I’ll never forget when I made my first post about my eating disorder. A long time before it was normalized or popular to talk about, I truly wanted to free myself from the weight of this secret I had been carrying for most of my life. As a person who had their childhood years shaped by early 2000s diet culture, misogyny, thin is in, and yt beauty standards, I still to this day have realizations of how that culture has affected me subconsciously long term. Soon most of my content surrounded my body, body image, ED and body dysmorphia, combined with some fashion beauty, and modeling jobs. I never expected anything to come from posting about it, I wasn’t looking for a following, or popularity. I was sharing it to help maybe one other person simply feel seen and not alone, and frankly I also wanted to feel seen and heard after years of shame. Then covid happened. My mental was absolutely not prepared, especially after an awful traumatic experience that happened in 2018 that I hadn’t even started to heal from yet. As we all were, I was deeply stressed and anxious and felt incredibly lost, and my body started to change in the wake of that. My weight has ALWAYS fluctuated even at my healthiest, but after the car accident my stress was so immense I ended up going back to disordered habits for comfort. I was not as healed as i thought I was. I had also started to feel the weight of my entire life and all of my content centering my body and how I looked. The heaviness of constant comments about my body and weight started to eat at me. Not being able to take one day, without a comment, DM, or discussion about the way you look is draining even for a strong minded person. After years online I started to experience the most harassment from men that I had ever experienced. It wasn’t just DMs,it wasn’t just comments,it turned into Reddit threads and other platforms essentially keeping track of my socials posts, weight,any appearance changes etc. Out of exhaustion from dealing with that, I decided to pivot and talk about 2 things I have been passionate and obsessed over since i was a little kid: fashion and beauty. (Continued in comments 👇🏼)