“I Like You But My Body Isn’t Ready”: What a Pop Song Gets Right About the Loneliness of Bad Body Image
It’s the summer of Sombr, and his new single, “My Body Isn’t Ready,” has the internet in its chest for a reason: the twenty-year-old singer has said the song comes from his own history of feeling different, uncomfortable in his skin, and not good enough to show up for someone he actually wanted to be with. The song is a pop-rock ballad about how long-standing body-image insecurity can poison self-esteem, and make it hard to trust love, even when people are trying to care about you.
Body image expert therapists hear about this phenomenon every single day, but in pop culture, almost nobody names it out loud.
Bad body image doesn’t just hurt how you see yourself. It empties your calendar, and deprives people of your presence.
Body image struggles are usually framed as an internal problem: a private war with the mirror. However, the research doesn’t stop at the mirror. It follows people out the door, or more often, keeps them from walking through it.
One recent study found that repeated exposure to athletic, fitness-focused imagery lowered self-esteem in 37% of participants, especially among women. Not exactly a subtle dip. That’s over a third of people walking away from their own feed feeling worse than when they opened it. And the behavior that follows is pure avoidance: Skipping the pool. Skipping the party. Skipping the date. Canceling on the people who already said yes to you.
“The cruelest part of poor body image isn’t what it makes you think about yourself. It’s what it makes you do to the people who love you. It cancels dinners. It skips the beach trip, the birthday, the first date. It teaches you to disappear right when someone is wanting to show up for you, and the tragedy is, they wanted you there exactly as you were. Not letting people love you because you don’t yet love yourself might be the loneliest form of self-protection there is.” – Mary Dobson, LMFT, CEDS-S
The real cost is not limited to the discomfort of a bad-body-image day. It’s the proverbial empty chair at dinner because you decided, unilaterally, on someone else’s behalf, that they didn’t actually want you there.
We are the loneliest we’ve been in decades
Roughly 79% of Gen Z report regular feelings of isolation, compared with 71% of Millennials and 50% of Baby Boomers. Thirty percent of adults 18 to 34 report frequent loneliness. A 2025 national survey of unmarried adults ages 22 to 35 found only 31% were actively dating even once a month, meaning roughly three-quarters of women and nearly two-thirds of men had barely dated at all in the past year. Zoom out further and the drop is generational: 80% of U.S. high school seniors had dated in the past year in 2000; by 2023, that number had fallen to 45%.
Intimacy with others, friends or romantic partners, isn’t optional plumbing; it’s regulatory. Co-regulation, touch, eye contact, the unglamorous work of being known by another person, are some of the most effective nervous-system interventions we have. You cannot doomscroll your way to feeling safe in your own skin; you can only be reminded of your worth and personhood by someone who’s actually in the room.
So why are we opting out of the thing that regulates us? Because everything else in our lives is training us to optimize instead of connect.
We didn’t wander into this. We were sold into it.
Every hour spent “fixing” your body is an hour not spent building the kind of relationship, with yourself, or with others, that might make the fixing feel less urgent. Every algorithm optimized for engagement is, by design, optimized against your contentment- a satisfied person closes the app. Self-optimization culture isn’t a personal failing. It’s a business model, and a wildly profitable one, built on the premise that you are a problem to be solved rather than a person to be known.
This is exactly the territory Lu Chekowsky dismantles in her new memoir, “Don’t Buy What I’m Selling: On Breaking Up with Advertising and Finally Learning to Love My Whole, Fat Self”— a former ad executive’s account of spending years building the exact campaigns engineered to make people feel inadequate, before turning that same scrutiny on herself. On Friday night, I attended her book reading at Shmendricks Books in Wilton (a must-check-out new book store for the summer readers among us!), and was floored by her insights. (We will be getting her to LiftWell for an event before long!) Her book lands for the same reason the Sombr song has: someone finally said the quiet part out loud. The industry that sells you the insecurity is the same one selling you the cure. Coincidence? Not at all.
Letting people love you is the actual work
The fix here isn’t a body-positivity slogan. It’s smaller and harder than that: showing up anyway.
Going to the party in the body you have today. Answering the text instead of drafting the excuse. Letting someone see you before you feel “ready,” because the mirror was never going to say yes, and it isn’t actually the one you need permission from.
Sombr’s song ends without resolution, which might be the most honest part of it. He doesn’t say he got over it. He says he’s not ready, and he still shows up anyway, or he doesn’t, and either way, he tells the truth about it. That’s the work. Not arriving at total self-love before you let someone in, but rather, just being willing to be in the room while you’re still figuring it out.
The people who want you there were never waiting for the finished version.
If body image is standing between you and the people or life you want, that’s not vanity — it’s a clinical issue with real treatment. Reach out to LiftWell Health to talk through what support could look like.
