Nikola, 15 years old: It started in grades 1-3. They called me: redhead, carrot-top, ginger. It hurt the most when a friend said that redheads were deceitful. He heard it from his grandmother.
Tomek, 24 years old: I was 1.90 m tall and I weighed 63 kilos. When I grew 20 centimetres in junior high school in one year, I felt it was strange, but I didn’t look at myself and think, “I’m shit.” When others started saying that, that’s how I felt.
Sonia, 16 years old: The reasons for bullying varied. In fifth grade, a classmate laughed at my second chin I got when I was taking encorton for asthma. In sixth grade, he taunted me because of my acne. In seventh grade, I changed schools, but there was another persecutor. He teased me because of my large breasts.
Ania, 23 years old: I went away for 10 months. After my return, instead of “we missed you,” I heard from my relatives, “Look at yourself!”
Nikola, Tomek, Sonia and Ania – all of them had or still have problems with accepting their own appearance. And they are not alone in this. Every other fifteen-year-old girl and every third fifteen-year-old boy in Poland consider themselves too fat, according to the report of the World Health Organisation entitled “Spotlight on adolescent health and well-being”. The study was conducted by the HBSC (Health Behaviour in School-Age Children) research network among more than 220,000 people aged 11, 13 and 15 from 45 countries. The Polish youth has the worst result in Europe when it comes to being critical of their appearance.
Two young theatre scientists, Natalia Królak and Marysia Pyrek, decided to do something about it, and, together with psychologist Aleksandra Musielak, they created the Spójrz na Siebie [Look at yourself] campaign – a body-positive campaign involving young people.
Its three keywords are: emancipation, normalisation and acceptance. Natalia adds, Emancipation, i.e. working with young people to free themselves from harmful patterns and learning to feel good about themselves. By normalisation, we mean spreading knowledge about what happens to our bodies depending on the state of our health, life stages and other conditions. It is also learning to respect it. And acceptance means looking at yourself with love and tenderness, even when the environment sends us different signals.
Ola: The immediate impulse for the campaign was the day when an intelligent, beautiful girl came to my office. She sits down and says that she sucks, that she will never find a boyfriend, that she looks terrible. It was obvious that it was eating her up inside.
First, they set up profiles on social media. They discuss various issues related to the perception of one’s own appearance and eating disorders. They convince that it is worth listening to your needs and desires instead of meeting the expectations of others. They suggest where to look for professional help.
They also figured out that they would hold body positive Fridays. Every week they give lectures for free for 7th-8th grade and high school students. First in Gdańsk, because they mainly operate there, but it turned out that demand for it was everywhere. Paradoxically, the pandemic helped because online they can reach teenagers all over Poland. They hold several lectures a day, so such a body-positive Friday is usually a meeting with over a hundred teenagers in total. Schools from large and small towns apply.
They show six figures on the slide – girls and boys with different body types. Young people have to choose one and say what thoughts this person may have about themselves, says Marysia. Angelika is in the photos. She trained professionally in sports, then experienced an eating disorder and stopped accepting her body. Young people usually describe her in glowing words, completely differently from the way she perceived herself. This is the starting point for talking about what factors influence what we think about our own appearance.
But also about how others may perceive us differently and that because of this attempts to adapt to their expectations do not make sense, adds Ola. Angelika in the sports environment was seen as the fat one, not meeting the standards. At school – as pretty and shapely. And in the family, opinions were divided. When she gained weight, her grandmother said she finally looked normal, and her sister asked, “What happened to you?”
The authors of the campaign have more stories like this because after each meeting someone writes to them to share their experiences. Many people want to tell them publicly afterwards to help others. These stories show that the problem with the lack of acceptance of appearance often concerns people from whom we would never expect it, says Ola.
24-year-old Tomek was 190 cm tall and weighed 63 kilos in junior high school. The comments were usually made in the form of pseudo-jokes and were not caused by a lack of sympathy. He felt liked, he was not excluded from the group. It hurt the most when girls said, “Your leg is like my arm” or “Have you had breakfast today?” He then laughed that he hadn’t had anything in his mouth for a week. He ate lunch at school and two more at home. He also had compulsive eating that ended up with abdominal pain and intestinal problems. He also often wore two pairs of jeans. Once, when he changed clothes before physical education class, his friends saw it and they savaged him.
15-year-old Nikola from Swarzędz, in grades 1-3, was called: redhead, carrot-top, ginger. It hurt the most when a classmate said that redheads were deceitful. He heard it from his grandmother, she says. There was a time when she did not want to go to school because of bullying, and she asked her parents why only she in the family had this hair colour.
