Victoria BC Boudoir Photography | Working on believing it

This beautiful soul wrote a story to accompany her photos when she chose to share them online. I remember reading it breathless. Breathless at the vulnerability, at the strength to look at those truths and speak them out loud for others to be inspired by. Breathless at the thought of each one of us at war with our bodies – and the simple power that comes with working on your belief that you are beautiful as you are. Because that’s all we can do - to work on our mindsets. To commit to unlearning old patterns that we inherited from our families, from our culture, from society, from other people’s opinions, from the patriarchy.

This beautiful soul really says it best – so I’ll let her words to the rest of the talking.

“

In elementary school, I was told that if I could pull two inches of fat from my abdomen, I was fat.

My friend told me this. She was also Asian, and she had been told this by her family. I examined my belly and according to this rule, I was fat. We were both fat. Those inches existed and it felt like suddenly, we weren't allowed to consider ourselves beautiful.

To be clear, this should have been neither of our concerns, especially at that age. Growing up though, blunt judgment on our appearance from the Asian community was very common; a very specific and uniform set of rules arising from East Asian beauty standards which we were meant to conform, including body fat, muscle mass, lightness of skin tone, eye shape, nose shape, face shape, demeanor, and on and on and on.

Not fitting into this Asian standard of beauty felt very much like being rejected by my own culture, and it contributed to low self-esteem and confusion over my identity growing up.

At the same time, while the Western standard of beauty ostensibly allowed for a somewhat more diverse set of very specific traits, here I felt exoticized and gaslit at the same time. From micro-aggressions from those unironically describing their preferences as yellow fever, to outright violence like the recent Atlanta spa shootings, as a Canadian-born Chinese person, I ruminated on events like these.

I still ruminate and navigating this identity is still a process, but I write all this now because, despite it all, I feel more intune with myself than ever before. There was no one fix for this, and the process continues to be gradual, but undeniably, pole has helped me appreciate my body for what it can do, not for what it looks like. Neither Eastern nor Western beauty standards apply. They are irrelevant because they do not help me pole. Instead, I create my own standard based upon how I would like to move. It was this paradigm shift that helped me feel more comfortable in my skin.

So I wanted to share this photo because it captures me in that skin, stomach in the forefront, two plus inches of fat and all-- and while I'm still working on really believing it, I consider myself beautiful here.