Video Transcription

Patrick’s Story: #ChangeThePicture

I lived in a beach town, a town with maybe six or seven beautiful beaches with barely anyone on them, and I didn’t even want to go because that would involve taking my body in public. There was one lifestyle that was the way you had to be: tanned, white, straight, fit. I was a closeted queer kid with body image issues, so I was just kind of fed this message, not just from my parents but from the world at large, that your body is something to always be improved upon, that you should be tireless in your efforts to perfect your body. The work’s never done, and there’s always a new box you’re supposed to squish into. It takes a certain special person to always be able to just look at that box and go, “Nah, I’m good.”

I would love to explain to this young Patrick that the way he’s feeling is not normal, and that he doesn’t deserve to feel so unworthy of love and to feel so unhappy and alone at 19. When I was underweight, I was so unhappy with my body and still trying to change it, to change how I felt about it. And seven years later, with a totally different body, I thought, “Ugh, well, obviously that’s not the problem.” The body’s changing, and the way I’m feeling isn’t changing. So, I guess that’s when I realized it was probably just my brain.

I mean, I think it takes you a long time to realize that if you’re really crippled by these thoughts that you think someone’s having about you. If I could tell my 13-year-old self that they actually do not care, that they are not thinking about you—that they’re in their own world, having their own stuff go down—that’s been really liberating. That’s a lesson, a bloody realization for 13-year-old me. My body is just my body.

Video by Butterfly Foundation