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How a Boudoir Shoot Helped Me Love My Body

Caitlin Fisher
3 min readNov 21, 2019

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Photo by Jen Hearn

When you live uncomfortably in your own body, it shows. It shows in your posture, your facial expressions, your wardrobe choices.

From about age twelve or so, I vacillated between extremes of ill-fitting clothing. When I wanted to hide, I wore over-sized clothes that I swam in. Other times, I stuffed myself into jeans a size too small, caring more about what the tag said about me than about the red, angry lines cutting into my skin at the seams of my pants.

I struggled with my weight for twenty years, believing that my worth as a person was tied directly to my desirability as a romantic partner, which was tied directly to my pants size.

I was never one for sex with the lights off, but I still felt ashamed of my body when I had sex. I felt like I needed to apologize to my partners for what I looked like naked. My deeply instilled shame about my body tainted everything about me for nearly two decades of my life. I’d fall in love with anyone who wanted me to, because I was so sure no one else ever would.

Fighting my eating disorder

My personality was replaced with a bag of shake mix.

After several years of extremely restrictive diets and over-exercise, I realized in early 2019 that I had an…

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Caitlin Fisher
Caitlin Fisher

Written by Caitlin Fisher

Prone to sudden bursts of encouragement. They/them. Queer, autistic author of bit.ly/GaslightingMillennials

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