16-year-old Sonia suffered from asthma as a child and had to take encorton. Her peers then teased her about her second chin. After stopping medication, it disappeared, but she can still see it. In the fifth grade, she heard from a classmate, “Here comes pimple face.” She went with her grandmother to a dermatologist. In seventh grade she moved to a new school. She was hoping for peace, but there there was a boy making fun of her breasts. She started wearing oversized sweatshirts, often for men, two or three sizes too large.
Looking at the contents of her plate, measuring, weighing, biting comments. For Ania, who trained artistic gymnastics, it was everyday life for 12 years. She had no problem keeping her weight, so the pressure affected her a little less. When she quit the sport at 18, she gained a little weight, but she didn’t pay much attention to it. Everything changed after leaving for a student exchange. When after 10 months she came back from Erasmus more than five kilos heavier, instead of, “We missed you”, she heard from her loved ones, “Look at yourself!” From that moment on, I started to feel bad about myself, she confesses. I heard negative comments all the time, and when there was silence, I would add them all up in my head.
Ola says that similar stories appear at every lecture. One of the girls kept hearing from her dad over dinner not to eat so much, or that she should go and ride a bike. In another case, a daughter who was taking medications for depression heard her mother telling her to give them up because she was getting fat. The topic of verbal abuse among peers is something we are aware of, while embarrassing and degrading messages from parents or other adults in the family are just as common. And as it turns out, they seem to have the strongest influence on our relationship with our own bodies – emphasises Ola and gives the example of a girl who said that she was also teased at school by her peers, but did not feel strongly affected by it. Because her parents brought her up in such a way that she built her own self-esteem not on her appearance, but on what talents she had, what she could do, what she had achieved.
Jadwiga, Nikola’s mother: At first I felt powerless, but my husband and I quickly took matters into our own hands. We were wondering what to do to prevent Nikola from having low self-esteem and to like her hair. We kept telling her that she was beautiful and special, but that was not enough. In the second grade of primary school, we enrolled her in an advertising agency and quickly received feedback.
When I was in high school, I had the impression that all campaigns were addressed to overweight people. I felt completely alone, says Tomek. I talked to my mother a few times about what was happening at school, but I quickly quit because I saw that it upset her.
There is also another problem with parents. Many people find it difficult to understand that they are doing something wrong because they have good intentions, says Natalia, and Ola adds, If a mum tells a teenager: “Eat less because you have gained weight,” this is out of concern to protect the daughter from, for example, comments from her peers. But she does not realise that such a negative message is much more powerful when said by her.
Teachers also have trouble recognising words that hurt. When girls complain that their friends tease them, they often hear from teachers, “It’s just cocky advances” or “The colder they are the hotter they get,” says Ola.
Marysia: Our lectures are aimed at opening up this topic for discussion in schools. Teachers and educators should take responsibility for the relationships in the classroom and build a supportive group within them rather than turning a blind eye.
Sonia has similar experiences. The teachers heard the taunts and did not react. I don’t think they knew what to do, she says and adds that young people prefer to complain to their friends than to adults. Teachers ignore the matter, and the persecutors will not forgive anyway.
In Poland, 21 percent of girls and 31 percent of boys (in the group of 15-year-olds) feel a lot of support from teachers, according to the HBSC survey. This is again the worst result in Europe.
In high school, Tomek played volleyball. After one of the lost matches, his classmate said it was his fault because he was so thin and not very mobile. Then the PE teacher chimed in. He said that maybe someday I will gain weight because so far I am only skin and bones, like Wlazły, says Tomek. It was supposed to be a compliment, but it strongly undermined my self-esteem.
Natalia believes that those who hurt often do not realise the importance of their words. That is why we pay a lot of attention to vocabulary during the lectures. How we talk about ourselves determines how we see ourselves. One of the goals of the campaign is to break the vicious cycle. Today’s youth, who have a negative relationship with their bodies, will also one day have children. It is important for us that they do not continue the message they received.
Ania started counting calories and reading about healthy eating. At the same time, she had episodes of compulsive overeating. I kept looking in the mirror, in shop windows. I started avoiding meetings with family and friends, and when I happened to go out to restaurants, I was angry that I ate so much. Then I went home and ate again to eat away my guilt. I wanted to lose weight and I was tired.
Ola: Young people are constantly struggling to be accepted by others. They don’t feel at all that the person they should like the most is themselves. When we are in a long-term bad relationship with our own bodies, depression can be one of the consequences. And depression is the most common reason today for parents to visit a psychologist with their children.
The age of 13-15 is a natural phase in which we focus on our appearance. Not accepting it reveals other problems: bad relationships with parents, messages heard at home, lack of support from adults.
