Body Positive Power

‘Our culture often expects women in general, and fat women in particular, to confine and limit ourselves. We are often discouraged, in many different ways, from moving freely, playfully, and happily in the world. We’re not supposed to take up space and be visible and spontaneous and dynamic, colorful or loud or boisterous or rambunctious. Heaven knows we’re not supposed to be fierce, physically unafraid, and fully aware of our physical power. To which I say: screw that’

– Hanne Blank, The Unapologetic Fat Girl’s Guide to Exercise and Other Incendiary Acts

‘I have faith that you want more out of life than a tombstone that says “All she ever wanted was a tight ass”’

– Summer Innanen, Body Image Remix

Or 15 Pounds, Or 20, Let’s Make it 30

AS I’M WRITING this, the first of the spring sunshine is breaking through the winter months and promising to make everything warm again. Not too long ago those beams of light would have meant one thing: summer is coming. The annual siren would be set off in my mind: MUST START DIET NOW IF YOU WANT A SUMMER. A summer wasn’t something that just happened, a summer had to be earned by working hard enough to win the ultimate diet-culture prize: the bikini body.

And so the spring routine began. I would dust off the exercise DVDs, buy a dress two sizes too small to hang somewhere visible, spend one last day polishing off all of the food I wasn’t allowed to eat again, and metaphorically lock the door.

I say metaphorically, but I quite literally shut myself indoors for months at a time to sweat myself smaller until I could emerge, butterfly-like, with a ‘New Body New Me!’ bang in the outside world. Year after year, I submitted to a life as a bikini-body hermit. Instead of actually living, I got by on the fantasy of how much happier I would be once my thighs were streamlined and encased in a piece of fabric with a single digit on the size label. Then I could really live.

Each time I set the goal to be bikini ready by the end of the summer, then go on holiday somewhere hot with a wardrobe that I could only fit in once a year and an overwhelming fear of the buffet. One of the summers that I lost the most weight ended with a trip to Egypt. I woke up on the first day, did 100 crunches on the bathroom floor and asked my boyfriend to take a picture of me before we could go to breakfast (in my mind, as soon as I had that first croissant it would attach itself firmly to my stomach and everything would be undone). The summer body fantasy came crashing down as soon as I looked at the pictures and still didn’t see the photoshopped idea of perfection I’d been striving towards for all those months.

Just like that, the whole summer had gone, yet again, and I still didn’t have a body deserving of the sunlight. I’d turned down days out with my family, said no to trips with friends, quit my job, pushed down all non-body-related ambition and put my entire life on hold. I’ll do it once I’ve lost the weight. I’ll do it all one day but not in this body. I traded in everything I could and it still wasn’t enough. Just like that, all the summers went.

I’d love to say that I’m the only one who bargained away so much life just to make themselves smaller, but I’m not. Most of you will know exactly what I’m talking about, you might even be doing it right now. People everywhere are buying into the ‘When I’ve Lost The Weight’ fantasy and putting their lives on pause.

We spend our days waiting to live until our bodies are good enough. The only problem is, then our days are spent. And it’s not just those few extra pounds that we believe are holding us back, it’s the muscle we need to build, the nose we need to get fixed, the skin we need to keep hidden, the breasts we need to enhance. There’s always something to change before we can really start living the life we want.

The list of things we put off is endless: holidays, dating, hobbies, career opportunities, meeting friends, making memories with our kids, having kids, buying new clothes, getting married, being in photographs, sex, food, lifelong dreams, and, of course, bikinis. All because we believe that we’re not worthy of these things in the body we already have. We’re not worthy of being seen in the world, living.

We learned a long time ago that happiness, adventure, style and romance only ever happen to people who look the part. The media perpetuates that myth every day; anyone who doesn’t fit the image doesn’t get the role. People whose bodies are the most marginalised – fat people, queer people, disabled people, people of colour, older people – often don’t even get a speaking role, let alone a happy ending.

