The weight of it all

10 Aug, 2026

Usually all it takes to escape the kind of pervasive body-critical content that the social platforms are riddled with is logging off.

You log off and you stop seeing videos on "how to stop being skinny fat" or "what to eat to lose 5kg in time for summer" or "what I eat in a day to stop being fat". I find that once I log off I stop thinking about myself quite so much. I stop thinking about the size of my thighs in my jeans or the way my stomach folds when I sit down. I go back to just existing.

But this time the talk about bodies has followed me, because it seems to be everywhere right now. It's no longer just on Instagram reels, it's now in my favourite podcasts, the news and a million opinion pieces scattered across the internet. And it's mostly there because famous women are becoming alarmingly small alarmingly fast, and everyone wants to talk about Ariana Grande right now.

I think now, at 25, I might finally have reached a point where I can reframe my thoughts of "do I look fat in this?" to "damn, I can run 23km with these legs". Or maybe it's just because I'm not as online at the moment that I feel as if I am viewing this discourse from a distance, rather than having it take over my entire life.

I read a Substack article recently about how many photos of ourselves we have these days. To summarise, it talked about how before cameras people might only see their reflection in a mirror and the only real copies of themselves they had were paintings (of them by others, or self-portraits such as Frida Kahlo's). But since 2010, taking a million photos of ourselves and sharing them online has become incredibly easy. Even incredibly normal. Your phone is full of an incredible number of tiny little copies of yourself.

We are seeing ourselves more frequently than people ever have before. This made me incredibly curious. I just thought, were people who didn't see themselves so often as critical of their bodies as we are today? I know that every age has come with its own set of, frequently unattainable, beauty standards, but were they thinking about themselves less when they weren't seeing themselves so often?

That then made me think of an Instagram story from actor Jemima Kirke that went viral in 2022 when she posted this:

And I wonder if she was really onto something there.

Comparison is a well-recognised facet of body image struggles. Social media is broadly accepted to make this worse. So maybe the fact that we're seeing everyone more, not just ourselves, is part of why we are so intensely critical of our bodies?

I wonder if I would think less about my weight or my nose or the size of my stomach if I wasn't seeing people I don't even know talking about their bodies online or seeing so many photos of myself. Maybe it's harder to accept how our bodies change when we have a million little photos of ourselves in our phones at all time?

So maybe one of the tricks to feeling better about yourself really is to log off more. Maybe it's also to look at photos of yourself less¹. Maybe the trick to all of it, as Jemima says, is just to think about yourself less.

Anyhow, I'll finish this the way I like to finish my journal entries. With a list of things that have made me happy lately:

• arising from my sickbed (read as: the couch where I slept off a cold) to sit in the sun in the park with a coffee the other day

• listening to more Aussie music! (DMA'S, Julia Jacklin, The Jungle Giants, Pacific Avenue, and the list goes on)

• having convinced more friends to join me for a cold morning swim on Sunday

• getting to spend a lot of time with a friend's cat recently

• the beautiful pastry I had from a patisserie I tried for the first time over the weekend (if you're in the area, hit me up for the new recommendation)

• nearly everyone I said "good morning" to on my walk saying it back

-- Em :))

Subscribe to my blog