These are not all 'me' things, but I see them around me.
This is simply brilliant ~ a little long, but so worth the read.
Someone recently called me “brave” for wearing a bikini to the beach because I have love handles and back fat. To be honest I don’t actually see it as bravery. This is just… my body. The c-section shelf. The bingo arms. One boob slightly bigger than the other. The suspiciously dark hair on my big toe. It’s the only body available to me, so what exactly am I supposed to do when I go to the beach? Leave it at home? But this is what years of body shaming have done to us. They’ve convinced us not only that our bodies should look a certain way, but also that our appearance is somehow the most important thing about us. We’re taught that our bodies are unacceptable until we finally “fix” them - usually through years of yo-yo dieting, guilt, restriction and self-torture, all lovingly sponsored by a multi-billion-dollar beauty industry that profits from our insecurity. And because of that conditioning, we now see people as “brave” whenever they dare expose the very parts we’ve been taught to hate, hide and apologize for. But look around you. Those supposedly “unacceptable” parts - the wrinkles, scars, cellulite, softness, stretch marks and wobbly bits - are things almost all human beings have. They’re not flaws. They’re just evidence of having a body. And a body, by the way, is so much more than what it looks like. Personally, I’m not even a huge fan of the whole “love your body” narrative because I think it puts enormous pressure on people. I don’t “love” my stomach any more than I love my right elbow. I used to think about my stomach a lot more, that’s true - mostly because I’d been conditioned to - but these days I simply have far more interesting things to think about. I don’t love my body. I appreciate it. I’m grateful for it. It carries me through life. It has birthed children, survived heartbreak, held me through grief, pleasure, illness, joy and exhaustion. It’s not good or bad. It’s not right or wrong. It’s literally just a body. Like millions of other bodies. And I’m not “brave” for showing it. To be fair, I couldn’t really hide it even if I wanted to… After all, it’s attached to my head