Somewhere along the line we forgot what our bodies really are: extraordinary vehicles that let us live. Instead, how our bodies look comes first, and what our bodies allow us to do in the world gets put back in the drawer with the too-small jeans, packed away for another time. Instead of going on adventures, we venture to our local weight-loss group. Instead of cultivating fulfilling relationships, we put all of our emotional energy into the act of not eating too much. Instead of chasing dreams, we chase a smaller size so that maybe one day we’ll be worthy of those dreams. Our bodies feel more like prisons than vehicles.

We’re told that the only way to release ourselves is to get rid of as much of ourselves as possible, to change and mould our bodies into something new. A new body will transform us into the person we’ve always wanted to be. A person who smiles at their salad and cackles maniacally while standing in one leg of their old trousers. A person who’s successful, loved, outgoing, daring, and of course, happy.

It says a lot that in the ‘When I’m Thin’ fantasy we don’t just have a different body, we are a completely different person. We really believe that reducing the amount of flesh on our frames has the power to change every single thing about ourselves that we don’t like. Kudos, diet industry, genius marketing plan, but also, screw you.

Here’s a thought: what if we refused to let the way our bodies look stop us from living our lives? What if we just started living them? Because the truth is that life isn’t happening 10 pounds from now. It’s here. It’s happening. And every day that we spend obsessing over how to make our upper arms jiggle less is a day that it’s passing us by. I know, I know, easier said than done. How do you go out into the sunlight when you’ve spent so long thinking that you’re not deserving of it?

To start with, we need to stop believing that our bodies exist in the world just to be looked at by other people. Our bodies are not lifeless objects, we’re not inanimate pieces of art hanging in a museum for people to gaze at and critique. Our bodies are for doing. How they look on the outside isn’t the purpose of the design.

When we go to the beach and bare our skin we’re not there to be visually appealing to others. We’re there to feel the sand, hear the waves, smell the salt, take in the view. We’re there to make memories. The dimples on our thighs or whether another beach-goer disapproves of our size is irrelevant. It’s not why we’re there. Being aesthetically pleasing is not the purpose of our existence.

The lesson that we learned so long ago, that how we look is the most important thing about us, is wrong. We are not a number on a scale or the texture of our skin. We are not a list of disposable body parts that need to be changed. We are not the judgements that other people make about our outer shells. We are more. Always were, always will be. We’ve just been made to forget it.

This chapter is filled with guest essays from people who stopped believing that their bodies determined their right to a full life. The parts of themselves they’ve reclaimed go beyond size and into other aspects of identity that our culture tries to teach us to be ashamed of. I hope that after reading about their body positive journeys, you’ll realise how capable you are of starting your own. But first let me tell you something that I wish I’d heard all those years ago: however your body looks, you are so, so deserving of the sunlight.

i want to apologize to all the women

i have called pretty

before i’ve called them intelligent or brave

i am sorry i made it sound as though

something as simple as what you’re born with

is the most you have to be proud of when your

spirit has crushed mountains

from now on i will say things like

you are resilient or you are extraordinary

not because i don’t think you’re pretty

but because you are so much more than that

– Rupi Kaur, ‘milk and honey’

It was the tenth bikini I had worn in the space of a week, each morning appearing from my room in a new two-piece that made me feel more beautiful than any other outfit I had ever worn.

I had half a mind to reply with a quip: ‘Yes. Yes, it is a fashion show and I am the star of the entire show.’ After all, I had earned it …

Each bikini felt like a medal of honour, bravely baring my body to the world unapologetically. Each morning, I would peruse my wardrobe and instead of having my brain bombarded with thoughts about how to hide my body, all I could think about was which one would result in the least tan lines. I had come a long way from the girl I used to know …

Less than three years ago, going on a summer holiday would bring all kinds of anxiety about what I was going to wear and how I could subtly disguise myself so that I didn’t offend anyone. All these thoughts would have consumed me in a way that would ruin the entire holiday. Weeks beforehand, I would scour the Internet in search of a kaftan or sarong that could hide my cellulite, stretch marks and lumps and bumps stylishly. I would spend the entire time in the pool or on the beach tugging at my tankini to ensure that not a single piece of flesh on my abdomen was revealed, in fear of exposing my deep dark secret that was lying underneath, sketched across my midriff.

