- Hello, lovely people!
If you're new here then hi, I'm Jessica.
I use my channel to make videos about heavy things
in a light hearted way.
Mainly disability, deafness, and chronic illness related,
but also gay things.
We have a lot of gayness here.
Subscribe if that seems like your thing.
Today we're diving back into a sticky topic, bodies.
We all have them, we all have feelings about them.
We all have feelings about other people's bodies,
often in relation to our own.
Or we're just really rude and enjoy casting judgment
on other people's appearances.
Supposedly we're meant to do the most thinking
about our bodies during our teenage years,
but really I think we're always in constant
ebb and flow of positives and negatives about our bodies.
Often that relates to growing up or aging,
but the relationship can become particularly strained
when illness or disability is included in the mix.
We've probably all heard the term body positivity
and likely a very vague idea of what that means.
Being positive about bodies that are often marginalized
is the original concept,
because it's actually a political movement
created by plus-sized women of color
who face a lot of negativity about their bodies.
But it's be co-opted to be the peak of Instagram blandness
giving another excuse for people with
socially acceptable bodies to
take pictures of themselves in bikinis.
What? It's true, I mean, who doesn't love a good
off-duty model in a bikini shot,
but please do not act like you are curing the world hunger
by posting your perfect derriere.
That's not body positivity, the political movement.
It's just body confidence, the feeling.
What I will say however is that it's lovely
that there's a greater encouragement to think
and feel positively about our bodies.
It's the only body we've got after all.
It's important to care for it, but here's a secret.
I don't love my body and that's okay.
From a photo you would probably look at my body
and think, "Well, that looks like a perfectly average
"socially acceptable body to me!"
And yes, yes yes yes it is.
It's also really broken and messed up on the inside
and that gives me some complex feelings,
which I had a discussion about
with a lovely girl called Meg,
as part of Teenage Cancer Trust's #StillMe campaign.
The idea of #StillMe is to acknowledge that
whilst your body will go through changes
you can still be positive about it
or not if that's how you're feeling today.
- [Both] Hello lovely people.
- That was really good.
- Okay, I think I messed up at the end.
- Well done.- No, no, I was impressed.
- Okay, thank you.
- Today I am joined by Meg and we're gonna be talking about
how you don't actually have to love your body,
but also you can love your body even when other people
are saying you couldn't love your body
and there's no right way or wrong way
to think about your own body because it's your body.
So you and I both have had kind of interesting -
- Relationships.
- journeys with our bodies.
- Yep, yep.
- Yeah, do wanna tell us a bit about yours?
- I was 21, so this was two and half years ago
and I was diagnosed with a blood cancer
called Hodgkin's Lymphoma.
So I went through chemotherapy and lost my hair
and that obviously had a really big impact on
just how I felt about myself.
I came out the other side,
last week was my two year clear,
but I still, you know, you still deal with these things.
Your relationship with your body's completely changed
so yeah, that's why I'm here to talk about it.
- And already it being young is quite a difficult time
- Yeah.
- to get ill in itself because when we're teenagers
or when we're in our early 20s,
we're still developing our own relationships
- Yeah.
- with our bodies.
And I imagine when you were 21 you didn't have
this, kind of, crystal clear vision of
- No.
- who you were and what you look like and
you were totally okay with every single part of you.
- No, definitely not but I think I also had
never really had to think about it.
I was quite lucky up until that point
that I never had to really understand
how I felt about myself.
I was kind of confident, just like a normal,
I was just a normal 21 year old
and then I didn't have any of the coping mechanisms
you need for things like that
because I just never had to learn them.
You realize things you thought you were confident about,
you maybe weren't and then you learn a little more about
what actually made you confident before
and it probably wasn't what you thought it was.
- No, I get that.
When I first got ill I was 17
and up to that point, I hadn't really ever thought about
the way I looked
- Yeah.
- that much at all. I was really into fashion,
but the way that my body was formed
- Yeah.
- Wasn't something that upset me or that
- Yeah.
- I ever had to really even think about.
And I guess there's that level of privilege with that,
- Yeah.
- I had a body that no one was gonna look twice at.
- And when you did get ill - Fine. (laughs)
- When you were 17,
what, for you, was the hardest part about that?
- So when I became really ill when I was 17,
I lost weight kind of gradually
over the first year, I think.
And then it just sort of plateaued because I have
connective tissue problems that associate to my guts
and my digestion and how I digest things
and I stopped being able to digest food properly
so I was in taking a lot of calories.
I may be having cake and cream for breakfast
and I just could not keep weight on.
There was almost something that was positive about it
in that I look more ill.
- Mmm-hmm.
