I got through it with three words. “I love you”. I made it a point, to tell at least three people, every day, that I loved them. And hearing it back got me through it.
If you hear something over and over, it’s natural to start to believe it. Hearing others say “I love you” every day instilled in me the belief that I am loved, and loveable- and over time I grew to love myself.

My self-esteem isn’t perfect, but it’s improved. And I have more “I’m fantastic” days than not.

Hey Lindsay! Glad to see you here. I think your points about autism and athletics are really interesting, though I obviously can’t agree or disagree since I’m not autistic or an athlete. It does go in line with what I know from talking to people and reading, though.

Disability is another interesting area of intersectionality. I know that some people with disabilities eventually end up taking pride in them, but that probably doesn’t make the “LOVE YOUR BODY” injunction any less alienating.

I think that good self-esteem can protect against certain causes of depression but not others. Sometimes people are subjected to levels of stress that they just can’t deal with and depression is the result; other times relatively minor negative events can kind of tip someone over into depression, and maybe that wouldn’t have happened had they been more emotionally healthy to begin with.

Personally, I had really low self-esteem for all of my childhood and adolescence, but once I started recovering from depression it started getting much better. Trying to raise my self-esteem didn’t work and it didn’t help me recover, though. It had to happen on its own, I think.

I do actually love myself, and my body, so for me, seeing all the injunctions to do so in the popular media weren’t a problem, though I did wonder why anyone would have to consciously *try* to love themselves. There are a lot of reasons why I grew up that way, although school self-esteem policies are not one of them. (I’m older than you, so maybe I missed that. I had actually thought a lot of the sillier stuff — participation ribbons for everyone, homework assignments/class exercises on what you like about yourself — were figments of conservative critics’ imagination, like the “multicultural” college lit classes where no one read Shakespeare or Milton anymore.) What did seem to contribute to me having such healthy (or excessive, depending on your point of view!) self-esteem are 1) having autism and knowing it from a very young age, 2) having perhaps a lesser degree of self-consciousness than most people for most of my childhood, due to said condition, and 3) athletics. Even now, I do not notice changes in how my body looks as much as I notice changes in what it can do — if I tire more or less quickly, what is easy or hard for me to lift, how long I can run etc. — more than I do changes in, say, waist size or visible muscle definition. I know it’s not necessarily true for most autistic people, but I really did have a lot less of an ability to imagine what other people were thinking when I was a child and adolescent. So I couldn’t really “see” myself from the outside, or even conceive of that as a thing I should be doing. So I never developed the critical gaze directed at myself that I have since read that most young women develop during adolescence.

The other aspect of it related to my autism is that, because I could talk, I was always in an Explainer role with teachers and other adults who were curious about autism and what it meant to have it. So instead of being stigmatized, I was always having people ask me about how I saw things, and learning that what I said mattered. Lots of autistic people have criticized this role, the “self-narrating zoo exhibit,” as being another way we learn to Other ourselves, but for me it seems to have been mostly helpful, teaching me to advocate for myself and know what my special needs were, and know how I was different and that being different is not Bad.

However, I still think your criticisms are totally valid. I’d also add that people with physical disabilities are another kind of person for whom “Love Your Body” is problematic — how’re you supposed to love something that’s causing you pain, or that doesn’t work as well as you might wish it did?

Also, I still managed to develop depression in college. It wasn’t at all characterized by feelings of being worthless or anything, but I was sad, I did cry all the time, and I *was* obsessed with killing myself. So sky-high self-esteem, in my case, doesn’t seem to have had any protective effect.

I think this is my first comment on your new blog … I had been worried I’d need to create a new user account just for FtB and didn’t want to mess with that, even though I’ve often commented on your posts in the past. It looks like my WP account is working, though, so you’ll probably see more of me!