Oh, but first canI rehearse it please? Wait...once... Hello lovely people

Nope messed it up! Down and then across because that's people who have stubble

on their chin and people who don't

Okay I'm gonna write it down. Hello lovely people! Rght, everyone, this is the

lovely Annie who I am absolutely delighted that I get to meet in person.

You're one of my favourite people on the Internet! You're my favorite person on the internet!

We're so cute, love it!

So, tell the people what you do

Alrighty, so I have a channel called Annie Elainey and on it I do similar to you

I guess where I talk to y'all about my disability stuff and basically

share my life with y'all. Delightful! Today we are gonna talk about, since

we're both lovely disabled people, what it's like trying to have a positive

body image when you have disabilities which can be complex, very very

complex and we're currently at VidCon if you're wondering why I'm with an American

You just did a panel about body image gender. Yeah, body image, gender,

presentation video

One of the things you talked about was the hashtag

love my disability which to some people can seem

like a very strange concept. How could you love a disability? How could you love

something that's so terrible and awful and yes having a disability isn't

necessarily the greatest thing in the world

No. But also it's just if this is the body that I am in I feel very powerfully

about my body that I must make a conscious decision to always love it no

matter what and my body ,due to my

disabilities we both have connective tissue disorders and I also have a nerve

condition as well, my body has changed a lot. It went through a period where I was

really really thin I was eighty eight pounds

six stone. I am 5'9 and I was incredibly thin and one thing that

people kept telling me they kept reminding me was that I looked terrible

and nobody believed that I could have a positive body image. They thought it was

a terrible thing for me to say "no I love my body" and I did and I bought dresses

that fitted me I got some new stuff that had the same style it went in at the

waist and it had a big skirt but now my waist was tiny and I had to buy

children's clothes. Daily, from my family, from wider family, from friends, from

strangers: they felt they had to remind me that my body was horrible "but you

don't like it do you? You don't like it? I mean because you're too thin and it's

just sticky out here and..." No! Screw you! This is my body, I love it I don't care

what you think! How did you go about that? How did you? Because like that was a huge

journey for me to like find body peace that way

So like I'm assuming it was probably like eating eating disorder recovery I'm

assuming. I didn't have an eating disorder.

No? Just because it was for me

cuz I was like that's why I make the assumptions we both have connective

tissue disorders but I when I was from age 12 to 21 had non disability related

like eating disorder body dysmorphic disorder and body

dysmorphic disorder is when you look in the mirror and you see something that

isn't there like a hallucination, so I would look in the mirror and see

like a monster I would see something like a 600 pound rhinoceros thing

my brain, my mental illness, told me everybody who looked at me was nauseous

at the sight of me they would say and that

every one that I passed inside their heads were thinking she doesn't deserve

to be here I wish she wasn't here I don't want to see her I'm gonna vomit

and so it very much made me feel like I was not deserving of taking up space

I was not deserving of existing I was not deserving of being seen but

long story short there it wasn't until I was 21 and someone was like "Are you

okay? Something's wrong with your brain." and so when I got confronted for the

first time about possibly being mentally ill that's when I decided to really

proactively do self therapy and recover and this happened before I started

losing abilities so through recovery process I found this euphoria of

like "I'm here, I'm alive and I deserve to love myself, I deserve to love my body no

matter what state it's in." So that's what I found through that I found "You

know what, body? I love you and no matter what you do, no matter what you look like

and no matter what you experience or go through I'm gonna love you anyway ."

and so then when finally losing abilities came along I had that foundation.

I have a similar thing in a way but having from a very young age I wasn't diagnosed until

I was 17 even though I had masses of symptoms my whole life, I wasn't

born right let's be honest. They told my mother in the hospital I was not okay.

They didn't know what was wrong with me but I was just not okay. my grandfather

was a doctor he looked at me and he was like something wrong with that baby

mother's like yeah so everyone keeps saying and so I knew my whole life like

that is not okay with my body but when I was being told from the outside from my

teachers and so um was that I wasn't doing enough I wasn't trying hard enough

I wasn't good enough I think also because I've always been quite I've

never struggled with a mental health issue so I guess the stuff that works

for me doesn't work for other people necessarily but for me having been told

that over and over and over mentally made me stronger because I was

like well screw you or you're gonna see

you know I mean she's not gonna do well in these hats issues I was like well I'm

gonna race them now oh my god and they talk about me in aids

that's like that's what's in you like I never meant on these like family hikes

and it was like okay I mean I struggle to walk like a hundred meters but all right

and I'd be like 7 at the back dragging myself along and I

was like you know what body good on you good job you've made it this far

I knew that my body was putting in a hundred percent effort all the time

always here always trying I knew that I was always trying I matter what anyone

else said to me and then even when I got ill and they were very much like oh you

don't need to take your a levels anymore it doesn't matter like what because my

life is stopped what do you think is gonna happen I have to continue across

this point after spending two years in a dark room because I can I can sit up

without vomiting or passing out and I can have light sound or touch because it

gave me immense pain I say you know what I'm going to take my a-levels god damn

it so I lay in a dark room dictating and a lady wrote down my exam results and

everyone told me I couldn't do it you know what I got a hundred percent.

