For the reason that 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 methods to have an ideal ‘brat summer’. Weaving an additional, 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 would like to. We discuss writing rather a lot nevertheless it never seems to occur and I don’t know why. I type of go round and round on it in my head, like why doesn’t this occur? It’s actually something I would like 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 1000’s of others, is how deeply vulnerable Lorde’s verse is. On the remix, Lorde details her insecurities as a key reason for the gap between them. In her verse, she sings: “I used to be 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 attempted to starve myself thinner / After which I gained all the load back”. 

This isn’t news to her hardcore fans: in September last 12 months, Lorde gave fans an insight into her body struggles in a newsletter, writing: “My body is admittedly inflamed, it’s attempting to tell me something and I’m attempting to support it but nothing seems to assist. I realised earlier this 12 months that listening to my body is difficult for me, it’s something I never really learned to do.” Lorde has touched on an issue 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 elucidate why Lorde’s lyrics have resonated a lot 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 on this hatred made me miss so many good moments because I used to be so embarrassed [of] being perceived,” she wrote within the post. 

I do know for myself, our culture’s obsession with thinness has permeated my subconscious and, in consequence, created a social jail cell that locks itself from the within. Just like most kids who grew up within the 00s, weight loss program culture was embedded in just about all the media around me. At ten, I remember overhearing a family friend discussing Beyoncé’s infamous ‘Master Cleanse’ – a fad weight loss program that consisted of only drinking lemon water with cayenne pepper and honey for ten days – so I attempted it over during summer break. Once I returned to high school I went from being an enthusiastic, high-achieving child to being snappy, disinterested and egregiously obsessive about my changing body.

Throughout my adolescence, I used any time away from school as a boot camp to drop some pounds. And within the lockdown of 2020, I, like many others, became obsessive about the concept of ‘glowing up’. On account of all that point 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 various cosmetic procedures. Locked away from everyone else, you can change every thing you disliked about yourself in private, after which hard-launch your latest appearance once restrictions were lifted. 

Fast forward 4 years, and I still find myself trapped in the identical thought spiral, waiting to be picture-ready enough to socialize. Naturally, I look different at 23 than I did once I was a young person, so while the top goal has shifted, the formula has remained the identical – “Once I [lose x amount of weight], I’ll [do something I want to do]”. One way or the other I even have successfully managed to persuade myself that when I look skinnier I’ll exit more, I’ll take more pictures, I’ll move to a latest 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 infinite. 

Not confined to at least one generation, I always spot this pattern of pondering 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 do know all too well in younger women who need to be ‘ready’ for moments like prom, their first friends holiday and graduation. It feels as if whatever the stage of life we’re in, a few of us are only always waiting to reach at a weight to be ‘ready enough’ to grow to be energetic participants in our existence.

In her book Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women, author Ellen Atlanta examines how digital beauty culture has been destructive for young women. “Do what happens if you starve a brain? You grow to be obsessive,” she writes. “Your concentration is compromised. You stop with the ability to hearken to other people’s opinions. You grow to be unable to see the larger picture. You lose the power to be spontaneous, creative and versatile.”

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

As I write this, there are friends I even have not seen in over three years who I shamefully delay planning with because I live in fear of being seen as a failed glow-up experiment. What in the event that they think I look worse than I did before? Will that change how they see me? But when every thing becomes conditional on attaining a picture you think that is essential, you’re taking a backseat in your life and eventually, it backfires. You grow other than friends, family gatherings grow to be tiresome, you miss birthdays, holidays and in the end grow to be so consumed in your individual thoughts that you just lose all perspective. When Lorde sings “It’s just self-defence until you’re constructing a weapon”, it’s likely that is what she means. Ultimately there isn’t any profit to being hyperfixated on our bodies. “An eating disorder will passionately defend itself. Like an abusive partner, it will possibly 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 latest book Dead Weight, Emmeline Clien questions the structural failures behind our current cultural eating disorder crisis. “It is a collective problem greater than a person 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 may inevitably be cold to the touch and won’t hold us long.”

It’s true there are systemic structures that keep us obsessive about our appearance, but we have now 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 identical way Weight Watchers was incessantly discussed within the early 00s, it is sensible that we’re always being sold one other product – a magical pill, a luxury gym, or Erewhon $20 smoothie – to assist us glow up and alter our life. But this consumerism thrives in isolation, and isolation is a pandemic that pushes people away from those they care about. 

“We will carry this power to make a positive contribution outside the partitions of our home. At work, with friends, anywhere we go, we are able to 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 one true approach to break free from such a tireless cycle is to exist as you might be in the present moment, but not in isolation. Being around people and maintaining a way of community reminds us that the best way we glance is normally the least interesting thing about us. We’d like to withstand 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.