When my appearance became a topic at work

My experience is that other people's attention was the destabilising thing, more than anything about my own body.

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

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

I had assumed this would resolve itself and it did not. It needed actual attention, and in my case some therapy, and I resisted both for a year.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Gently disagreeing with Tibor, or rather adding the other half of it.

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

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

I would gently say that if this has become the main thing you think about, that is worth mentioning to somebody rather than managing alone.

Something practical: I bought two things that fit, properly, rather than waiting. The waiting was itself a message I was sending myself.

I read this twice. The second time was for the last paragraph.

Gently disagreeing with Orsolya, or rather adding the other half of it.

Mine has settled into something quieter over two years. Not resolved. Quieter, and much less central than it was.

I found this circle at a point where I was reading things that were making it worse, and the change of company was most of the improvement.