Those secrets were my scars. All 15 of them. These lines are what made me decide at age 10 that bikinis were simply not for me. I’ve had scars since I can remember, my first one being placed on my skin before the age of one and slowly building up a collection that is unparalleled to many others. I’ve had 15 surgeries, a brain tumour, a punctured intestine, an obstructed bowel, a cyst in my brain and a condition called hydrocephalus, and all the evidence from these surgeries mark my stomach like an incomplete game of noughts and crosses. So with such a decorative piece of art on your abdomen, it seemed obvious that people like me can’t wear bikinis.

Bikinis are often seen as a status symbol, a trophy at the end of an achievement, a marker for #bodygoals. But with each mark that was etched into my skin, this goal became more and more unobtainable. They are the kind of scars that make a person stare, double take or at the very least, make them curious. My scars induce pity and shock in people, and I always believed the solution to this was hiding them. I wouldn’t make people uncomfortable that way, and I would never have to talk about it.

I made that decision young, not realising the consequences on my own body confidence. I lived in a body that I believed should be kept hidden, I treated my scars like a secret and my surgeries like a past life that I never wanted to be associated with. Until one day in 2013, aged 19, I landed back in a hospital bed. My bowel had obstructed and had left me bedridden again for the first time in eight years, and it was in this moment, with the ability to walk, eat and even shower taken away from me that I realised how much of life I had been missing out on. I had been sitting on the sidelines of my own life because I was too scared. It was in this bed that I made a promise to myself: I was going to live my life on behalf of the people who couldn’t.

This began a year-long journey where I said yes to everything that scared me. It started with simply going to a dance class. I worried through the whole class about how I looked dancing or whether anyone was judging the fat girl in the corner. But I went and, more importantly, I stayed. I would never go on hikes with my friends just in case I slowed them down, but for the first time in my life I did. Over the next year, my body stopped being the reason to not do things, and before I knew it all my favourite activities were back in my life – from horse-riding to paddle-boarding and wake-boarding. I had started appreciating my body for its ability to keep me alive and in turn had found body confidence out of mere gratitude and respect for a body that was doing its best for me.

I loved my body for what it could do, but I still had to learn how to love it for what it looked like, scars and all. That’s how wearing a bikini became my last step. The first time I put on that bikini, it wasn’t easy. The stares were still there, the looks of pity and surprise too, but the difference this time was that I didn’t care. I had such a deep fundamental appreciation for my body still working and being around long enough to keep me alive to do these things that no look, no stare, no comment could affect my body love. My bikini body was for me.

The same scars that marked my body and once hindered my body confidence became the fuel for my fire for body positivity. I took a photo that day and posted it on @scarrednotscared as the start of my campaign Scarred Not Scared. My scars are what caused me to be so invested in helping people realise that their bodies are so much more than prize possessions or objects to be adored. My scars will never be seen as pretty or attractive and I would never wish them on anyone else, but they are beautiful. They are beautiful because they show the magic of having survived, lived and thrived.

Wearing that bikini and being unapologetic about it was about more than just two pieces of material. It was about removing the limits that society had always placed on me about what my chronically ill, scarred body was capable of. It was about choosing my happiness over other people’s opinions. Wearing that bikini was about recognising that I had a choice.

Photographs

MAKE SURE YOU stand behind someone else. Always wear black. Don’t smile too wide. Hand on your hip, shoulders back. For the love of god, suck it in! I don’t do photos. How many rules do you have about having your picture taken? Seeing ourselves in photos can take away our self-esteem in an instant. It’s why so many weight-loss fairy tales start with ‘I saw a photo of myself and I couldn’t believe I’d become that big! I knew it was time to do something about it …’. Despite seeing our bodies every day, there’s something about having them caught in a snapshot that can make us hate every part of ourselves faster than a flash going off.

Part of the problem is that when we see pictures of our own bodies, we’re comparing them to the glossy, airbrushed pictures of bodies we see every day. It might not even be a conscious comparison, but the parts of ourselves that we see as glaring flaws are only standing out so much because we’re not used to seeing them elsewhere (unless they’re in a ‘before’ photo). So when our holiday pictures pop up on the screen and we don’t look like the cover model on the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated, we see something disgusting and vow to never be caught on camera again.

