Lorde has articulated how many of us feel about our bodies

Since the release of Charli xcx’s sixth studio album brat, our social media timelines have been flooded with neon green memes, conspiracy theories and step-by-step guides on how to have a perfect ‘brat summer’. Weaving an extra, and seemingly not final, layer to the brat tapestry, last week (June 21) she released a remix to “girl, so confusing” with Lorde.

The remix was a highly anticipated collaboration between two artists with somewhat overlapping fanbases, who make sense as friends but have interacted very rarely in public. Back in 2022, during a Q&A on her private Instagram, Charli was asked if she would ever work with Lorde. In a story, she responded: “I want to. We speak about writing a lot but it never seems to happen and I don’t know why. I sort of go round and round on it in my head, like why doesn’t this happen? It’s actually something I want to ask her about.” 

Two years on, the pair have “worked it out on the remix”. Honest and sensitive, the song clears the air between them. But what seems to have struck the loudest chord, for myself and thousands of others, is how deeply vulnerable Lorde’s verse is. On the remix, Lorde details her insecurities as a key reason for the distance between them. In her verse, she sings: “I was so lost in my head / And scared to be in your pictures / ‘Cause for the last couple years / I’ve been at war in my body / I tried to starve myself thinner / And then I gained all the weight back”. 

This isn’t news to her hardcore fans: in September last year, Lorde gave fans an insight into her body struggles in a newsletter, writing: “My body is really inflamed, it’s trying to tell me something and I’m trying to support it but nothing seems to help. I realised earlier this year that listening to my body is hard for me, it’s something I never really learned to do.” Lorde has touched on a question many grapple with but rarely discuss – how insecurities about our bodies can paralyse us and destroy our relationships.

Since its release, many young women have taken to social media to explain why Lorde’s lyrics have resonated so much with them. One TikTok user @thecurtainsareblue, posted a video saying she related to the singer because she stopped reaching out to friends, deleted her social media accounts and extricated herself from her friends’ lives out of fear of them seeing her body. “Being trapped in this hatred made me miss so many good moments because I was so embarrassed [of] being perceived,” she wrote in the post. 

I know for myself, our culture’s obsession with thinness has permeated my subconscious and, as a result, created a social jail cell that locks itself from the inside. Similar to most children who grew up in the 00s, diet culture was embedded in almost all the media around me. At ten, I remember overhearing a family friend discussing Beyoncé’s infamous ‘Master Cleanse’ – a fad diet that consisted of only drinking lemon water with cayenne pepper and honey for ten days – so I tried it over during summer break. When I returned to school I went from being an enthusiastic, high-achieving child to being snappy, disinterested and egregiously obsessed with my changing body.

Throughout my adolescence, I used any time away from school as a boot camp to lose weight. And in the lockdown of 2020, I, like many others, became obsessed with the idea of ‘glowing up’. Due to all that time in isolation, staring into our reflections on Zoom calls, the pandemic saw a surge in people viewing themselves as products needing ‘rebranding’. By the tail end of the pandemic, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) reported a 70 per cent increase in requests for virtual consultations for different cosmetic procedures. Locked away from everyone else, you could change everything you disliked about yourself in private, and then hard-launch your new appearance once restrictions were lifted. 

Fast forward four years, and I still find myself trapped in the same thought spiral, waiting to be picture-ready enough to socialise. Naturally, I look different at 23 than I did when I was a teenager, so while the end goal has shifted, the formula has remained the same – “When I [lose x amount of weight], I will [do something I want to do]”. Somehow I have successfully managed to convince myself that once I look skinnier I’ll go out more, I’ll take more pictures, I’ll move to a new city, I’ll pitch more ideas, I’ll show my true personality at work more, I’ll date this person and I’ll wear that outfit – the list is endless. 

Not confined to one generation, I constantly spot this pattern of thinking in people of all ages. I hear older women around me discuss their desire to drop weight before their weddings or trying for a baby, and I hear phrases I know all too well in younger girls who want to be ‘ready’ for moments like prom, their first friends holiday and graduation. It feels as though regardless of the stage of life we’re in, some of us are just constantly waiting to arrive at a weight to be ‘ready enough’ to become active participants in our existence.

In her book Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women, writer Ellen Atlanta examines how digital beauty culture has been destructive for young women. “Do you know what happens when you starve a brain? You become obsessive,” she writes. “Your concentration is compromised. You stop being able to listen to other people’s opinions. You become unable to see the bigger picture. You lose the ability to be spontaneous, creative and flexible.”

“How many girls are missing percentages of themselves, lost particles and potential? How many of us have been eaten away by the hunger to be beautiful, to be the best?” Atlanta writes. Catherine*, a 24-year-old student and friend of mine from London, spent the majority of her adolescence navigating various eating disorders. Now in recovery, she finds herself attempting to rebuild the bridges she unintentionally burnt at the height of her illness. “I now have to do the catch-up game with old friends,” she tells me. “They are compassionate and never make me feel guilty but I know some of them thought my distance was because of something they did. But truthfully, it was nothing more than a projection of my own issues.”

As I write this, there are friends I have not seen in over three years who I shamefully delay making plans with because I live in fear of being seen as a failed glow-up experiment. What if they think I look worse than I did before? Will that change how they see me? But when everything becomes conditional on attaining an image you think is necessary, you take a backseat in your life and eventually, it backfires. You grow apart from friends, family gatherings become tiresome, you miss birthdays, holidays and in due course become so consumed in your own thoughts that you lose all perspective. When Lorde sings “It’s just self-defence until you’re building a weapon”, it’s likely this is what she means. Ultimately there is no benefit to being hyperfixated on our bodies. “An eating disorder will passionately defend itself. Like an abusive partner, it can push all other close connections away,” writes Jennifer L Gaudiani in her 2018 book Sick Enough: A Guide to the Medical Complications of Eating Disorders.

In her new book Dead Weight, Emmeline Clien questions the structural failures behind our current cultural eating disorder crisis. “This is a collective problem more than an individual one, a social sickness,” Clien writes. “But I worry that our (rightful) belief in collective responsibility is being misused to absolve ourselves of individual responsibility, to avoid asking ourselves whom we’re stepping over to climb onto a throne that will inevitably be cold to the touch and won’t hold us long.”

It’s true there are systemic structures that keep us obsessed with our appearance, but we have some power to catch patterns and behaviours before they stray into more destructive territories. At a time where Ozempic is glued to the tip of our tongues in the same way Weight Watchers was incessantly discussed in the early 00s, it makes sense that we are constantly being sold another product – a magical pill, a luxury gym, or Erewhon $20 smoothie – to help us glow up and change our life. But this consumerism thrives in isolation, and isolation is a deadly disease that pushes people away from those they care about. 

“We can carry this power to make a positive contribution outside the walls of our home. At work, with friends, anywhere we go, we can resist contributing to a culture of body dissatisfaction and narrowly defined standards of beauty or health,” writes Jennifer Gaudiani, in her book Sick Enough. The only true way to break free from such a tireless cycle is to exist as you are in the current moment, but not in isolation. Being around people and maintaining a sense of community reminds us that the way we look is usually the least interesting thing about us. We need to resist this social conditioning which keeps us prisoners in our own lives, and – as Lorde so eloquently summarised – holds us back from potentially fulfilling creative partnerships, friendships and experiences.