2020 Love Your Body

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2020.01.08 NOW Magazine

For NOW’s fifth annual Love Your Body issue, we invited eight people to bare all (literally and emotionally) and share what life is like in their skin.

Their stories prove that self-love is a complex, ongoing journey that confidence and self-appreciation can often come from surprising, unlikely places and that it’s never a bad time to learn to celebrate yourself.

Here’s to more self-love in 2020.

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Jaime Eisen, writer, communications strategist and cam performer

"Camming allowed me to see my body from a new perspective and reclaim control over part of my identity in a safe environment."

I started camming about six years ago. I’ve always been interested in the labour of sex work and the moralistic legal debate around it, and I had friends who were sex workers.

I actually got into it because during a group counselling session, someone suggested I try it after I was raped. I was diagnosed with PTSD and unable to look at myself naked because I’d see bugs crawling out of my vagina. I threw myself into a lot of unsafe sexual situations. I was trying to understand what my attacker saw in me, and the only way I could was to recreate the situation in which he found value in my body.

The first time I cammed, I saw my body as this separate thing that wasn’t connected to trauma, and I had the ability to experience pleasure. It felt really groundbreaking. I don’t like talking about “female empowerment” because I don’t think that’s the right word, but camming allowed me to see my body from a new perspective and reclaim control over part of my identity in a safe environment.

I like to say camming is a mix between phone sex and porn. But often you’re not live-streaming anything sexual. Yes, that’s what people come for, but you get close to your regulars. I’ve had cam shows where I’m just reading, doing karaoke or making macaroni and cheese. It’s really interesting to watch a community form around you and your body. It can be a really special place, but it can also be a really violent place.

So much of the violence comes from stigma. A lot of people conflate sex work and trafficking, which is why we’re seeing anti-sex-trafficking laws that push sex workers further into the margins, forcing them to find work in more dangerous ways.

I don’t shy away from talking about sex work advocacy or sexual violence. Camming is a part of my life that I would never want to hide. My mom follows me on Instagram. I’ll post a nude with some political messaging behind it and she’ll send me a message: “I love you, but also oy.” Camming has opened a lot of conversations between me and family and friends, and I hope that it’s helped people in my life address their biases.

Some days camming has made me feel horrible – there are trolls and you can get a lot of hate. I don’t want to be like, “Hey everyone who’s been sexually assaulted – go cam!” It’s a job and it should be taken seriously.

I often don’t love my body. Sometimes I hate my body. Sometimes I’m terrified of it. Sometimes I feel like it’s not there at all. But, somehow, no matter how disconnected I feel to my body, it’s kept going. And I’m thankful for that.

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Juan Medina, public health professional

"I don’t want to hide and I don’t want to feel any more guilt or shame about who I am and how I look."

I’ve always attached guilt and shame to my body. That has to do with different messages I received growing up, whether it was from my culture, my religion or from my peers who had negative things to say about the way I looked. In trying to understand my sexuality, it all mixed together to create this terrible perception of myself.

When I started trying to understand all the different facets of my identity, I realized I had connected a lot of them to body image.

One of the strongest memories I have was at age three. I experienced third-degree burns on my upper thighs and my midsection. I was running through the kitchen, tripped on a mat, hit the stove and a pot of boiling water tipped over and fell on me.

I remember always looking at my scars and feeling guilty for the pain and anguish I caused my parents. I have a twin sister, and my parents had to split their time between cities because I was taken to a hospital in a different place.

With being Latino comes an emphasis on masculinity, both in having an ideal body type and not showing weakness or emotion. I started to associate femininity with negative features. Conforming to that was easy until I started to question my sexuality and how I fit into the queer community. I had internalized the message that homosexuality is wrong and undesirable.

Trying to date in the LGBTQ community was an added layer of pressure: some races are considered more desirable masculinity is more desirable than, say, a feminine-presenting person. I went from internalized pressures to external ones.

When I studied biomedical science, I started to view the body in terms of the functions it has. I felt grateful for the things my body does for me. Instead of being critical, I started to appreciate that I am able-bodied.