But unless you actually are doing a professional modelling job, it really doesn’t matter how you look in pictures, it just matters that you’re there. Your family holiday photos don’t have to compete with a spread in Vogue because that’s not what they’re for. Photos are taken to capture a memory, that’s all. They’re supposed to be keepsakes to remind us of a moment, not opportunities to pick ourselves to pieces.

When you next see a photo of yourself, instead of zooming in on all the parts you think are wrong, try to remember the moment it was taken. Think about that sight, that smell, that experience, how you felt. Instead of focusing on how your teeth look when you smile, remember the joy.

Every photo is a moment that you can’t get back, so cherish the memory – I realise that sounds like a Kodak advert but it’s not, I swear. Just get in the damn picture and smile as wide as you want. And for the love of god, don’t suck it in!

For the first 12 years of my life, I’d always dream I was a white woman. I remember being around the age of five or six, and looking at myself in the mirror and not understanding what I saw. I saw this black thing, not even a girl. I saw kinky hair that was usually kept in braids, not long flowing hair. I saw a broad flat nose that reminded me more of an animal than a human. I saw muddy brown eyes, rather than colourful ones. And I saw two big lips that couldn’t be reduced or hidden. Every time I saw myself, I felt ugly, undesirable.

I didn’t know Black was Beautiful. I didn’t know I could’ve been descended from queens and kings. I didn’t know how to be a strong, black woman.

But I knew how to be a white woman. I knew white history better than my own. My history began as a slave. I had it memorised, and my identity as an American was wrapped in a history of people who had little to do with my own. I knew white women had options. On TV, they were fashionable, wealthy, business owners, getting attention. Black women were rarely seen … I knew I wanted to be seen, beautiful, important. I wanted options. And so every night, I’d dream that I was a petite, thin, white woman.

Around the age of 12, as my breast tumour reached its peak size, my heart broke. It was an inescapable truth that I wasn’t a beautiful white woman with options. After having my first surgery, my mastectomy, something within me clicked. I came out of my comforting dream of white privilege. Something about waking up scarred and heartbroken, having to redefine myself forced me to see clearly who I was for the first time.

For the first time, I couldn’t move beyond the reality of what I saw. I couldn’t close my eyes and see anything other than my scars and stitches. The dreams of being a white woman did nothing to ease my physical pain that was rooted in reality. I saw myself and felt myself exactly as I was, a little black girl. And I wasn’t empowered. I was sad and scared.

These memories that flood me in this moment aren’t about anything other than the simple fact that REPRESENTATION MATTERS. For years, I struggled with living in reality and being truthful to who I am. It wasn’t until I became a mother to a black child that I knew I had to face these issues. I had to learn to critique the effects of mass media. I had to understand the cause and effect of living in a capitalist society. I had to learn the complicated and painful history of African Americans. Education is power, and leaving my history out of school books, films, and advertising keeps me powerless. There is a profound beauty and confidence that comes from knowledge and there is power in creating a safe space, where you can represent yourself and speak on issues freely.

I want my daughters to know their history. I want my daughters to know how to navigate a world that leaves them out of a lot of important conversations. I don’t want them waking up alone one day to figure out their place in the world. I want to create cracks in a system that keeps us segregated, and marginalised people silenced. I want Every-BODY to find worth and value, Outside of being thin, white, able-bodied, and heterosexual.

I want my daughters to see bodies and lifestyles normalised so that, as my little ones develop a sense of self and mould their identities, they know they are beautiful exactly as they are in any given moment of their growth and development. I also want them to see their immediate value and know they are vital members of society with options beyond their wildest dreams, without ever having to pretend they are walking this earth in someone else’s skin.

Birth, babies, and getting your body back

PEOPLE WHO EXPERIENCE pregnancy and childbirth are prime targets for the weight-loss fantasy. Instead of ‘When I’ve Lost The Weight’ it’s ‘When I’ve Got My Body Back’, which is a bizarre phrase considering your body didn’t actually go anywhere. It’s not as if your pre-pregnancy body went away on a luxury holiday and left an imposter in its place.

