If you're new here then hi, I'm Jessica.

I use my channel to make videos about heavy things

in a light hearted way.

Mainly disability, deafness, and chronic illness related,

but also gay things.

We have a lot of gayness here.

Subscribe if that seems like your thing.

Today we're diving back into a sticky topic, bodies.

We all have them, we all have feelings about them.

We all have feelings about other people's bodies,

often in relation to our own.

Or we're just really rude and enjoy casting judgment

on other people's appearances.

Supposedly we're meant to do the most thinking

about our bodies during our teenage years,

but really I think we're always in constant

ebb and flow of positives and negatives about our bodies.

Often that relates to growing up or aging,

but the relationship can become particularly strained

when illness or disability is included in the mix.

We've probably all heard the term body positivity

and likely a very vague idea of what that means.

Being positive about bodies that are often marginalized

is the original concept,

because it's actually a political movement

created by plus-sized women of color

who face a lot of negativity about their bodies.

But it's be co-opted to be the peak of Instagram blandness

giving another excuse for people with

socially acceptable bodies to

take pictures of themselves in bikinis.

What? It's true, I mean, who doesn't love a good

off-duty model in a bikini shot,

but please do not act like you are curing the world hunger

by posting your perfect derriere.

That's not body positivity, the political movement.

It's just body confidence, the feeling.

What I will say however is that it's lovely

that there's a greater encouragement to think

and feel positively about our bodies.

It's the only body we've got after all.

It's important to care for it, but here's a secret.

I don't love my body and that's okay.

From a photo you would probably look at my body

and think, "Well, that looks like a perfectly average

"socially acceptable body to me!"

And yes, yes yes yes it is.

It's also really broken and messed up on the inside

and that gives me some complex feelings,

which I had a discussion about

with a lovely girl called Meg,

as part of Teenage Cancer Trust's #StillMe campaign.

The idea of #StillMe is to acknowledge that

whilst your body will go through changes

you can still be positive about it

or not if that's how you're feeling today.

- [Both] Hello lovely people.

- That was really good.

- Okay, I think I messed up at the end.

- Well done.- No, no, I was impressed.

- Okay, thank you.

- Today I am joined by Meg and we're gonna be talking about

how you don't actually have to love your body,

but also you can love your body even when other people

are saying you couldn't love your body

and there's no right way or wrong way

to think about your own body because it's your body.

So you and I both have had kind of interesting -

- Relationships.

- journeys with our bodies.

- Yep, yep.

- Yeah, do wanna tell us a bit about yours?

- I was 21, so this was two and half years ago

and I was diagnosed with a blood cancer

called Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

So I went through chemotherapy and lost my hair

and that obviously had a really big impact on

just how I felt about myself.

I came out the other side,

last week was my two year clear,

but I still, you know, you still deal with these things.

Your relationship with your body's completely changed

so yeah, that's why I'm here to talk about it.

- And already it being young is quite a difficult time

- Yeah.

- to get ill in itself because when we're teenagers

or when we're in our early 20s,

we're still developing our own relationships

- Yeah.

- with our bodies.

And I imagine when you were 21 you didn't have

this, kind of, crystal clear vision of

- No.

- who you were and what you look like and

you were totally okay with every single part of you.

- No, definitely not but I think I also had

never really had to think about it.

I was quite lucky up until that point

that I never had to really understand

how I felt about myself.

I was kind of confident, just like a normal,

I was just a normal 21 year old

and then I didn't have any of the coping mechanisms

you need for things like that

because I just never had to learn them.

You realize things you thought you were confident about,

you maybe weren't and then you learn a little more about

what actually made you confident before

and it probably wasn't what you thought it was.

- No, I get that.

When I first got ill I was 17

and up to that point, I hadn't really ever thought about

the way I looked

- Yeah.

- that much at all. I was really into fashion,

but the way that my body was formed

- Yeah.

- Wasn't something that upset me or that

- Yeah.

- I ever had to really even think about.

And I guess there's that level of privilege with that,

- Yeah.

- I had a body that no one was gonna look twice at.

- And when you did get ill - Fine. (laughs)

- When you were 17,

what, for you, was the hardest part about that?

