doing things,
to diminish the extra creativity
that I perhaps had to use in getting to that event,
to diminish the extra strength
that I had to use to be there.
Talking is hard.
I did not think that through.
But do I need to love my body?
Do I need to think positively about it all the time
in order for me to live happily?
And what even is me?
Does my body have to be part of me?
Yes.
Welcome to another video where Jessica just rants,
and talks about stuff.
They may or may not come together at the end cohesively.
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So what is body positivity?
Body positivity is a movement
to fight against the systemic oppression,
and discrimination that fat bodies,
and marginalized bodies experience every day in society.
And it has evolved to be about loving your body
no matter what which is what everyone now knows
as body positivity and that the problem
it evolved to be something that it was never meant to be.
Body positivity in itself is a political movement.
It's about how society and the world treats you,
positive body image and feeling positive about your body
is about the individual.
It's about how you feel about yourself.
It's a systemic issue versus a psychological issue.
If someone said,
"people in marginalized bodies
should feel positive about themselves,
and be met with all bodies
should feel positive about themselves".
And whilst they are right,
they would also be missing the point.
It is the classic refrain
we have spent last summer dealing with
of Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter.
Making a feminist point
about women facing one particular type of oppression
does not mean that you are necessarily
excluding the issues faced by other people,
who are being oppressed in other ways.
So again, we are not talking specifically
about the body positivity movement here,
which was created by plus sized black women,
and has since been co-opted by pretty much everyone.
Instead, we're going to talk about the pressure
on social media to love things, yourself often,
and why that isn't always helpful.
Now granted, in the last couple of years,
there has been a lot more of a move
towards talking about the hard bits,
the hard parts of life, discussing flaws.
Sometimes it can feel very hollow for me to see pictures,
and posts of people talking about loving
their worst parts of their body
when their worst part of their body
is cellulite or stretch marks.
And when I say that,
I don't mean to diminish their lived experience,
because obviously we all lead different lives,
and that's completely fine.
But as someone who struggles often with my body,
for a long time didn't feel that I had the choice
to be anything but positive.
I was faced with a lot of negativity.
And I think that there's a dangerous line
sometimes with the kind of toxic positivity thinking,
where you have to be happy as a disabled person.
And you have to keep going,
and you have to like be chappy and that kind of thing.
And I've made a video about that before.
But in terms of your actual, physical self,
key things that sort of stand out to me
were that I always felt so disconnected from my body
as a child because it let me down a lot,
and I felt things that other people told me I didn't.
So my body hurt a lot, a great deal,
and I was getting injured in ways
that were much more extreme than they should be.
I'd fall over on the playground,
and where another child would stand up and brush it off
and be okay, I'd be like,
"oh, I've fallen over, I've scraped my knee,
and now I cannot feel the skin on my shins at all,
this doesn't feel right."
And I have a deep bone pain all the way through my knee.
This is very, very painful, it's all swollen up.
And the adults around me
would tell me that that wasn't the case.
That wasn't what I felt,
all that if something was either very normal,
or that it was just not what was happening.
And my inner thoughts were,
"if it's so normal why is it just me?
Because none of my friends seem to be experiencing this.
If this is not what is happening to me, what is going on?
You're saying that I can walk on this foot
that I have twisted my ankle,
and that it doesn't hurt yet,
when I stand on it it hurts and doesn't bear my weight."
And thus I grew up creating a very strange experience
with my body and then having like a idea of myself
as in terms of just looks became a quite low down the list,
in terms of my priorities I suppose.
Like people would tell me,
I was a sort of like a pretty little girl
and I'd be like, "sure, okay, my hand doesn't work.
Do you wanna do something about that?"
And even as a teenage girl,
I was a bit like, "oh good, we're talking about wonderful.
Yay, the adults have decided to focus
on superficial things again."
And I've always really enjoyed things like my hair,
and clothes and all that kind of thing,
but I kind of had bigger issues going on.
And thus it wasn't a massive thing for me
until I started to get really ill in my late teens,
and as a result of being quite ill,
started to lose a load of weight.
Tell you about another video somewhere, like have a look.
