This amputee blogger is changing the conversation around body positivity

While body image and body positivity have become major online conversations lately, more often than not the topic is centered around young, able-bodied people.

One blogger is tackling this topic head on, sharing her own journey to body positivity as an amputee.

Toni Furmanski is a writer from Nebraska who loves fashion, reading and Harry Potter. An embroidery enthusiast, she runs a quirky Etsy shop where she sells some of her unique art, including embroidered uterus patches, lung badges and avocado keychains. On her blog, Anne and Kathleen, named after her two grandmothers, Furmanski openly discusses life, fashion and body positivity under a veil of her grandmothers’ own ideals: kindness, character and consideration for her own flaws.

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“I was encouraged to start a blog by my coworkers who I always talk about clothes and self esteem issues with. I have a really good memory when it comes to what other people wear — it’s not creepy, I promise, I just pay attention to clothes,” she told Yahoo Canada Style. “Combine that with my affinity to discourage them, and all my friends, from talking badly about themselves or their bodies, I decided maybe they were right. Maybe I could reach more people and encourage them to rock it out no matter what their bodies looked like, too.”

Furmanski, an amputee since she was 13 months, speaks openly about her disability. Living with class C proximal focal femoral deficiency (PFFD), she admits the disorder often requires a description when talking to people who don’t know her well.

“It basically means I have a really tiny and misshaped femur bone in my right leg. My right knee is where my hip should be and my right ankle is where my knee should be. Everything in my right leg is shifted up. To say I’ve felt every emotion possible about having a prosthetic leg is putting it extremely lightly. I just feel like for most of my childhood I felt so awkward about it. I didn’t want people to stare,” she said. “I wasn’t exactly ashamed of being an amputee. It’s my normal. My truth. But because it’s not everyone’s, as I grew to understand, I learned to stop caring about the stares and the comments because I know it was/is coming from a place of curiosity, not meanness.”

While the blogger says this is her most confident year yet, she admits that despite her preaching self-love — she didn’t always follower her own advice.

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“I started 2017 off preaching to people that they should feel good about their bodies and that they didn’t need to change who they were for anyone, and all that time, I was trying to diet. I was eating food that was really disgusting and drinking all these concoctions that were supposed to make me fight hunger and speed up my metabolism… I started following other plus size and body positive bloggers and as I read their words and their struggles a switch in my brain flipped,” said Furmanski. “I realized all the words they were saying were things I was saying too… but not to myself… So I stopped putting pressure on myself to lose weight. Instead I just decided to feel good about myself and who I was as a person. And somehow the words I started believing for other people, I started to believe for myself too.”

Aside from her strong messages of acceptance and body positivity, Furmanski continues to inspire visibility in the online community, posting television-themed photos replicating her favourite TV fashion looks. Most recently she’s been sharing photos of herself in outfits borrowed from popular ’90s TV shows, “Boy Meets World, “The Nanny” and “Full House” – an ode to her fandom.

“As a little girl I always wondered why an actress couldn’t have a prosthesis. I mean, I didn’t want the story to be about her prosthesis, I just wanted her to have one. And then still be the character she was. After all, I was just a normal girl, who did normal things, but I just also happened to have a prosthesis,” said Furmanski. “I think this series, and others I have started to plan since I started this one, are important because we get to see these iconic outfits on a different body type. I look nothing like Kelly or Topanga or Fran, who are the type of women society has told us are traditionally beautiful, but that didn’t stop me from feeling confident. That didn’t stop me from feeling every bit as beautiful in those outfits as I’m sure someone else would who has a more similar body type to them.”

While Furmanski is continuing to build her online community – and hopefully the conversation about diversity – she remains true to the ideals instilled in her by her grandmothers.

“We need to see diversity. Not just with ability levels, but in body types, too,” she concludes. “Be kind – be kind to other people and please, please, please be kind to yourself.”

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