Chip Chick
“Anyway, my partner likes to post pictures of us, and he always photoshops me to make me look thinner or to make my skin a little brighter/smoother,” she said.
“Maybe it’s not obvious to everyone else… the pictures will still be “liked” and whatnot, some of them even hanging in the house, but I know that’s not me. I’ve made verbal comments about it, and in the beginning, I did this by sort of making a quick joke about it, but now this whole thing really is messing with me. It’s hurtful.”
“t started years ago where maybe just one or two would be altered, and it would be pictures that I wasn’t crazy about, to begin with, so at the time, I thought that he was just weirdly thinking that he was helping my insecurities?”
She has never pointedly asked her husband to photoshop photos of her at all. And while her husband started out only editing a handful of photos, now it’s every single photo of her that he shares.
He never edits himself, only her. She feels that by photoshopping her, he’s essentially saying he wishes she looked different.
“I do not want to grow older and look back at pictures of someone who wasn’t me,” she added. “I want to be able to see all of the chapters of our life as they actually were.”
“Sometimes he will ask if I saw the picture of us he posted, and I don’t even want to look. Sometimes I’ll get messages from him of older memories, and all that I can see is “the old me, aka the girl he misses.”
“Recently (the last year or so), I’ve stayed off of social media, and pictures just aren’t a big deal to me like they used to be… I’ve realized I haven’t taken pictures of us together, but why should I? Sometimes I get in my thoughts and feel like posting the original picture under what he has posted and commenting, “what was wrong with me in this one?” But I don’t want to be petty and put our problems on blast.”
She is aware that the best thing to do here is sit down with her husband and actually bring this all up, but she’s afraid.
She’s scared to know what her husband really does think about her, and she’s not entirely ready to be filled in on his truth.
She has struggled with how she views her body for her whole life, and while she could not recognize that in her younger years, she sure can now.
