Getting real: beauty standards and building confidence

Candace: “As a Black woman growing up in a white family in the deeper country of Oregon, I didn't have a lot of people who looked like me growing up. My parents did the best they could to make sure I felt beautiful. They were my cheerleaders from a very young age, but it's also important to have role models or people you can relate to. I looked to the media for that, but in the early 2000s, there wasn’t a lot of media representation for Black women, or fat Black women. It caused me to look inward for confidence, but at the age of 12 or 13, when you're in middle school, you just want to fit in. It becomes difficult to be your own cheerleader during those formative years.”

Elisabeth: “Candace, you have always been incredibly strong; you were just you all the time. I'm amazed at how confident you've always been, since you were two-and-a-half weeks old [...] You were shining with confidence, and you taught me how to give you self-esteem.”

Candace explains the positives and negatives of social media, including how it ‘blew [her] world wide open’ and became her space for self-expression, as well as the pressure of beauty standards online.

Candace: “Mom, you might not know this about social media, but there’s also a tendency to show a highlight reel of your life [...] and it’s fostered a culture of toxicity to a point where people feel like they can't live up to these highlight reels [...] Before I found the body-positive movement, I was definitely influenced by that "Instagram model” look [...] It took a lot of work for me to unlearn [...] so I don’t look at that content, I don’t follow people who push an unrealistic beauty standard. 

Elisabeth: “It seems that you didn't share or didn't talk about these things. But you found a way to say [...] That’s not okay.” And I know it took time — years — because once, when you were really tiny, you said your skin wouldn't wash off. And that was painful.”

Elisabeth: “When I was your age, I didn't have any self-esteem. I saw beautiful women in magazines and I compared myself to them constantly. But I knew I wasn’t going to give any of those feelings to you”

Candace: “Your upbringing showed you a lot of things you didn't want to pass down to me. You were taught to be modest, to not take up space, to not speak out of turn, or to not wear certain things.”

Elisabeth: “You don't want to just be waking up and working on yourself every day. It should be waking up and loving this body.”

Candace: “That's the attitude, but no one is positive all the time. It’s not realistic. That’s the hard thing about the body-positive movement. What some people may not understand when they’re starting their confidence journey is that when they have a down day, it’s their fault. It’s about accepting yourself on low days and high days. I will not have 100% positive days, and that's okay. When negative self-talk creeps in, that’s when I’m happy to have found practices, like self-affirmations and surrounding myself in real life with people who don’t bring me down. I hope that social media and everybody's persona online can start to lean in that direction.”

Elisabeth: “You let yourself be real. I imagine that sharing your less-than-perfect self gives trolls more things that will possibly hurt you. That's what I worry about when it comes to sharing yourself online.”

Candace: “Well, it happens. My body, by society’s standards, isn’t perfect, so that's enough ammunition, right? The point of the body-positive movement is to normalize these bodies and terms, like using “fat” as a descriptor and not as a negative word. That’s what we have to lean into, otherwise no change will happen. The bigger goal is to have these bodies feel welcome in any space; online is just a small snippet of the grander mission.”

Elisabeth: “I didn't realize trolls were so prominent or so present in social media.”

Candace: “I am swift with that block button”