- So when I became really ill when I was 17,

I lost weight kind of gradually

over the first year, I think.

And then it just sort of plateaued because I have

connective tissue problems that associate to my guts

and my digestion and how I digest things

and I stopped being able to digest food properly

so I was in taking a lot of calories.

I may be having cake and cream for breakfast

and I just could not keep weight on.

There was almost something that was positive about it

in that I look more ill.

- Mmm-hmm.

- And it was easier for me to be treated

- Yeah.

- Because when you go hospital and

you have an invisible illness,

you don't get treated necessarily very seriously

- Yeah.

- Because people can't tell what's going on,

but when you look very ill,

suddenly people are like, "Oh, can I help you?"

- Yeah.

- It had a really negative impact on the people

around me in my life,

which I found the most surprising part of it.

- In what way?

- In that, people around me would sort of

remind me that I didn't look good.

- Right, yeah.

- They would be like, "Oh, it's such a shame

"that you're this thin." And I'm like,

- Yeah, not helpful.

- Is this an okay thing to say to someone? I don't think so.

- I used to have really really long blonde curly hair

and then when I knew I was gonna lose it,

I wanted to donate it to the local Princess Trust

- Oh!

- Cause they give me a wig so I was like,

"Okay, fine, you can have some of my old bleached hair,

"that's fine. You can take it."

And so I cut it into a little pixie to give,

and then when it started to fall out from there,

I thought, "Okay, I'm just gonna shave it

"before it all falls out."

I actually, weirdly, had a really really fun day with it

because my friend came 'round and did my make-up,

I bought a new outfit,

I got some really big colorful earrings

and it helped me feel like me when I didn't look me at all.

- And it's also taking that choice back,

- Right, yeah.

- That, like, shaving your own head

- Yeah.

- Before all the hair falls out.

- Exactly. Because at that point,

and you must feel the same,

that all these decisions and things are happening around you

but you are not asked about it and

it's just nice sometimes to grab on to whatever you can

to make it feel like it's part of your own

decision what's happening rather than feeling

completely helpless about the whole thing.

- I had a thing when I was hospital where I had to, like,

I had to color my hair.

Every night looking my best,

I had to put my red lipstick on, like, looking horrific.

I did not look good.

- It's the little things, it really is.

I used to have my make-up done to go to chemo

just to try to cover how gray I was looking

and I'd walk in and the nurses would be like,

"Gorgeous, glamorous patient." - You're looking nice.

- Well, okay. - Where have you been today?

(laughs)

- I remember feeling really guilty about feeling the way

I was feeling about my body because at that point,

you kind of feel like, "Got bigger problems.

"I've got more I should be dealing with, you know.

"Other people have got it worse,

"I have it really easy, I've not,

"You know, nothing else has really changed for me."

But, it was really important for me

and, yeah, really helped.

- It can be quite difficult when we get a lot of messages

from society and social media

and this isn't going the way you probably think it will,

but people are like, "Oh social media, it's so bad

"because it, you know, makes us focus on our looks,

"blah blah blah blah blah

"And it's kind of belittling."

But then, at the same time,

we do live in a society that is focused on looks

and when the choice gets taken away from you,

and when you are looking not your best,

- Yeah.

- it's very nice to feel like I have the power in this

and I can decide to put on make-up.

Just because something is happening to our body,

it doesn't have to change who you are.

- So I had an, she was called, like,

a Clinical Nurse Specialist

from the Teenage Cancer Trust,

and she, we would meet every couple of weeks

while I was on treatment,

just to chat about things and how things were going,

and I started to really struggle with

just, my confidence and it was developing into

an anxiety about things and it was, just,

a really low time for me

and she was like, "Why do you feel so, kind of,

"lacking in confidence?"

And I said, "It's because I don't have any hair anymore."

And she was like, "Oh, so were you confident

"because you had hair?"

I was like, "No, that's silly. Of course I wasn't confident

"because I had hair, I was confident - "

And we would like work through the different things

about me and my life and the people around me

that made me feel like me, like Meg,

and realize that some of it might look a little different

right now but actually the basis of it was still there.

- Yeah, like, our outsides are just representations of