- And it was easier for me to be treated
- Yeah.
- Because when you go hospital and
you have an invisible illness,
you don't get treated necessarily very seriously
- Yeah.
- Because people can't tell what's going on,
but when you look very ill,
suddenly people are like, "Oh, can I help you?"
- Yeah.
- It had a really negative impact on the people
around me in my life,
which I found the most surprising part of it.
- In what way?
- In that, people around me would sort of
remind me that I didn't look good.
- Right, yeah.
- They would be like, "Oh, it's such a shame
"that you're this thin." And I'm like,
- Yeah, not helpful.
- Is this an okay thing to say to someone? I don't think so.
- I used to have really really long blonde curly hair
and then when I knew I was gonna lose it,
I wanted to donate it to the local Princess Trust
- Oh!
- Cause they give me a wig so I was like,
"Okay, fine, you can have some of my old bleached hair,
"that's fine. You can take it."
And so I cut it into a little pixie to give,
and then when it started to fall out from there,
I thought, "Okay, I'm just gonna shave it
"before it all falls out."
I actually, weirdly, had a really really fun day with it
because my friend came 'round and did my make-up,
I bought a new outfit,
I got some really big colorful earrings
and it helped me feel like me when I didn't look me at all.
- And it's also taking that choice back,
- Right, yeah.
- That, like, shaving your own head
- Yeah.
- Before all the hair falls out.
- Exactly. Because at that point,
and you must feel the same,
that all these decisions and things are happening around you
but you are not asked about it and
it's just nice sometimes to grab on to whatever you can
to make it feel like it's part of your own
decision what's happening rather than feeling
completely helpless about the whole thing.
- I had a thing when I was hospital where I had to, like,
I had to color my hair.
Every night looking my best,
I had to put my red lipstick on, like, looking horrific.
I did not look good.
- It's the little things, it really is.
I used to have my make-up done to go to chemo
just to try to cover how gray I was looking
and I'd walk in and the nurses would be like,
"Gorgeous, glamorous patient." - You're looking nice.
- Well, okay. - Where have you been today?
(laughs)
- I remember feeling really guilty about feeling the way
I was feeling about my body because at that point,
you kind of feel like, "Got bigger problems.
"I've got more I should be dealing with, you know.
"Other people have got it worse,
"I have it really easy, I've not,
"You know, nothing else has really changed for me."
But, it was really important for me
and, yeah, really helped.
- It can be quite difficult when we get a lot of messages
from society and social media
and this isn't going the way you probably think it will,
but people are like, "Oh social media, it's so bad
"because it, you know, makes us focus on our looks,
"blah blah blah blah blah
"And it's kind of belittling."
But then, at the same time,
we do live in a society that is focused on looks
and when the choice gets taken away from you,
and when you are looking not your best,
- Yeah.
- it's very nice to feel like I have the power in this
and I can decide to put on make-up.
Just because something is happening to our body,
it doesn't have to change who you are.
- So I had an, she was called, like,
a Clinical Nurse Specialist
from the Teenage Cancer Trust,
and she, we would meet every couple of weeks
while I was on treatment,
just to chat about things and how things were going,
and I started to really struggle with
just, my confidence and it was developing into
an anxiety about things and it was, just,
a really low time for me
and she was like, "Why do you feel so, kind of,
"lacking in confidence?"
And I said, "It's because I don't have any hair anymore."
And she was like, "Oh, so were you confident
"because you had hair?"
I was like, "No, that's silly. Of course I wasn't confident
"because I had hair, I was confident - "
And we would like work through the different things
about me and my life and the people around me
that made me feel like me, like Meg,
and realize that some of it might look a little different
right now but actually the basis of it was still there.
- Yeah, like, our outsides are just representations of
the confidence that we feel inside based on
who we are as people.
- Yeah.
- How awesome we are.
- Exactly, and things that we're, like, passionate about
and people we like to spend time with,
they make you feel like you.
- Yeah.
- So that's really important to, like,
get as much of as you can.
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about social medias,
and we touched on it before but, I think,
I started following when I got poorly
a lot of people who blogged
or posted on Instagram or whatever
about their own illnesses, not just cancer,
but, like, any form of serious illness
and talked about it a lot,
and I thought it was interesting for me because
you would see some things on social media
and, like, when I would just be, like,
lying in hospital scrolling on Instagram,
having, like, the worst FOMO about
I was wasn't on holiday with my friends.
- Yeah.
- But then you also were connected to people
who were talking about things that you were experiencing
in a really lovely way
- [Jessica] Yeah.
- That made me feel like I wasn't going through it on my own
I wanted to ask a little bit about, kind of,
you know, why you got into talking about it
and having that positive conversation about it.
