Confidence Over Comparison

I believe we all have those memories that stick out to us; not the ones that contain core moments of our lives, not the ones that commemorate key milestones or events, or even the ones that we often recall for better or for worse. Just those random minutes from bygone years that find themselves re-emerging in the most unlikely of places.

I am 13 years old, sitting in the science lab with the rest of my tutor group. Our teacher, a lovable yet ill-equipped man stands at the front, still visibly uncomfortable from several weeks of sex education. Very few teachers willingly want to discuss sex and relationships with their pupils, but we’d all survived it, more or less in one piece, even without much of the knowledge we all actually needed. But this week, we were focusing on ourselves, and more importantly, how we saw ourselves. And one question, over a decade later, still rings in my ears.

“Who is happy with their body?”

A wave of thought went around the room. After a mere few seconds of deliberation, my hand tentatively rose. I’d never given it much thought in all honesty, but it rang fairly true for me. As I turned my head, wondering who thought the same way, I could see no more than a few extra hands up; I was firmly in the minority. Yet of all the people in that room, my close friends, classmates and everyone else, my mind seemingly fixated on one person. The popular girl, one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen, had her hand firmly down, eyes slightly downcast. 

How could I be happy with my body and yet she wasn’t? My mind was baffled.

A boy and a girl, one satisfied, one not.

A decade later, that proportion still stands, albeit now between two girls. Yet reversed.

That girl is now a personal trainer, a fitness coach and a lifestyle enthusiast. During a heatwave and a holiday, she would post twice, thrice daily bikini pictures, gym pictures and more, toned and muscular, tanned and chiselled. 

Any semblance of public insecurity long-since banished. Meanwhile, I could never hope to do the same; not anymore. There are days I can struggle to look at my own body in the mirror, let alone share it with others.

It is a sad irony that this is one of my strongest memories of secondary school; a throwaway day, a throwaway moment, that had no business being recalled so far along. Two people who haven’t spoken even once throughout that intervening decade, yet for some reason forever linked by a random moment in my mind. 

Body image, self-perception and confidence is something that ebbs and flows in everyone, all the time, particularly around adolescence as identity, sense of self and bodies change rapidly. I see young people so comfortable in themselves and expressive of their bodies in a way that I had assumed I had been those years ago. But after all this time, it’s clear that past and present aren’t the same. Whether something had changed or whether I was in denial, that past sentiment is long gone.

Written by, Sophie Layton (she/her)