Still, the headlines make it clear that the number-one priority after giving birth should always be shrinking yourself back to your former size: ‘Celebrity Secrets to Losing Baby Weight’, ‘Amazing Post-Baby Bikini Bodies’, ‘Body After Baby: Star Moms Who Bounced Right Back’.

The message is clear: life won’t restart until your body looks how it looked before. The ‘When I’ve Got My Body Back’ goal isn’t optional, it’s required. So what happens to the people whose bodies change permanently? Why are we being taught that pregnancy ruins a body, and that if we don’t ‘bounce right back’ like elastic then we’ve failed?

There’s definitely a lot of money to be made from teaching people to fear the inevitable physical changes that come with pregnancy. Making post-pregnancy bodies a problem is a diet-industry dream – the stretch-mark creams, the baby body weight-loss plans, the tummy tucks and breast surgeries. The pressure becomes one more thing that stops us from living until we’ve whittled ourselves down to size.

For the people who become mothers, that means missing irreplaceable moments with their children because they believe that their body isn’t deserving of them. It breaks my heart every time a new mother tells me that they can’t take their baby to the pool and be seen in swimwear. They can’t play with their child in public because their body jiggles. They can’t be happy because now they have stretch marks and loose skin and baby weight, and according to the ‘When I’ve Got My Body Back’ rules, these new parts of themselves are unacceptable. So instead of being in awe of what their bodies are capable of, they feel like they have to erase every sign of pregnancy as if it never happened.

Just think about that for a minute. The person who endures so much, who grows and changes physically and emotionally, who learns and adapts, gives endlessly and sacrifices so much, is then convinced that they have to erase all visual signs of that experience. All because of how something that is nothing less than miraculous has made their body look? How fucked up is that? Why shouldn’t those visual signs be celebrated? Why shouldn’t those bodies be valued and admired as much as they deserve to be?

To all the new mothers who’ve been made to believe that they need to get their body back: you already have a body, and it’s extraordinary. It’s powerful and resilient and it brought a human life into the world. Don’t let anyone convince you that the signs of that are shameful.

And to all the people who experience pregnancy without childbirth: you are just as powerful, just as resilient, and just as valuable. You are so much more than how your body looks.

Go to the pool, play, keep living your life and don’t miss out on a single thing waiting for your pre-pregnancy body to come back. You’ve outgrown it, in so many beautiful ways.

Have you ever asked yourself, ‘What is happiness?’ According to Google, ‘Happiness is a mental or emotional state of well-being defined by positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy. Happy mental states may also reflect judgements by a person about their overall well-being.’

When I was around 10 years old, I was taken to a Jenny Craig facility in Menlo Park, CA. My mother pulled into the parking lot and I innocently jumped out of the car and followed her through the ‘clear and promising’ glass doors. I remember anxiously waiting next to my mother, dazed and confused as to why we were there. Soon enough, we were called by one of the practitioners and we followed her into her office.

As we sat down, she handed us two binders that contained our rigorous diet plans. Endless sheets outlining times, foods, calories, red stickers for bad foods and daily lists that would allow us to keep track of the food we consumed. At that age, I didn’t understand the negative effects that a weight-loss programme could have on a child, I had only been told that I needed to ‘choose the right size and weight’ if I wanted to be happy. As much as I wanted to do so in order to live a happy life, I struggled.

In my mind, food and my weight were my enemies. This toxic relationship encouraged me to use other methods of weight loss, including a painful tummy belt that would send ‘fat-melting’ electricity waves into my abdomen. Other nights, my guilt and shame of eating would push me to purge. A sense of praise came with vomiting, because I truly believed it was for the best and that I was doing myself a favour.

When I was 16 years old I began competitive cheerleading, and things quietly worsened. I would go to practice on an empty stomach so that I could burn fat and not food, only allowing myself water to feel full. I would work my body to exhaustion, to the point where I would come home after practice and fall asleep on the living-room floor. And still, happiness never came.

