Since I realised I probably won't be going to a psychologist for a while, I decided to talk,at least here,about my struggle with BDD. I don't really know when I passed from being just another insecure teenager to having full blown BDD, but, when last night I threw up simply because I looked at myself in the mirror(no kidding), I realised it was definitely not the former. One thing I'm struggling the most with is the fact that I think I look different in every picture and every mirror. I can see about 10 different versions of myself in a day, but none of them are a match with how I end up looking in pictures. A story I remember was that when I was in the 8th grade I was supposed to get my ID picture taken. Now, I was never confident in my looks, but back then I didn't really care about it. Anyways, when I saw the picture, first thing I noticed was that I didn't look the way I thought I did. Like yeah, in the picture i looked uglier than I thought I did, but the thing that scared and confused me was that I didn't look like I did when I saw myself in the mirror. Fast forward to a couple years later, I have my first major breakdown about the way I looked. My mother noticed how sad I was realised something was wrong. Anyway before I talked to her I was looking in the mirror and feeling really down and ugly, but after I talked to her, and she was very understanding and reassuring about it, I looked in the mirror and felt pretty. And if this isn't a textbook example about how it's all about perception and mood, what it is. A couple months ago I accidentally looked at myself in a reflective surface and I liked what I saw. My image was also not changing from place to place or mood to mood, but the thing is I looked very different from the mirror(like my nose, eyes, face shape etc were really different. Now you might say that aren't that clear or whatever, but everytime i saw someone looking in a reflective surface they looked exactly like irl. But I think reflective surfaces are my loopholes and give me a more accurate depiction of how I look for a number of reasons: 1. I can go look at a reflective surface without the preconception that I'm gonna look ugly and 2. Not being able to see all my imperfections helps me focus on the bigger picture (my whole face) and not just a certain feature. Another thing for me is angles,aka I think I look better from certain angles. So like a month ago I was at a group project and the coordinator suggested that we all take a selfie. I was really anxious about it at first, but then I realised I could position myself at the angle I wanted. Anyway, I ended up pleased with how I looked in the photo, but more importantly I ended up looking exactly like I thought I look. Which brings me to my next point: control. Every time I felt good about myself and I wanted to take a pic of myself, I ended up looking like I thought I did but every time someone takes another pic of me I look completely different (for example a month ago I had to take a pic for school, for which I had on control over the angle Tec, and I thought I looked awful and felt really bad for the next 2 days). But my point is that in first picture, the one the coordinator took I looked like I thought I did and liked it bc I had control over something as opposed to the second one.
I'm not gonna talk about the amount of compliments I've got because I realise ugly&beautiful people can get complimented anyway + I don't think being ugly or beautiful should determine whether on not one should or shouldn't feel this way about themselves. No one deserves to feel this way.
Anyway thanks for bothering to read this much. I'm having a pretty good day today but I realise they're I have some bad ones ahead of me too, so I'm really interested to hear your advice on how to cope with BDD. Also id love to hear about whats your take on my thoughts and struggles with BDD.