I just finished my master’s degree in public health, which puts a strong emphasis on the social determinants of health. It’s so easy for people to minimize a person’s journey and their health to, “If you want to look better, it’s up to you.” People don’t consider socioeconomic status, access to health care, access to adequate food or upbringing as a factor.

When I started learning more about who I am and my identity, I realized how all of those things influenced my own perceptions. That’s when I started to change. Instead of trying to suppress parts of myself, I started to love myself for who I am as an individual. I don’t want to hide and I don’t want to feel any more guilt or shame about who I am and how I look.

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Kasha Blu, mother

"I’m still working through a lot, but I think you should still celebrate yourself in the midst of your struggle."

For a lot of my life, I did not celebrate myself whatsoever – I spent a lot of time shaming and rejecting myself. I experienced a sexual assault at a very young age, and then it happened again when I was a teenager. I don’t think I really took the time to process those experiences. You’re growing up, and the world is telling you all these changes happening to your body are positive – but it was reinforcing all the things that made the world feel really dangerous, and all the things I wanted to hide.

I threw myself into drugs, alcohol, lonely people, anything. I thought, “If I can romanticize this darkness that I’m in, then this is all my story, my narrative.” Little did I know, I was masking a lot, fooling myself into thinking that the things that were detrimental to me were empowering.

Having my son was an eye-opener. Giving birth to a human, I thought, would just change you by proxy. Looking back, I think I needed to give myself a reason to change – I didn’t feel I was enough for me to just change for myself.

For somebody like me, who experiences social anxiety and depression and is still working through trauma, child-rearing is a bit different. Feeling the pressure to bond with your child and be happy, and it not materializing that way, is so mortifying. You’re like, “Where are the sparks? Where’s the sunshine?” The level of guilt is insane – it can feel like you’re taking your child down with you. To get past that, you have to learn how to forgive yourself every single day. It’s the only way that I’m able to move forward and not spiral into a darker hole.

After pregnancy, I thought that I was going to have this glorious, voluptuous mom body. Instead, I totally lost my appetite and fell really hard into postpartum depression. I’d gone down to skin and bones. I feel super strange in my body right now – and I feel almost guilty for saying that, because right now, I’m fairly healthy. It’s a bit of a weird place to be, but I’m learning to love my body and give it everything it needs, including positive feedback and energy.

My body has done amazing things. It’s created a human. It’s kept me alive for almost 30 years. I’m still working through a lot, but I think you should still celebrate yourself in the midst of your struggle.

For me, doing this shoot is saying “I love you” to myself, and not being able to take it back. I think it’s time that my spirit embraces my physical self and treats it with kindness and goodness and sweetness, and nourishes it and is patient with it and loves it through every shape, size, mood swing, whatever. This is my grand gesture. It’s saying, “I’m sorry, let’s start over.”

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Kayla Logan, body positivity and mental health advocate

"I was promoting loving your body at every size, but I still hated myself."

I’m a body positivity advocate, but I didn’t start off that way. I was a competitive soccer player when I was younger, and as a teenager and during my 20s, I did some very harmful things to lose weight and stay thin. I struggled with binge eating and purging using laxatives. It took me until my 30s to realize that I’d struggled with an eating disorder my whole life.

Over the last few years I gained over 100 pounds. I deal with anxiety, ADHD and depression, and when I gained the weight, the depression got really severe – I wouldn’t leave my house for six months. I believed so strongly that my size was directly related to my self-worth and happiness. Diet culture was firmly ingrained in me – to me and my family, thin meant healthy. I remember telling them, “I’d rather be dead than fat.”

I decided I would try to lose weight during that process, I would pose in my underwear at iconic locations across Toronto, and anywhere else I travelled, in order to show that you’re beautiful in every shape and size, but also to document the weight loss.

I went to Nova Scotia and posed in front of the lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove. It was liberating, but it also made me realize that I was a hypocrite: I was promoting loving your body at every size, but I still hated myself. When I was a size 2 I thought I was fat, and at a size 18, I still felt the same way – the issue was my relationship with my body, not my size. I decided I was going to do something I never thought I had the strength to do: I was going to quit the diet, and work on learning how to love myself instead.

Now, a year later, I’m the most confident I’ve ever been. It took me stripping down to my underwear in public – most people’s worst nightmare – and being the most vulnerable I could be to become the most empowered version of myself.