You know when happiness came? Once I stopped believing people’s bullshit misconceptions about what defines beauty. Once I stopped shaming my body and denying myself the love that I needed. It came once I realised how oppressive society is to people who are different, people who don’t fit into the various binaries, the status quo.

Happiness came when I surrounded myself with positive people who want to progress how we think, how we approach everything that we’ve been taught in life about what is normal and what is beautiful. Happiness came when I held myself tightly at night while apologising for the years that I abused me.

Happiness came when I accepted myself, my fat, my brown skin colour, my identity as a transgender woman, and all of my unique qualities that society once made me believe were not worthy of acceptance.

You are beautiful. Regardless of how different you may be, you have to believe in yourself the way I did in myself. You have to break free from the oppressive ideals that society imposes on us, the ideals that hinder our ability to see our own beauty.

Wrinkle and Disappear

WHERE HAVE ALL the women over the age of 50 gone? According to what we see in the media, they’ve either disappeared, or stuck around and miraculously managed to keep all visible signs of ageing at bay.

Think about it: how many positive representations of visibly older women do we see? How often do we see grey hair being celebrated? How many wrinkles can you spot in any magazine that aren’t the ‘before’ picture in an anti-ageing cream advert? How many times has Hollywood cast their latest blockbuster and relegated the older female actor to playing grandma, while male actors the same age still get to play the mature love interest to the twenty-something leading lady?

Even the most successful older women aren’t allowed to wear their years on their face. On the rare occasions a female over 50 is featured on a magazine cover she’s still made to look like she did when she was 30, the lines are smoothed, the cheeks are lifted, the years are disguised. They’ll say it’s so that she looks her best, but why does ‘best’ have to mean younger?

Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth that ‘to airbrush age off a woman’s face is to erase women’s identity, power, and history’ – this isn’t just about making a picture look smoother, this is, once again, teaching us who deserves to be seen in the world and who doesn’t.

Everywhere we look we see evidence of the visible ageing double standard. The older male news anchor is joined by a co-host half his age. Older men are called silver foxes while older women are convinced that grey hair is shameful and has to be covered like a dirty secret. We’re told that lines on our faces are hideous flaws and our bodies’ natural changes over time are our own moral failings.

As our representations of female beauty seem to fade away with age, we’re convinced that there comes a time for us to disappear as well. And you can guess what the main motivator is for teaching us to always equate beauty with youth: money.

In 2015, the anti-ageing industry was valued at over $140 billion globally.⁵² That includes Botox injections, anti-wrinkle products, chemical peels and hair restoration treatments. Every week a new miracle serum promising to turn back time on skin hits the shelves, the adverts are filled with scientific jargon and a model who looks about 15 shows the supposed results. So many of us buy into the hype despite knowing, deep down, that there is no way to reverse the ageing process. Especially not by putting overpriced gunk on our faces. But as long as ageing is shameful and beauty is equated with youth we have to keep trying.

Not a single person in the world can live in their bodies and not age. Turning visible ageing into a problem and selling the solution might be the greatest marketing scheme of all time (even more reliable than selling weight loss, since some people are naturally thin, but nobody is naturally young for ever).

Wrinkles are inevitable. Grey hair is unavoidable. Body changes are inescapable. Teaching women to fear those things does more than make money, it convinces us that we’re less valuable, less powerful, and less worthy of a full and vibrant life as we age. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

As we age we only get more powerful, more knowledgable, more resilient. The lines on our skin show that we’ve lived, laughed, cried, kissed, felt. With every new fleck of silver we’ve seen more, done more, been more. How could that be anything other than beautiful? Erasing all signs of life from a face isn’t an improvement, it’s a deception, and we’re old enough to know better. Visible signs of ageing are not shameful, and they sure as hell shouldn’t stop us from living out loud in the world.

In 2015, Carrie Fisher showed us all how to deal with sexism and ageism while generally not giving a damn. After the latest Star Wars film was released, there were plenty of morons on the Internet ready to criticise Fisher for not ageing as well as her male co-stars. Remember: ‘ageing well’ for a woman means not ageing visibly at all, which is impossible.

