I think that loving your body and the way it looks every single day is impossible. But don’t worry, I don’t mean this as a massive downer, or some precursor to a hugely self-deprecating blog: relax.

I just mean it in the sense that having insecurities, and waking up some mornings thinking you look about as attractive as a sea cucumber (those things are not pretty, don’t try and tell me that they are), is not the end of the world. Insecurities are normal and healthy, as long as you don’t let them overwhelm you.

For me, the things I don’t love about my body are largely based around how I think I look when I move. I just don’t like the idea that my disability causes me to have a limp or is accentuated when I walk. This doesn’t mean that I think it’s a big deal when other disabled people have a limp, it just means that somewhere in my head, I feel insecure about whether I might have one. Does that make sense?

You might read that and think: ‘no, that doesn’t make sense, why be bothered by such a minor thing? Plus, you are disabled, so if you did have a limp then it’d make sense and not be a big deal’. But that’s how insecurities work: I tell you what I don’t like about myself, you say you barely even noticed, that you don’t care and think that I shouldn’t either, I thank you, feel better for a second, but still duck my head before I see my legs reflected in shop windows.

So where do we go from there?

Well, what’s clear is that businesses prosper when people don’t feel good about themselves: that’s part of the reason we buy things. We’re also addicted to scrolling through social media and looking at examples of ‘perfect people’ in ‘perfect places’ with ‘perfect lives’. Basically, we like to see what’s beautiful.

So obviously a huge remedy to our insecurities would be to recognise that what we see on social media is a fragment of the truth, but we know this already. And obviously we need more varied representation of body types in the media, but it’s also impossible to represent everyone because each individual human is different – and there are a lot of us. So in all of this, we haven’t really been able to solve the problem…

And that’s because there simply isn’t a quick, one-step solution to getting rid of all of our insecurities. Humans will always find flaws in how we look because improvement, jealousy and seeking perfection are just in our nature.

But something that we can definitely try to do, is not let our insecurities consume us. By all means, feel it, and even wallow in it for a minute, but don’t let what you don’t like about yourself be the only thing you think about. You know you won’t like how you feel after thinking about it, so why waste your time like that?

We all have to become more aware of how we treat ourselves, so if you’re looking for a one-sentence piece of advice on how to do that, I guess all I can say is:

just don’t be a b****.