I wanted other humans to be able to celebrate their bodies this way. People started to ask me if they could join the photo shoots, so I decided that I would drive across North America and hold shoots. I’ve done shoots all over Canada and the U.S. In December, I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in my underwear with 200 other people as part of theREALcatwalk. Stripping down to your undies in public is nerve-racking – but it’s also the most empowering and powerful thing I’ve ever done.

I’m no less of a human being because of my weight. Your weight doesn’t define you – you get to decide who you are as a person. And I like who I am.

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Leisse Wilcox, speaker, podcast host, life coach

"(My breast cancer diagnosis) rebooted the relationship I had with myself."

My breast cancer diagnosis was, actually, a really positive experience. That statement pisses a lot of people off – but it was! It took me through this rabbit hole of facing all kinds of shadowy things in myself I’d been subconsciously avoiding.

In my profession, I use the term “emotional alchemy” – to take something that’s dark and heavy and turn it into something beautiful and uniquely yours. Cancer was kind of the pinnacle of that. I remember being on the living-room floor, just primal-screaming, “What the fuck am I gonna do? How am I gonna get through this?” And I heard this little voice that said, “You’re gonna make this beautiful.”

I made chemo very purposeful in my life. I wrote a book proposal from start to finish while on treatment. I was able to launch a podcast because I had so much time to just sit and be with myself. It rebooted the relationship I had with myself.

Before the diagnosis, I’d gone through some minor ups and downs with body image. The second I found the lump, I thought, “Dear god, if this isn’t cancer, I will never complain about my body again.” I was like, “I have this healthy body that lets me do all the things I need to – why would I complain?” But I didn’t realize I had hidden self-judgment and shame based on an absence of self-worth.

When I made the decision to go flat – to not have breast reconstruction – it was really, really difficult. Part of that was doing a lot of emotional work to accept myself unconditionally, regardless of my appearance.

I was really hungry for beautiful images of women who had also had mastectomies. Nikki McKean did a campaign with Knix, and I was like, “Oh my god, here’s this beautiful woman – I’m gonna look like that!” It was such a redefinition of beauty, and I wanted to pay that forward. Now, any chance I have to share that awareness of what bodies look like and what people of value look like – which, spoiler alert, is everyone – I jump at the chance.

I was always pretty confident, but once I was bald and had no breasts, I realized I no longer had this mask of long, blond, wavy hair or double-D boobs. At first I thought, “If I lose my hair and breasts, I guess I lose my femininity.” It challenged me to go deeper: “Well, what the hell does that really mean? What kind of story am I telling about myself here?”

I eventually realized I had to start leading with who I was as a person. That was a dramatic change – understanding that I, alone, am enough.

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Mackenzie Kundakcioglu, barber

"Perfect doesn’t have one look, one way, one size, one gender expectation."

I grew up assigned female at birth in upper-middle-class Etobicoke. In my family, there was a very specific expectation of how women were supposed to look and act. At the time there were expectations about what I should and shouldn’t do with my body, in terms of promiscuity and what I should be wearing.

I also struggled with my weight. My parents were always portion-controlling, but as I went through puberty I couldn’t get rid of the chub. My current weight – 200 pounds – and the way my body looks now is the way I thought it looked when I was 120 pounds in high school. That was the dysmorphia my environment caused.

Day to day, I’m still hyper-aware of what I eat. At the same time, I feel healthier because I know how to catch myself and say, “You ate three meals today. That’s still better than eating two, being hungry and hating yourself.” Reminding myself to eat on a regular schedule is very relaxing.

Coming out as trans involved a shedding of the expected femininity. When I stopped shaving my legs, there were two days of anxiety, and on the third, I realized nobody cares. That was very freeing. I also had an idea of how I would look post-transition that did not pan out. I’m still heavy-set. The interaction between beer and testosterone meant the beer gut came 30 years earlier than it does for most cis men. I went through a rise, a very deep valley and then plateaued. I’m still getting used to the balance.

I’m fortunate to have better relationship with my mom. I catch her fighting with transphobes in the comments on Toronto Star news articles. I know everything she’s saying is something that my brother or I taught her. It’s mind-blowing how people can still grow even though they were so set in their ways.