Fisher shut down the criticism with this iconic tweet: ‘Please stop debating about whether or not [I] aged well. Unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings. My body hasn’t aged as well as I have. Blow us’. Followed by this – ‘youth and beauty are not accomplishments, they’re the temporary happy bi-products of time and/ or DNA, don’t hold your breath for either’.

So, in the words of Carrie Fisher, don’t hold your breath. Stop hiding. Stop being ‘age appropriate’. Stop believing that the new textures and colours that your body takes on with time are flaws, because they’re not. Don’t let our society’s obsession with youthfulness convince you that life ends after a certain age. Be proof that it doesn’t.

I twisted, trying to stuff my fat underneath the armrests of the make-up chair in the Today show studios in New York. It wasn’t working. I could already feel indentations forming from the metal jabbing in my sides, forcing my 380-pound body into a mould designed for a much smaller person.

It seemed the enquiry was more of a formality rather than a real question, and the make-up artist began shuffling through stacks of foundation, eyeshadow, and blush spread out on the counter in front of us. She picked up several brushes, rattling a metal can as she dropped the ones she didn’t want back into it. Then she rotated my chair toward her, the lucky brush poised in mid-air.

The question surprised me. Am I the dancer? I thought to myself. Surely I was the only person scheduled to appear on today’s programme who was dancing, but surely, I wasn’t the dancer. What even was a dancer? I wasn’t positive I was a dancer at all; calling myself ‘the’ dancer seemed presumptuous at best and ludicrous at worst. It had been over 10 years since I’d referred to myself as a dancer, and even then I’d had my doubts.

The dance world is vast and home to millions of bodies. Bodies that leap, pirouette, and stretch themselves into motion over music. Bodies that are expressive, malleable, and magical. They are flexible, dynamic, perfectly muscled, and thin. And I was never thin – even as a 10-year-old child weighing one hundred pounds, I was made fun of for my thick thighs and soft stomach. Even though I was the star dancer in my teacher’s in-home studio, it was the size of my body, not my talent or ability, that kept me from feeling like a ‘real dancer’.

As I got older, I was swept into the hurricane of bulimia and restriction, and still I could never starve or purge my teenage body smaller than 120 pounds. In my extracurricular competitive dance company, I was moved from the front row to the middle, behind the thinnest girls and in front of the ones who would still need to watch me to remember the choreography. I won the ‘Best Dancer’ award at my performing arts school, choreographed professionally in the community, and even taught classes at my studio, but my less-than-perfect body labelled me a fraud. It caused me supreme embarrassment: my body had become my biggest enemy, even when doing what I loved the most.

By the time I was halfway through my first semester in college, my body had swelled to nearly 200 pounds. None of my clothes or leotards fit, and showing up to dance class and its endless line of mirrors felt like standing in front of a firing squad. I quit showing up after that, failed the class, and was swiftly put on academic probation. By the end of my freshman year, I had gained 100 pounds and a new layer of shame that only a visibly fat woman can experience. I didn’t dare dance after that. The years that followed were full of depression, self-hatred, a PCOS diagnosis, and an intense wishing for my old body. Those years were devoid of joy, of love, and of dance.

When I graduated college, I was directionless. The fat that coated my body had robbed me of my identity. I was no longer a dancer, a pretty girl, a valid person; becoming fat had turned me into a bitter, lonely, and marginalised person. With my dreams of pursuing an acting and dancing career completely demolished, I set off for Korea, where I taught English for the next several years.

Korea presented a set of new problems. Not only was I foreign, but I was the largest person many Koreans had ever seen in real life. My body was a huge neon sign parading through a country of homogeny. My body was a target for unwanted touch, laughter, and insult every time I left my apartment. One day as I was walking to work, a middle-aged man began peddling his bike too slowly beside me. I made eye contact with him and he called me a pig and then spat on me. When I got back to my apartment that night, I sobbed – a common occurrence during my time there. I had so many feelings: the anger, the indignation, and the shame circulated every inch of my body with electric energy.

I picked myself up off the floor and felt the bottoms of my feet flat against the fake hardwood. And then something happened – I began to move. My body swayed, my knees bent and straightened, and before I knew it, for the first time since I was 18, I gave myself permission to dance. My tears of rage transformed into tears of release, and after a few minutes I collapsed on to my bed, breathless and aching for the feeling of being free.

