What Selena Gomez’s TikTok can teach Gen Xers about body shaming, living with an autoimmune disease, and kindness.
Probably like you, I’m not on TikTok and I don’t know much about Selena Gomez’s music (although I did love her in Only Murders in the Building, a TV show on Disney +), but she taught me some lessons about body shaming, living with an autoimmune disease, and the power of kindness through a TikTok live last week. So I thought I’d share them with you.
But first, a little background about Selena Gomez
Selena Gomez is a 30-year-old singer and actor who started out as a child star on the TV show Barney & Friends and then moved on to Disney-produced programs. I have to say I feel that child stars of the 90s and 2000s probably suffered the most with body image and body shaming because they grew up publicly in such a toxic time, and viewers now expect them always to have the small bodies they had as teens.
Selena has had to go through much more than being a child star. She has had an eating disorder, been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and lupus, an autoimmune disease. This makes what happens next even more disturbing.
Why Selena was body shamed
Back in January, Selena posed for some paparazzi shots wearing a swimsuit while on vacation. First of all, let's offer some praise to Selena for posing for the paps. It’s a boss move because she can’t control how she looks in the photos, but it's a way to get the paps to move on to other targets. Click here to see the photos. I think she looks great (even though the way she looks shouldn’t matter because she has enormous talent that has nothing to do with her appearance.)
Once these photos came out, the body shaming started. People began to comment on Twitter to say “Wow, pack on the pounds or what” and “OH SHES HUGEE”. (Side note: not only are trolls mean, they don’t seem to value grammar or spelling!)
What this teaches us about Body Shaming
This may seem like a small, one-off event. But you know deep down that it’s not. You might have thought negative body comments about another celebrity or more likely, you’ve thought them about yourself. “God, I look so fat in those photos.” And fat, in this context, means ugly.
As women, we are taught that the way we look is the most important thing, when in fact, like Selena, we all have so much more to give to the world than our physical appearance. Whether it’s acting or singing skills, raising families, or being really good at balancing the books, our looks shouldn’t have anything to do with our talents.
I hope you can see that being mean about anyone’s body including your own is not supportive of the sisterhood and maybe you can commit to taking a break from it? If you think about the number of times you have negative thoughts about your body each day and multiply that with the number of days since you remember having the first negative thought… that’s a lot of thoughts and they can all add up to a big hit to your self-esteem.
And each time we have that thought about another person’s body, we are adding to the objectification of bodies which is a practice that harms us all.
What Selena teaches us about living with an autoimmune disease
In her TikTok live, Selena talks about how her medications help her to feel better but also impact her weight. She alludes to the fact that she’s sometimes on her meds and sometimes she’s not. That’s what it’s like to have an autoimmune disease. You have good days and bad. You have stretches of good days and stretches of bad days. It’s hard to know when you’ll feel good and when you’ll get hit from behind with bad days. And there are side effects to medications. Taking them might make you feel good in some ways but not so good in others.
Plus. autoimmune diseases are largely invisible, although some come with things like skin rashes and others can be quite debilitating which can result in the need for physical aids like walking sticks.
This means people with autoimmune diseases are often treated like people who are well and pain-free because no one can see that there is an issue.
We know about Selena Gomez’s autoimmune disease (lupus) because she has told us about it, otherwise, you might have never known about it.
What we can learn from this about kindness
There are a few things to unpack from Selena’s body shaming to help us understand the importance of kindness.
Firstly, there is power in Selena sharing her feelings with a video post. We are able to see the vulnerability and pain Selena is facing and it helps to humanise her and the experience she is having. I believe that sharing vulnerabilities is one of the best ways to be kind to yourself and to others because when we share we learn that we aren’t alone, that we have shared experiences and we allow others to see that they also aren’t alone.
Secondly, we are reminded that we can’t tell what someone is going through by looking at them from the outside. We often can’t tell how healthy someone is, physically or mentally, just by looking at them.
Lastly, its a reminder that we ALL have good days and bad days, even if you are a famous actor, and that its okay to do what you can to feel better, even if that means taking medication that makes you “fat” or taking a day or two to rest.
Since I started writing this post, Selena has announced a break from TikTok to help support her mental health. This is another act of self-kindness.
In my opinion, kindness is the key to true wellness and research backs me up. It's time to ditch hustle culture and focus on being supportive of ourselves and those around us. That’s why I’ve created The Kindness Space, a themed conversation each fortnight that's hosted live on Zoom for free.
The first conversation is this Thursday 2nd March at 5.30pm WA time (recording will be available). If you’d like to be on the newsletter list so you can join the conversation and community for free, add your details below.