I identify as a non-binary trans masculine person who uses they or he pronouns. I also identify a lot with the femininity I used to try to shed.

Perfect doesn’t have one look, one way, one size, one gender expectation. I made a point of wearing heavy makeup in my photos because that genderfuck presentation helped me feel comfortable. I want everyone to be as comfortable challenging social expectations. I’m not the parts of my body that people want to change. I am myself and every part of me that you see is me.

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Maxx Daviid, model

"You don’t have to have a certain build or a certain image to be able to model or to show your body."

I flew to Toronto from my home in Washington, DC, to promote body positivity. That’s why I started my Instagram page: to love and express myself and put my journey out there in the world.

My weight has fluctuated throughout the years. I went through a major weight loss that has left me with loose skin that hangs from my chest and stomach. But I love myself, big and small.

My struggles with weight began when I was younger. I was going through a lot: my mom put me on medication to help stabilize my mood, but it also led to weight gain. Due to my doctors’ concerns about my health, I began my first weight-loss journey.

Later I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, which is when the chemicals in your body make you gain weight. I went from being at a healthy weight again to being morbidly obese. I had gastric-bypass surgery in June 2017 to help start the process of getting my weight down.

After I healed from that, I immediately started working out again, trying hard at the gym and building muscle. Just a few months after the surgery, I was feeling confident and good about where I was going. I created my Instagram page in September 2017 with a post that said: “Start of a new beginning.” I used social media to mark my progress and show people that you don’t have to have a certain build or a certain image to be able to model or to show your whole body online.

When I was younger, I watched America’s Next Top Model and was always into fashion. I am into pushing boundaries artistically and aesthetically. My posts are also a way to express myself, whether I’m posing with candlelight or with provocatively lathered blood.

It is a struggle to look at yourself, see the loose skin and know that there’s more work to do. I want to see my body in the best way possible, and I don’t want my excess skin to get in the way of seeing my progress, even if that means having cosmetic surgery to remove it. Once I have the money for it, I’ll be able to get the surgery. But it’s not something I’m going to beat myself up about.

I am confident in myself now. I go out to parties and bars where people are in underwear, shirtless, whatever. No, I don’t have the six-pack – but I don’t care.

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Roxy Menzies, body movement instructor

"One day my daughter will look at this photo and realize that she’s in it too."

I’m 37 weeks pregnant with a daughter. I’m marvelling at what my body’s going through, what it’s capable of, the strength it possesses and the vulnerability it holds. In the past, I’d feel more self-conscious about my size, my butt or how I’d look in something. But with pregnancy, I’ve realized there are more important things than worrying about how you look.

Three years ago, I had a loss at 20 weeks. At the time, I felt my body had let me and my son down. I watched him take his first and last breaths. Though I was only five months pregnant, your body holds on to pregnancy for a while.

Nowadays it’s more common for women to speak out about pregnancy loss or infertility, but even close family and friends get uncomfortable or avoid the subject. And at the time, I was in an environment that had an attitude of “Get over this and move on” – and it was literally only a couple of months after it happened. It was an isolating feeling and, looking back, I wish I had sought out more support.

Although this pregnancy is going great, I did have a lot of fear, especially in the beginning. I would always breathe a sigh of relief at each appointment when everything was okay. The fear is less and less, but it’s always still there at the back of my mind. That’s why I talk to myself about trusting my body, trusting my daughter and trusting in the universe and god. It’s not easy, since some of that trust felt broken three years ago.

I used to be a professional dancer and I was going to dance classes even at eight months pregnant. I’d tell the teachers beforehand and I could see the fear in their eyes. They thought I was going to give birth in their class. But I just wanted to move my body. It was fun to see what I could still do and what I couldn’t do. I wanted to take every opportunity to explore what it’s like with this body, embracing all of the changes.

One day my daughter will look at this photo and realize that she’s in it too. She might think, “Wow, my mom was a bit crazy!” but I hope it also inspires her on her path toward a healthy physical and emotional relationship with her body.

The whole “body image” thing is never finalized. It’s a work in progress. But I hope my daughter, and all the other girls coming up, will be even stronger.