I had heard of “The Body is Not an Apology” here and there in body -positivity spaces online, but the reason I read this book was Sonya Renee Taylor’s interview on Brené Brown’s podcast.
“I am not simply proposing that you make peace with your body because your body shame is making you miserable. I am proposing you do it because it’s making us miserable too. Your children are sad that they have no photos with you. Your teenager is wondering if they, too, will be obligated to hate their body because they see you hating yours. The bodies you share space with are afraid you are judging them with the same venom they have watched you use to judge yourself. Remember that body shame is as contagious as radical self-love. Making peace with your body is your mighty act of revolution. It is your contribution to a changed planet where we might all live unapologetically in the bodies we have.”
I think this point is really critical. The way that each of us individually thinks of our bodies does not just impact us – it ripples out to the people around us. I was a thin kid – not thin to the point where I looked unhealthy, but thin to the point where adults took notice, often, and commented. Hearing that message growing up, I understood that thin was good. Adults who said this to me didn’t intend to teach me that, but it was unavoidable – they thought that thin was good, they told me that thin was good, I learned that thin was good.
“It is not enough to transform our relationship with our physical and emotional selves and leave the world around us unexamined or unaltered. Messages we received about the validity and invalidity of our own bodies did not occur in a vacuum. We were simultaneously receiving and spreading those messages. Dismantling oppression and our role in it demands that we explore where we have been complicit in the system of body terrorism while employing the same compassion we needed to explore our complicity in our internalized body shame. Regrettably, this is where too many of us choose to exit the radical self-love train. We desperately want our good intentions and niceness to be enough. Although each of us is inherently “enough” to be loved, valued, cared for, and treated with respect, our efforts to raze systems of oppression and injustice will require more than our niceness. “But I am a good person; I am nice to everyone” has never toppled one systemic inequity nor interrupted the daily acts of body terrorism leveled against humans throughout history. You are enough. Being good or nice is not.”
Taylor links body shame and body terrorism to the larger systems of oppression and hierarchies at play in society. She discusses this further in her interview with Brené Brown too, connecting racism, ableism, ageism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia to the hierarchy of bodies that we’re all taught by the world around us.
“Our body shame is a story whose chapters began being written in some of our earliest memories. Body shame is not a thrilling page-turner but a grueling text of embarrassment, judgment, and grief. Our story made us believe we would never have love, we would never be good enough, we would always be rejected. Decades later we find ourselves still stuck, the body-shame story on loop in our minds. We do not have to keep that story. We absolutely have the power to turn in that cheap and tawdry tale and make a new story.”
For me, the body shame story that I learned was about being thin – I was thin, thin was good, I was good because I was thin.
And then I wasn’t thin. I wasn’t fat, but I hit puberty and I wasn’t as thin as I was before. I wasn’t thin to the point where people commented on it, but I was thin enough to fit in the bounds of normal, okay bodies. I wanted it back, though – I wanted to be thin enough for my body to be good again. I really wanted that all through college. Moving to Mississippi was a blip – I was somewhat thinner, compared to the people around me, but I also gained weight from eating southern food. In year two of teaching, I started running more often and more seriously, I ran four half marathons in the next two years, and I found a way to love my body for what it could do, rather than how it looked. In the past ten months, I’ve taken a break from running, but I’ve still been working out and started weightlifting. Now, rather than loving my body for being able to run a half marathon, I can love my body for being able to deadlift 120 lbs.
I realize that this isn’t it, I have not arrived – loving your body for what it can do is still ableist, it is still rooted in a place that says “my body is good because I am strong.” But what about people who have disabilities? What about people who aren’t strong, and are not going to grow stronger? Their bodies are still good and still worthy, but there isn’t any space held for them in a story that says “my body is good because I am strong.”
Maybe radical self-love means seeing where you started, where you are, and recognizing that you’re good, even if you are a work in progress.