Selena Gomez Leaves Comments On Her Own Instagram Story About Being Imperfect & ‘Proud’
Body acceptance is a journey.
DFree / Shutterstock Social media heightens our level of interconnectedness, yet also creates space to drag people down.
Being a celebrity with a social media presence can create a double-edged sword situation: By posting their lives online, they open themselves up to praise and criticism in equal measure, yet sometimes, the cruelty outweighs the kindness.
Selena Gomez commented on her own Instagram story about being imperfect and ‘proud’ of who she is.
“Today, I realized I will never look like this again,” she wrote beneath a photo of herself in a bikini at a younger age.
Photo: Selena Gomez Instagram
“I’m not perfect but I am proud to be who I am. Sometimes, I forget it’s okay to be me,” she captioned a second bikini photo, one that she got extreme criticism for posting in 2023.
Photo: Selena Gomez Instagram
Gomez was hugely body-shamed for those recent bikini photos, as people (read: men) crept out of the woodwork to leave unbelievably harsh commentary on something that doesn’t concern them, at all: The way someone else’s body looks.
Showcasing vulnerabilities isn’t easy for anyone, no matter how famous or successful they are.
By virtue of having been in her 20s in the first photo, Gomez’s body looks wildly different from what it looks like now. In acknowledging those differences, Gomez is opening up about an issue that affects all of us. How do we accept ourselves, how do we love the bodies we’re in without comparing them to what we used to look like?
By acknowledging that her body has changed, Gomez is giving herself the gift of body acceptance.
Loving our bodies is a wonderful thing, yet we’re human and we can’t be expected to feel great about ourselves all the time. Sometimes, it’s enough — more than enough — to say to ourselves, “This is what I look like,” and treat that as a neutral statement.
Gomez has previously touched on the fraught relationship she’s had with her body, living in the public eye. In an interview conducted by her longtime friend, Raquel Stevens, the 31-year-old founder of Rare Beauty discussed how being the target of consistent body-shaming has negatively affected her.
“I experienced that with my weight fluctuation for the first time. I have lupus and deal with kidney issues and high blood pressure so I deal with a lot of health issues and for me, that’s when I really started noticing more of the body image stuff,” Gomez explained. “I really noticed when people started attacking me for that. In reality, that’s just my truth… I think for me, that really messed me up for a bit.”
Experiencing changes in weight due to medication is a hugely relatable fact of life, yet Gomez doesn’t have to justify why she’s gained weight.
At the crux of the issue, clapping back against body-shaming has to do with bodily autonomy: What happens in and to our bodies is no one’s business but our own.
In that same interview, Gomez talked about her relationship to social media, saying, “When I make an effort to post on social media or do what I’m doing, it’s important for me to make sure it’s 100 percent authentic.”
“I see so many beautiful girls and amazing different characters and then they’re just demolished by an image that they’re trying to chase. They're wanting to be a completely different person but that’s not what’s inside of them, you know? But I get it. I look at other people’s pages — or I used to — and I’m like, okay, I need to fix myself,” she continued.
The comments she left herself on Instagram affirm that it’s okay for our bodies to change. We are all imperfect.
Nothing is won by looking back at past versions of who we once were. I say this as someone who’s mourned the way I looked in my 20s, compared to how I look now. Yet the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is to recognize that our bodies are on a journey, just as we are. They tell stories of who we’ve been and hold promise for where we’re going. At the end of it all, how lucky we are to be here, breathing and moving and living our truths.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis, and all things to do with the entertainment industry.