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My creative writing was a poem that describes a day in the life of a teenager who is struggling with body image issues. The poem is fairly short, but it goes through her school day and what happens when she goes home. It also gives some insight into what her thought process is like and how she feels about the way that she looks. I wrote this with my guiding question in mind of how social media constantly exposing us to the ideal body image has a huge effect on our mental health. My creative writing is below.

Wake up. Get on the scale. Make yourself look.

You don’t deserve breakfast. Go to school.

Try not to look at how everyone else looks.

Be happy when you are supposed to be happy.

Go to lunch. Tell everyone you’re full,

Try to make yourself believe that you are full too.

Go home. Go on Instagram.

Look at how great everyone else looks.

Take a selfie and retake it until you don’t look disgusting.

Run until you physically can’t anymore.

Shower. Go to bed. Do it all again tomorrow.

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My last peer-reviewed article is “Associations between social media, adolescent mental health, and diet: A systematic review. Peer-reviewed article. Talks about sadness, mental health, and body image” by Laurence Blanchard et al. and was published in September of 2023. The original purpose of the article was to bring to light how adolescents who are using social media are facing many severe consequences because of that. Many are battling eating disorders, depression, unrealistic body expectations, and more. The main audience for this audience was for the general public and for the parents of teenagers. The authors of this article wanted to warn society about how social media can be damaging to the people who use it and how people need to be aware of its effects. I encountered this article while I was researching social media, sadness, and body image. I read the article and I was able to understand and agree with the messages that the article was trying to convey. I responded to the article by agreeing with what was written and making connections between the article and my own life. I believe that this article can be in conversation with the article "Active and passive social media use are differentially related to depressive symptoms in older adults” by Kaitlin M. Lewin et al.. I believe that these articles can be in conversation with one another because I believe that the topics that we discussed by Kaitlin M. Lewin et al. can help explain what was written by Laurence Blanchard et al.. "Active and passive social media use are differentially related to depressive symptoms in older adults” stated how active social media use (posting) and passive social media use (browsing) can affect our mental health in different ways. “Associations between Social Media, Adolescent Mental Health, and Diet: A Systematic Review” wrote about how different types of content that people look at and post have different effects on the individual. Both articles really dive into how different social media usage and exposure of body image can affect our mental health. I believe that the article “Associations between Social Media, Adolescent Mental Health, and Diet: A Systematic Review” goes with my guiding question because the article talks a lot about the exposure of body image through social media. The article uses statistics and analysis to show how social media exposure of body image brings more sadness to the people using it. 

Blanchard, Laurence, et al. “Associations between Social Media, Adolescent Mental Health, and Diet: A Systematic Review.” Obesity Reviews, vol. 24, Sept. 2023, pp. 1–15. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1111/obr.13631.

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Another peer-reviewed article that I selected was “Active and passive social media use are differentially related to depressive symptoms in older adults” by Kaitlin M. Lewin et al. which was published in April of 2022. The original context of this article was to understand and assess the difference in how our mental health is affected by different social media usage. The audience for this work I believe was for the general public to understand how we use social media differently will affect our overall sadness. I encountered this article while doing research on the topic of social media and mental health. I was fully able to encounter the message once I began reading and understanding the article. One of the first things that I noticed and appreciated was how they quickly differentiated between passive and active social media use and how that affected our mental health differently. Passive social media use was defined as browsing or looking at other’s posts while active social media use was defined as posting content. This article goes with my overall guiding question because how we use social media, actively or passively, can lead to more exposure to the ideal body image which can cause sadness. I responded to this article by agreeing mostly with what he said. I agree that what we do on social media can affect our happiness but I disagree with how active can cause less sadness overall than passive. Even though experimentation and studies have supported that answer, I believe that it depends on the person. Some people may be affected more by body image by posting pictures of themselves and feeling like they don’t meet societal expectations. Others may be affected more by body image when they see other people’s posts and wish they looked like them. I feel like this work can be in conversation with my other peer-reviewed article, “The Perfect Storm: A Developmental–Sociocultural Framework for the Role of Social Media in Adolescent Girls’ Body Image Concerns and Mental Health”. I feel like Lewis et al. spoke about passive social media usage making us sad ties together with what Choukas‑Bradley et al. wrote about in the last article. Lewis et al. wrote that when we are constantly browsing and scrolling through social media, it makes us sadder. This correlates with the body image issues that many young girls face when they see other people's posts. Overall, this article gives support to my argument that social media generates more exposure to the perfect body image which creates more sadness as a whole.