During the lectures, but also on social media, we talk a lot about the fact that starting therapy is a normal thing. Young people have little knowledge of helplines, and reaching for such help is also – especially in smaller towns – still stigmatised, notes Marysia. After each workshop in schools, the girls get a lot of questions: where to look for free psychological help, is it anonymous, or can it be used without the parents’ knowledge. We respond on an ongoing basis, provide helpline numbers, we also published them on Facebook and Instagram. But even when young people dare to seek professional help, they do not always get it because the lines are busy. So recently we launched free online psychological help. You can report to Ola.
The authors of the campaign believe in a naturally formed support group. We put a lot of emphasis on creating a platform of speech for teenagers. We encourage them to write, tell us their stories. Perhaps someone who experiences something similar will read them. Or maybe a parent, says Ola.
Additionally, we connect teenagers from different towns. We see that they lack peer friendships based on respect and understanding, a space where they could get to know each other and talk. People who have similar experiences understand each other better, open up to each other faster, and often make friends, says Marysia.
Tomek says that when he went to high school, the teasing ended. At that time, he focused on supporting his classmates because they had problems with bulimia and anorexia. Some ended up in a children’s psychiatry ward.
As a humanities class, they had additional ethics classes with a Polish philologist. We went through a lot of topics that people didn’t discuss with their parents. Most importantly, we could start talking and not feel judged, says Tomek. A teacher once said that in life you have to be a healthy egoist and love yourself. Because if you don’t love yourself, how can you love others? And that was the first step towards self-acceptance for me. The other was my girlfriend. In high school, I started dating Ada, with whom I still am today. She liked my appearance, and she would convince me of this all the time.
When Ania realised that the topic of weight and appearance was turning into an obsession that disturbed her studies and relationships with people, she decided to get out of the vicious circle. She decided to meet a psycho-dietician. They came to the conclusion that the only times she feels good about herself is when she goes out with her friends. There are no mirrors, the here and now is what counts, the stress is gone. And most of all – no one pays attention to what Ania eats. She was given a task: to transfer her attitude from her trips to everyday life.
Nikola appeared in Lidl’s newsletter, she appeared in a TV commercial for Dr. Oetker. Thanks to this, she gained more self-confidence. I started to tolerate nicknames more, but I preferred to be called redhead than a carrot-top or ginger. Recently, there are definitely fewer taunts, my friends have probably grown out of it a bit. In the past, I couldn’t react to taunts, I would clam up. I would probably speak up today. She admits that sometimes she still has moments when she would like – just as her friends do – to lighten her hair.
Sonia: I had a few crying nights because of what my colleagues said. I tried to get out of the PE class and deliberately flooded my clothes with water or another drink. There were times when I didn’t feel like getting out of bed and going to school. But it’s worth getting up – she says and emphasises that she was supported all the time by her grandmother and cousin. Today she is in the first year of high school and is relatively calm.
The authors of the “Spójrz na się” campaign did not expect such pace and momentum. We try to post at least three posts a week, do a livestream at least once a month and give lectures at schools every Friday. Additionally, individual contact with young people who write to us and immediate help. Sometimes it is difficult to handle it all, says Marysia.
So far, we have managed to obtain money from the Development Initiation Fund for the organisation of artistic and psychological workshops during the summer holidays. We believe that it is easier to make friends with your body through movement, dance and theatre. Then we see what it gives us and what it can do, explains Natalia. In addition to group classes, there will also be the possibility of individual meetings with a psychologist.
Ania admits that she still wonders how others see her. And she knows that her body is under constant scrutiny, largely because of her profession. She is a dancer. She has also recently been in a relationship and when she hears compliments from her boyfriend, it is difficult for her to accept them as sincere. I will always look at what I look like. It has been such an essential part of my life for too long.
Sonia claims that she now accepts her appearance. Maybe my chin bothers me a bit, but I have one and I won’t change it.
There was silence in the classroom when Nikola talked about her experiences. Not everyone is aware that such taunting can lead to a tragedy, she emphasises.
Tomek: Today, when I look in the mirror, I think to myself that I can see a cool boy who has arms and legs, who can pursue his passions and dreams. And who is still slim but healthy.
JUST LOOK AT YOURSELF – Natalia came up with this name. This is a message that is very violent, but it could not be. Just look at yourself, see what a wonderful person you are!
Author: Izabela O’Sullivan
Illustration: materials from campaign „JUST LOOK AT YOURSELF ”
The text was published in „Wolna Sobota” a magazine of „Gazeta Wyborcza” 24 April 2021