so it's just defiance my father my positive body image is because yes you said I

can't so I'm gonna prove to you that I will you said I can't love this so I

will goddamn love it every morning when I get dressed I have to get dressed in

front of the mirror I can't feel most of my body so like if I'm putting on tights

or something I have to be in front of a full-length mirror so I can see them

getting out my legs and do I'm doing and every morning and look at myself in the

mirror and I pick what I think looks really great today and I just stone it

for a while yeah it's terrible I go to the loo and

okay give it and then I'm like my chauffeurs today Jessica looking good and its

truly it's like a daily affirmation yeah positive affirmations whenever I am

in front of a mirror I look at myself I find the part of myself I like the most

in this moment well that is my hair or my nose mm-hmm

or just I look great in this dress and I look at it and I go that's a good point

I've liked what people should be practicing to try and like start like

really what's the word I was used to use retraining your brain because I think

disability by default has a lot of people immediately hating their bodies

which if you hate your body you have the right to but I always think that it's

just better for oneself to like try and like you know evolve from that place

because I don't think that hate is a healthy feeling for like anybody to feel

especially in regards to themselves so one of the ways to combat it is to practice

loving yourself practice looking at yourself in the mirror and even if you

have to fake it like and even if you're lying to yourself you're gonna give

yourself a compliment Just the days when I look awful

and I look at myself in the mirror and I'm like you look horrific

but that is a great eye color I mean that beautiful Jessica what I'm blessed

and I I think it is the outside world comes and they tell us you should want

to look like this you should want to have this body you should want to be

this weight you should want to have that hair color bla bla bla bla you should

feel bad about your disability you should feel bad about the way your body

looks and I'm just like no thanks I don't really want to

doesn't sound very fun to hate myself but

thanks for the advice right but then if we want to talk about like bad hair days

that cuts me I mean it does I have like dysphoria with like a bunch of different

parts of my body and I think like there's that intersection of like gender

and which we talked about on Annies channel yes gender scription so I'll

have problems with like my hips and like that all the bumps of my body and I

will have problems with it sometimes and it depends on the day some days I'm like

okay I can work this Beyonce it up and then a lot of the times just no a lot of

times it just does make me feel very uncomfortable and it doesn't feel like I

feel like I'm living in a body that doesn't represent what's inside I I have

to just work through it I have to figure out a way to continue going on my day

because it can get so bad like anxiety mental illness that you're like I don't

want anybody to see me I just want to stay alone and not move on with my life

and not not go on with my day that's when you know you have to kind of be

your own parent yeah be your own partner yeah if you you got to think of yourself

like if you were not you if you saw your friend thinking the way you think about

yourself what will you say to them and it would

be encouraging it would be supportive you got to be able to treat yourself

like yeah like you're in a relationship with our side which you are outside of

your body and I really feel very protective of my body like when I'm

saying when I was really skinny and everyone was being so rude I would take

that but I would almost like disassociated from my body and I'd be

like I'm not gonna let this mean comment filter through to the part of my brain

that handles how I feel about my body I'm just gonna take it I'm just going to put it in a little box

and I'm just going to put it on a shelf somewhere in

my mind there is like a little room full of boxes of horrific things people have

said to me and I'm just like I'm just going to lock that room then leave that be. and never deal with it don't need to

go and deal with that I think that's fine sounds like you got it under control I trust

you sounds like you have it on lockdown of like locking bad things away

I think you just literally let it yeah let it let it fly off it's like time

they you know they dissolve with time okay I hope it doesn't catch up with you

one day someone unlocks the box oh wow this is a positive note to end this on isn't it

so thank you very much for watching this potentially rambling video about body

image and disability I hope that you connected with some of it that you could

kind of recognize where we're going with this but I really want to know what your

coping strategies are what are the things that you do to make you feel

great about yourself me curling my hair and red lipstick me positive

affirmations wearing clothes that make me feel good and do practicing being

proactive and continuing to live my life even if I don't feel entirely

comfortable with my body at the time I'm gonna wear what makes me happy no

matter how much other people might be right we're today Jessica thats a bit of a odd

I mean there are maybe too many bows on that it's eight bows too much is it no

no it's never too much hi Rachel good to see ya

you can find her as well gonna put her channel down in the description you can go leave her some

comments like HI RACHEL also please go and check out Annie and the video we

made for our channel which had more of an LGBTQ+ stanch so goodbye my darlings

we shall see you next time