Lewin, Kaitlin M., et al. “Active and Passive Social Media Use Are Differentially Related to Depressive Symptoms in Older Adults.” Aging & Mental Health, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan. 2023, pp. 176–83. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2022.2068133.

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One of the peer-reviewed articles that I chose to help with my guiding question was “The Perfect Storm: A Developmental–Sociocultural Framework for the Role of Social Media in Adolescent Girls’ Body Image Concerns and Mental Health” written by Sophia Choukas‑Bradley, et al. and was published in July of 2022. The original context for this article was to discuss how social media has led many teenage girls to have issues with their body images and how their mental health is affected by that. The audience is for both teenage girls who may have been struggling with body image issues and for the public as a whole to understand that social media is becoming detrimental to younger audiences. I encountered this article and the article’s message as a whole while I was researching the topic of how social media’s exposure of body image has affected our mental health. I began to read the article and I came across the message that teenagers who are being exposed to posts on social media on how their body is supposed to look, began to battle severe issues with their mental health. One of the main things that I noticed was how often the idealized body image is shown on social media and how people who are younger and younger are being affected by it. I believe that my main response to this article as a whole was that I have gone through what many of the girls in the article have experienced and how what we are exposing ourselves to on social media is causing sadness. I believe that this article can be in conversation with “Fat underground: an introduction to fat militancy”. Both of these sources dive into the issues of exposure affecting our body image and mental health which leads to sadness. While “Fat underground: an introduction to fat militancy” took place almost fifty years ago, the issues that are discussed are brought up in “The Perfect Storm: A Developmental–Sociocultural Framework for the Role of Social Media in Adolescent Girls’ Body Image Concerns and Mental Health” through a different medium. I believe that this source as a whole goes great with my guiding question because the article dives into how being exposed to body image on social media causes more sadness in adolescence.

Choukas-Bradley, Sophia, et al. “The Perfect Storm: A Developmental–Sociocultural Framework for the Role of Social Media in Adolescent Girls’ Body Image Concerns and Mental Health.” Clinical Child & Family Psychology Review, vol. 25, no. 4, Dec. 2022, pp. 681–701. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-022-00404-5.

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The next archival source that I chose was “My Mind on My Body and My Body on My Mind: Examining the Effect of Self-Objectification on Exercise Flow and Enjoyment for Young Women” by Kimberly Emacher-Martin. This piece was written in 2019 and its original context was to speak out on how social media is affecting our body image and how we respond to it. The audience for this source was society which needed to know how social media is affecting our mental health. Social media is becoming more prevalent in our everyday lives, and it is having serious impacts on our mental health and how we view ourselves. I encountered this archival source while I was exploring the UConn archival website. I found this piece that was speaking out on how social media is destroying our perceptions of ourselves and it is affecting our mentality as well. My main response to this source was that I agreed with what the message was and I saw how it was becoming more frequent on social media. I believe that this source can be in conversation with “Associations between social media, adolescent mental health, and diet: A systematic review. Peer-reviewed article. Talks about sadness, mental health, and body image”. Both of these articles discuss how social media is affecting body image in teenagers and how it is causing sadness. In “Associations between social media, adolescent mental health, and diet: A systematic review. Peer-reviewed article. Talks about sadness, mental health, and body image”, the article brings up how social media uplifting the perfect body image leads many young social media users to have eating disorders and experience tremendous amounts of sadness. While in “My Mind on My Body and My Body on My Mind: Examining the Effect of Self-Objectification on Exercise Flow and Enjoyment for Young Women”, the source explains how social media has led to users being more objectified both by themselves and sexually. Which, in turn, has led to a decreased state of flow. which causes more sadness. Both of these sources highlight how social media exposing body image has only done more harm than good. This archival source is in conversation with my guiding question because it argues that social media urging people to have a certain body image and objectify themselves, only leads to more sadness. 