- Yeah, I think it's too easy nowadays to have
that idea about how evil social media is
and while it's true that, especially very ill people
who we kind of feel like we've dropped out of life
- Yeah.
- For a bit, you do have that fear of, "Oh gosh,
"Look at everyone else with their life that's moving on,
"Excellent, good, now I feel worse."
But there is that amazing positive side of
you finally feel connected.
- Yeah.
- Because it's very difficult to talk to your friends
who maybe you've had years and years,
and you love them and they love you,
but they don't know what it's like to have cancer.
- They don't get it, no.
- You know, like, I can't explain this to you.
I can tell you and you can feel sorry but
you cannot feel exactly what it feels like.
And I, when I was particularly really ill,
I spent two years on bed rest and while I was there,
obviously spent a lot of time with myself
and I finally got through thinking
that there must be other people
who are also in that same position
and feeling like they probably felt as alone as I did
and so, what I should try and do would be
to get out and to spread awareness
of the kind of people who fall through the gaps,
- Yeah.
- But also bring people together, so it's like,
"Hey, I went through that too, you're going through that,
"it's okay, there's gonna be an end,
"and if there isn't an end, that's also fine.
"And we can all come together."
So I think social media is an incredibly positive thing,
because it allows me to connect the outside world
whereas I don't actually leave my house that much.
I'm actually just in my house.
YouTube is a perfect job for me.
- (laughs)
- Because I don't have the energy to leave my house.
- I actually didn't know anyone else who had had cancer,
like, it wasn't, it doesn't really run in my family.
I knew friends who's aunt may have had it a few years ago,
but I definitely didn't know of anyone
my own age who had had it,
and I was living in my parent's house which is
a little bit kind of in the country,
it's not, I wasn't around people
and having people who were, like yourself,
were, like, talking about it,
for people who you won't interact with, kind of,
in person but you find them online,
was so important and just, yeah,
to make you feel like you weren't doing it on your own
and make you feel a little bit more normal.
I think I really craved feeling normal
when I felt really really abnormal.
- I think it also helps with things
like reducing your guilt.
- Yeah.
- Like we talked about how you can,
you feel the guilt of like, "Why do I care about my hair
"when everyone says I should be caring about these
"bigger and more important things?"
But also the guilt of, like, you know what?
I just don't love my body.
- Yeah.
- And a lot of social media is that that, kind of,
you gotta be really positive about yourself,
just love yourself no matter what, and I don't now.
There are many days when I'm like, "I hate my body."
I would trade in a heartbeat, like,
I wanna be in some other body thanks, right now, let's go.
But unfortunately, can't happen.
But I think it's a shame to minimize
those feelings, the guilt, - Yeah.
- Because you don't have to love your body
and you don't have to hate it
all of the time. - No.
- There's like that happy in-between, everything's okay.
- I just, I had a saying when I was poorly,
and I always just said, "Feel your feelings."
So if I was feeling sad, feel sad, it's okay.
Don't try and be like, "We've got this.", positive.
And if you're feeling happy,
don't feel bad for feeling happy.
And I think it's the same with not feeling very comfortable
in yourself because, you're right,
this whole body positive movement is
phenomenal and more power to it,
but at the same time, when your body's going through
a lot of changes caused by illness or whatever,
it can be really hard to identify with that
when you're just not feeling it.
Like, you're just not feeling your body
and it's done something to annoy,
or you don't like what it looks like,
or it's changed really drastically,
feeling like you shouldn't be feeling like that,
or you should be celebrating it because look where we are,
look what it's done for us.
But it's okay, I think like,
what I've learned from it is not view it as, like, static.
Right? That you now,
I now love my body or I now hate my body.
It's like, it will change.
It changes multiple times a day,
it changes over weeks and months.
Like, for me, it's about working towards
feeling confident in myself.
So as long as I've got that driving me,
it's fine and it's okay to, like, not recognize yourself
in your body and - I like that.
- Just keep trying.
- Yeah, feel your feelings.
- Yeah. Feeling your feelings - That's nice.
- That's what I always say. - I like it.
There we go, I think that is the wonderful end message
of this video that you can take away with you.
Feel your feelings, no feelings are bad feelings.
- No.
- Because they're yours.
Thank you so much for joining us, Meg.
- Thank you so much, it's been so lovely.
- It's been lovely to meet you.
Thank you so much for watching.
I hope that you take from this video
the message that you and your personality
are unique and special and that's what's amazing.
Plus, that your feelings are yours
whether they're good to bad,
they're yours to feel.
Thanks for joining us for this video
and I shall see you in my next one.
(upbeat music)