Name: Positively Proving People Wrong!!! With Annie Elainey [CC]
Uploaded: 2020-03-27T18:58:27.000Z
Duration: 14 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

Okay hello lovely people! Did I do it right? Are you watching? Are you watching?

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

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!

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,

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

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.

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

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

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Positively Proving People Wrong!!! With Annie Elainey [CC]

assume

mental

deserve

practice