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The “Fat underground: an introduction to fat militancy” is an archived collection of works from The Fat Underground Collective. This collection of works was published in 1976. The original context of these works was to speak out against fatphobia and how society interprets being overweight. The audience for these works was the general public who were against people who were overweight. At the time, people wanted to uplift only one type of body image. I encountered its messages when I was looking through the archives and I immediately felt connected to the message. I noticed while reading how prevalent these issues of body image are today. I felt like my main response was that it has been almost fifty years since the original collection was published and our world has not changed too much. I think that this work can be in conversation with Thelandersson because, through different types of media, we are told that one type of body image is superior and we need to look like that. In Thelandersson’s case, people on Tumblr were experiencing sadness because being a skinny white girl was idolized, and not everyone was able to be that. In the “Fat underground: an introduction to fat militancy” case, being in a situation where you are told you have to look a certain way, no one likes you because you are overweight, and that you will die will cause a lot of sadness to the people involved. I think that this archival source is in conversation with my guiding question since people being exposed to what our physical appearance is supposed to look like has been going on for decades, and social media has only heightened that. Fifty years ago when people were exposed to unrealistic body expectations it made them sad, it is even worse now when we have apps and multiple ways of constantly being exposed to unrealistic body images.

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For my next visual text, I have the photograph Self-Portrait with Skeleton painted by Marina Abramovic from the Benton. The photograph is shown above and I decided to do an ekphrastic for this photograph because I feel like it really connected to the theme of body image. On social media, the body image that seems to be uplifted the most is to be skinny. Almost like a skeleton. When in reality, people don’t really look like that and they are not supposed to look like that. I feel like the photograph responded to my question, does the exposure of body image on social media cause more sadness, because of the figure in the photograph. The figure has the skeleton on top of her like the weight of looking skinny is weighing her down. A lot of people who go on social media and are affected by the body images that are shown on there feel weighed down by unrealistic body expectations. The woman also has a sad expression and people who see their social media flooded with how society is expected to look causes immense sadness. I believe that a lot of people can relate to this photograph of feeling like you need to be skinny to the point where it is unhealthy and feel like it is a burden to try and fulfill the body image expectation. Below I have my ekphrastic.

All around me, I hear “I’ve been on this diet for months and I’ve lost so much weight”,

“When was the last time you went for a run” and “I need to look bikini body ready”.

All around me, I see people constantly sucking in their stomachs,

people on social media edit their photos to look smaller than they actually are, 

and I see myself not measuring up.

All around me, I feel the weight of not looking what I am supposed to look like.

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For my visual text, I selected the painting New Year’s Eve painted by Marion Greenwood from the Benton. I have the painting above and I decided to do an ekphrastic for this painting because I felt like I could write creatively about this painting. I also felt the story that might have been coming from this painting and I felt connected to what the painting was showing me. I feel like this painting connects to my guiding question, which is does the exposure of body image on social media cause more sadness? I believe that this painting correlates with the question and can be interpreted to give an answer. I feel like on social media, we are constantly shown influencers and others alike who are made to seem like they are living perfect, happy lives. We see them at parties and look like they are living life to the fullest. The majority of the people who are posting that narrative are also posting a body image that goes along with that narrative. If you want to be happy and go to a lot of parties with your friends, then you need to look a certain way. At these parties, everyone is shown to look happy but they probably feel like who the figures in the painting look. I feel like this painting has a lot to say about how we present ourselves and how body images can affect us. Below I have the ekphrastic.

Confetti falls, people yell, music plays,

drinks are poured, and they are involved in the celebration.

While the party is raging and to an outsider, it seems 

like everything is perfect, they know the truth.

They see the empty glasses but full plates.

They see the people who look like they are about

to fade away.

They see fake smiles and sad eyes.

They sit and see all of these things.

Another minute, another hour, another day,

another year, another lifetime passes by.

And the party still goes on.