‘Insecurities’ is a common word that corrupts our mental health. According to the Oxford Dictionary, the meaning of ‘insecurities’ is the lack of confidence a person has about themselves or their relationships with other people. Even though dictionaries can provide the standard meanings of words, they cannot define their word-for-word meaning in our daily lives. Succinctly, I would like to define ‘insecurities’ as the source of self-doubt and self-hate.
Many people have controversial views on insecurities. Which leads to the question of why insecurities exist in the first place. Why would people allow themselves to suffer due to their insecurities? From my own experience, insecurities are developed by the judgement and criticism of others. The way people treat others who are skinnier and prettier than you allows you to slowly build up the gremlins that grow inside of you. Gremlins are referred to as monsters who try to bring everyone's self-esteem down by provoking negative and depressing thoughts. The more unfair treatment we receive, the larger our gremlins grow. In other words, you may say that Gremlins are the source of our ambivalence and pain towards ourselves.
Certainly, most people in the world have doubted at least once the amount of affection and respect they could receive from others due to their physical appearance, especially their body size. Many people are prejudiced against larger people due to the beauty standard set in our society. The main aspect of the beauty standard is being skinny. Out of all aspects, people tend to pay more attention to body sizes. Due to beauty standards, our society has concluded that fat, chubby, and obese people are lazy, unattractive, and futile. This leads to unfair treatment; therefore, people tend to develop insecurities, become indignant and allow their gremlins to enlarge.
You might be wondering, where did these body standards come from? The epitome of beauty standards is perpetuated through unrealistic photos of women and girls portrayed in the media, along with men with abs and muscles. Underweight and photoshopped models are everywhere, and they act as examples for what women should supposedly look like, especially teenage girls. Additionally, the amount of advertising that uses muscular men to drive the foundations of beauty standards provokes pressure and stress on everyone from a young age.
Of course, judging and tantalising people by their size is a repugnant action to take; however, everyone tends to be stoic, not willing to stand up and speak for themselves when they are enduring pain inside, which leads to more criticism towards larger people. In fact, I believe the reason people are afraid to confront and rectify the beauty standards is because, as we all know, the more we speak of body standards, the more criticism and hatred one might receive as the beauty standards become a default vision in our lives.
"Beauty isn’t on the outside; it’s on the inside'' is a very cliche quote many people use to treat insecurities and gain confidence in their appearance. Nevertheless, nowadays people tend to invest more stress and effort into their appearances than in their personalities or intelligence, thus deteriorating their overall self-esteem and creating unhealthy habits such as hating themselves; thus, leads to self-doubt and self-hate. As you can see, beauty standards are corrupting our society, allowing our gremlins to conquer our mental health, and replace it with pessimistic thoughts.
You might be wondering, 'Then what should I do? Seeing a therapist couldn’t help me. How can this blog help me?’ Even though I am not a professional therapist, I can guarantee you that I have experienced the same pain you or other people might have felt. From my own experience as one of the chubby teenagers, I dealt with all the judgmental glares, the unfair treatment from others, and the stress of constantly gaining weight, regardless of my effort into losing weight. Statistically, teenagers tend to place more stress on body sizes, as bullying is the main source of developing insecurities. Every time I feel anxious about other people's thoughts on my body size, I tend to turn my perspective into something more optimistic. The thought of a small number of people still being by my side no matter how big my body got cheered me up.
Of course, thinking this way is very challenging, as our gremlins devour our optimistic thoughts, and replace them with pessimistic ones. However, I will tell you an example of my own experience that allowed me to become more confident and optimistic about myself. For instance, I would starve myself to lose weight, would become deplorable of everything I ate, go to the gym more often, eat less every time I would have a meal in front of me, but that only enabled me to gain more pressure and feel insecure about everything. Even at my darkest times, there was always someone who changed my perspective on myself. It was my Dad. Every day I would pontificate and annoy him by asking him, 'Am I too fat? Do you think other boys would like me if I were fat?' Every single time, regardless of how pessimistic I thought about myself, my Dad would say, ‘Not everyone needs to like you. You just need to find one person in your life who will love you as you are. Even if the whole world turns its back on you. Rather than body sizes, people tend to like women who eat well, rather than starving themselves or eating little by little. That's why I married your mother, regardless of how skinny or fat she was, I would have loved her the same'. This made me think that maybe not everyone in the world can understand how stressful and unfair being large is, but the small group of people around you will. As for you, do you have someone like my dad who loves you just the way you are? Think of them, and everything tends to be better.
To simply highlight my Dad's words, there are always people by our sides who would love us the way we are, even if our whole society might not agree with that, as our society is intransigent. If you think about it, you belong to many micro-societies, there are a variety of societies that have different norms (e.g. beauty standards). For example, we might not be able to be treated equally or be accepted in the school society, to contrast, our family society maybe we will. For that reason, we don’t need to be loved in every single society there is, we just need to find one or a few we can be ourselves in. Lastly, I wanted to refer back to my gremlins: the only way to step down the gremlins growing inside you is to become more confident. Confidence is their weakness, as it derives from anxiety and stress. Don’t let judgements and criticism define who you are, because at the end of the day, you are you, and you should love yourself. Emphasise to others that you love yourself and that you aren’t ashamed of anything. Of course, ‘confidence’ isn’t always the easiest thing for people that are insecure, however we shouldn’t let our Gremlins control who we can be all the time. The main point I want to convey is to try and be confident for at least a small portion of your life. Being confident is all there is even if it is. the hardest thing to do, and no one can break you down, not even beauty standards.
Citations used by Noodle Tool.
Works Cited
Feehly, Conor. "Where Do Human Beauty Standards Come From? Evolution Could Be to Blame" ["Where Do Human Beauty Standards Come From? Evolution Could Be to Blame"]. Discover, Conor Feehly, 27 June 2023, www.discovermagazine.com/mind/where-do-human-beauty-standards-come-from-evolution-could-be-to-blame.
Hetherington, Chelsea. "Beauty Standards and Mental Health: Social Media's Role" ["Beauty Standards and Mental Health: Social Media's Role"]. Healthnews, Chelsea Hetherington, PhD, 7 June 2023, healthnews.com/mental-health/self-care-and-therapy/mental-health-and-social-media/#:~:text=The%20pressure%20to%20fit%20within,healthier%20and%20more%20positive%20way. Accessed 25 July 2023.
Kassir, Yasmina. "Unrealistic Body Standards Create Toxic Environment" ["Unrealistic Body Standards Create Toxic Environment"]. The Standard, Yasmina Kassir, 16 Mar. 2021, standard.asl.org/17556/opinions/unrealistic-body-standards-create-toxic-environment/.
Plumtree, Sue. "Personal Gremlins: There's a Monster Iiving inside Your Head" ["Personal Gremlins: There's a Monster Iiving inside Your Head"]. Henpicked, Sue Plumtree, henpicked.net/personal-gremlins-theres-a-monster-living-inside-your-head/.
ROBBINS RESEARCH, editor. "7 Tips on Overcoming Insecurities" ["7 Tips on Overcoming Insecurities"]. Tony Robbins, ROBBINS RESEARCH, www.tonyrobbins.com/building-confidence/how-to-overcome-insecurity/. Accessed 26 July 2023.
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