Social media has played a crucial part in forming my identity, transforming into an arena through which our recognition of identifications and values are created, constructed,and commodified. The wish of approval and validation in the eye of a digital gaze yielded such a compelling yet latent drive that my body was no longer only needed, but became a main form of exchange in consumerism’s context. However, this validation of self awareness did come at a cost. Aligning my physical appearance with externally imposed ideals - ideals founded in society expectations and hegemonic standards of beauty—caused considerable psychological distress. Over the decades, it morphed into a self-harm ritual where an idealized body was obtained by compulsive exercise and near-starvation.

 

At the core of this struggle was a conflict between personal autonomy and the larger ideological structures that dictate how bodies are perceived and valued. I turned my very being, once both a vital part of who I was and separate from the sum total of me at every moment, into something that worked in order to produce: an image (of myself), how willingly it sang out as brashly coloured flesh on screen or page, disciplined to meet an aesthetic that was not truly my own but rather one idealized by dominant cultural narratives. Such narratives, amplified through social media, equate self-worth in the form of likes, comments and external validation. Reshaping my body to conform with this image was a process that felt both shameful and sort of empowering at the same time. It was a double shame: In one corner, the collective reluctance to crumple under an aesthetic standard that by definition leverages objectification as currency. But every time it did, there was an addictive pleasure in feeling validated; that my attempts to adhere were recognized by someone.

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I found myself in a state of perpetual dissonance, the ultimate climax being my toxic relationship with food; it was here I thought I had finally figured out some kind of solution to this puzzle — how can i continue to indulge every natural craving my body has whilst at the same time contain what society told me would get me validation. The purging was, in many ways, representative of my relationship with the system itself: a transactional act where one's body becomes an object that can be manipulated and consumed before it is disposed off as waste.

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Social media, as a platform, operates a capitalist framework that encourages the discourse of consumerism of each individual. Individuals are both the product and the consumer at the same time. This mode of content production is characterized by subjects who are simultaneously the objects, as well as simultaneously internalizing and producing a style that incurs to dominant aesthetic standards. In this context, my body itself became a shell reflecting these ideological forces, turned into the consumable property which needed to be seen and as such addressed for approval. But it also dehumanized me — rendering me as a product with no autonomy, exposed only via my musculature and my Instagram grid.

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But due to medical intervention, I am now in recovery/“normal” living again (the idea of “recovery,” as we all know is so much more complicated and war torn).What for this hulk or body where anything that even remotely resembles a world to withstand after being manipulated and adapted by those anyway? The root of my experience is a greater systemic critique where capitalism, social media and secular ideologies alike promote the idea that in order to survive or succeed you must be “the otherness” other than who you are which begs consumption by appealing with false validations only creating estrangement followed. This is the deeply personal pain of an experience that — while unique to us — also grew from a larger system designed for the transaction and “normality” in bodies, with this particular rendering being our own cultural capital.

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