If you haven't seen, look through my back catalog,
but I had a lung puncture that went wrong,
which is the thing where they stick a needle
into your spine, slack around your spine essentially,
and your spinal fluid
and they take some of your spinal fluid out.
And because I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome,
which I didn't know at the time,
it wasn't a great idea
because the sack around it
is supposed to just close back up
once you take the needle out.
But unfortunately mine didn't do that.
And they'd actually created three holes,
and that left just three holes and they did not close.
They just kept bleeding spinal fluid out.
And that gave me a really really awful brain time,
awful brain time.
It was very hard to keep food down,
because I had really bad vertigo,
I guess would be a way to describe it.
Like I couldn't sit up without vomiting,
and everything hurt all the time.
So my pain level was so high,
the hospital gave me these special drinks
to up my calorific intake.
Because they were like, "well, you can't take food,
we'll give you these instead".
But they're so foul that like, how are they helpful?
But that was the first time
that I really created an impression of my body,
like a body image I think,
because everyone around me started telling me
that I didn't look nice and I was like,
"oh, this is not very kind."
So I'd see like family members or friends
I hadn't seen for a while
and they would tell me, "oh, you look really awful.
You look too thin, do you know that?"
Thanks, this is really not what I need to hear right now.
I'm quite ill.
And that's why I look bad.
Like I know that my ribs show through at the front.
You can count them if you want.
Because that was happening,
because everyone around me was so insistent
on informing me that I looked awful,
that my body was so unappealing and so unattractive.
I think it made me feel like I had to create
a very strong sense of protection for myself,
and I had to protect my like little inner psyche
from being damaged by other people being rude.
And so for a couple of years I was like,
"yeah, I love everything.
Love everything on my body.
Brilliant, it's amazing."
Even the bits that really hurt, all the bits that are wrong.
And then I think over time
it just slowly started to not need it.
It started to become not something that I was faking.
It didn't have to be that I looked in the mirror
that day and thought,
"okay what is the one thing that I like today?
It's my hair.
Okay, I really like my hair today."
I came to a position of being more in a sense of neutral.
I can like things in it and I can dislike things about it,
but it doesn't actually bother me.
It's like I have one foot that points forwards,
and I have one foot that points inwards like this
and I am neutral about that.
Back and shoulders can sometimes look interesting, visually,
I am neutral about that.
If you would like to know my opinion about how they hurt me,
oh, I have opinions, I really do,
I have very strong opinions.
So I don't allow myself to feel negative about my body,
but I don't love it either.
I can't be my body's enemy
and I can allow to be rude about it when I want.
But I can throw the word of wasn't around
because yes, that muscle did waste.
But it doesn't mean they hate it.
And just more objective.
The more I learned about body image,
I think the more I realized that
when it comes to developing a kind of healthy,
long term idea of it,
body positivity doesn't give us the tools
that to reach that goal.
Again, not the body positivity movement
has accomplished a ton of stuff.
And I'm fully on board with the idea
of promoting diversity and inclusiveness,
especially when it comes to making sure
that disabled bodies are seen.
I think as a child I did hate my illnesses,
because I didn't really know what they were,
and what was going on with me.
And then for a while I'd forced myself
to love them because no one else did.
And now I'm just neutral because I think that's better.
And I think it's better
to start from a neutral stance with my body.
But if loving your body helps you,
and serves as a counter people coming out to you,
then obviously I do not knock that.
A lot of people with chronic illnesses
find a huge amount of positivity
in looking at what our bodies can do.
And that's wonderful, but it's just not how I feel.
And I think that's absolutely okay
and that for me is just a healthier place to be.
And I felt better for it.
You know what, we're all different.
We all have our own little journeys.
Some of us have those never ending
freaking long fingers, unimpressed lungs.
Thank you so much for listening friends,
I appreciate you, I appreciate this.
And you know who else I appreciate?
Surfshark, sponsoring today's video.
Do remember to click the link in the description,
surfshark.deals/Jessica and use code Jessica,
for 83% off and three months extra for free.
Thank you for watching
and I'll see you in my next video
where I will hopefully be a bit healthier,
and have my voice back to my normal voice.
I may even have washed my hair.
Bye-bye.
(cheerful music)