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Body image

A wedding photograph I cannot look at

Started 23 January 2026 · 19 replies · 133 hearts · read 1.7k times

ClémenceNantes, FR · 23 January 2026
6 months ago

Something I have been sitting with: A wedding photograph I cannot look at Not looking for advice so much as other people's experience.

I have been sitting on this for a month.

I have been sitting on this for a month and it has not got smaller, which I gather is how these things usually go.

I am aware this may be about something older than any of this, and that is part of what I am trying to work out by writing it down.

No advice needed. Company would be welcome and anything else is a bonus.

44

ObieNashville, TN
#1

The thing that has helped most is spending time doing things where my body is useful rather than looked at. Swimming, mostly, badly.

4

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#2

Speaking plainly: if things have got dark, this is a thread to leave and a person to ring. We are company and we are not the right help for that.

12

TiborBratislava, SK
#3

What surprised me was that the difficult feelings did not follow the timeline I expected. My hardest month was much later than I would have predicted.

3

RinManchester, UK
#4

Jonah has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I have stopped reading anything that presents bodies as a before and a subsequent state. That single decision improved my year measurably.

9me too 7

LulaBournemouth, UK
#5

Somebody in this circle wrote that a body is a place to live rather than a thing to display, and I have thought about that most weeks since.

5

NissaHaifa, IL
#6

What I got wrong was expecting a change in circumstances to change how I felt. It did not. The feeling had its own history.

6

TavishIsle of Skye, UK
#7

Building on what Nissa wrote rather than answering the original question.

I found the comments from people who had known me a long time hardest, because they carried an implied opinion about before.

6me too 4

DotFalmouth, UK
#8

This is why I read the boring weeks. Thank you for the boring weeks.

8

OrsolyaBudapest, HU
#9

What helped was other people describing exactly the same complicated feelings without tidying them into a lesson.

10me too 7

MimiHong Kong
#10

My relationship with my body has been complicated my whole life and none of this created that. It surfaced it, which is a different thing.

7

EsmeAix-en-Provence, FR
#11

Orsolya, thank you for that. It gives me somewhere to start from.

The mirror thing comes and goes. Some months I barely notice and some months it is the first thing I think about, and I have stopped trying to control which.

6

GwythFishguard, UK
#12

I liked how I looked before as well. That is a complicated thing to say in most places and it is straightforwardly true.

6me too 6

GwilymCaernarfon, UK
#13

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

10

ZenBristol, UK
#14

Something that helped was reducing how much I looked. Not as a punishment. Just less often, and it made the looking less loaded.

9

OsricSalisbury, UK
#15

Photographs are difficult for me and I have stopped apologising for stepping out of them.

3me too 1

ClémenceNantes, FR
#16

What I would say is that this is harder than the physical side and gets a fraction of the discussion. I am glad this circle exists for it.

5

ObieNashville, TN
#17

Clothes were the practical version of this for me. Nothing fitting the way it used to, and the daily reminder of that was wearing.

4

JonahFacilitatorCork, Ireland
#18

Facilitator note: a couple of replies have described what worked for them, which is welcome, and none of it is a plan for anybody else.

14

TiborBratislava, SK
#19

My therapist pointed out that I was describing my body in the third person, and I had genuinely not noticed I was doing it.

6