It would be three years before I’d ever dance again. I was living back in my hometown in North Carolina and working as a radio personality when I called up my friend Todd, who had been my dance partner when we were teenagers performing in community theatre and paying for special dance classes with quarters. By this time, 2014, I was still fat, in fact, I’d lost a hundred pounds and gained it all back and more. I was the fattest I’d ever been. I still didn’t think I deserved to call myself a dancer, but something was different.

The years of abuse had made me stronger underneath all of my jiggling softness. I was a feminist, I was angry, and I had begun to get turned on to an almost erotic new idea that I didn’t yet have a name for: body positivity. Todd and I filmed some videos for a YouTube series called ‘A Fat Girl Dancing’, and I danced my heart out for the first time in a decade. One of the videos went viral and that’s how I found myself twisting in that uncomfortable chair on the set of Today being asked if I was ‘the dancer’.

I looked at the make-up artist and allowed myself to say four words I thought would never leave my mouth again.

In that moment, I knew my life was changing and I had the power to direct it, to claim it, and to live it. There were many more appearances after that: Good Morning America, The Steve Harvey Show, CNN, Inside Edition, Dr Oz, The View. There were press tours in America and Europe. There was my memoir called I Do It with the Lights On and even an international TLC reality show called My Big Fat Fabulous Life in America (Whitney: Fat Girl Dancing, in the UK), now in its fifth season that chronicles my life as a fat woman who dances.

Life is still hard now; it’s not all sunshine and body positive rainbows. Being on a global stage means I am exposed to the best of people and the worst of people, but each day I navigate through the fatphobia and the misogyny, and take solace in the arms of my sisters who are doing the important work: championing eating-disorder recovery, intersectional feminism, and the visibility of all bodies regardless of race, age, gender, or ability. And today, I know that dance changed my life. It fosters the unspeakable connection between the mind and body, the intimacy experienced through looking at one’s own body, through touching it, through moving it, through letting your soul guide it, sometimes gently and sometimes fiercely, into motion.

Dance is a delicious metaphor for all the ways I know I was meant to live. My body is fat, but it is valuable; it is pulsating with love, vibrating with newfound confidence, and always expressing its truth, whatever that is in any given moment. Today, I know that dance saved my life.

I can’t wear that

THERE ARE FEW things in this world that can make someone feel as bad about their reflection as a clothing store fitting room can. The fluorescent lighting, the five-way mirrors that show your body at every single angle, the pressure of what size to try on, the sales assistant waiting to ask ‘any good?’ as you leave. Most of the time we end up feeling like the clothes were fine, it’s our bodies that aren’t any good. If something doesn’t fit, it’s not the fault of the fabric, it’s on us.

How many crash diets have been embarked on after a zip won’t close in one of those rooms? How many times have we left near tears and torn ourselves to pieces on the way home? Some of us have felt the fitting-room shame so often that we’ve just stopped going. It’s easier to grab something safe and stretchy and hope for the best, even if it’s too tight, we’d rather be uncomfortable than see the number on that label go up. We put so much value into that number, as if a lifeless bit of material is worth more than our self-esteem.

As far as fashion choices go, flattering is the only word that matters. And flattering is usually just code for ‘makes you look thinner’. We’ve been trained in the art of disguising our problem areas, skimming over our flaws, enhancing our assets and cloaking the rest. For the record, there’s no such thing as problem areas, our bodies are not flawed, and our greatest assets have nothing to do with our outsides, but you’ll never hear that from the fashion police.

We’ve all internalised the rules of what people with our body type are allowed to wear. If you’re a plus-sized woman you probably feel like you might explode if you’re told another wrap dress is the flattering choice for your figure. And no matter what size or shape you are, we all know that cinching in our waists is more important than life itself!

Clothing stores the world over echo with chants of ‘I can’t wear that at my size’, ‘I’ll have to tone up a bit first’, ‘Maybe if I had curves in the right places’, ‘I’ll wear clothes like that once I’ve lost the weight’. Why should we have to wait until our bodies are different to feel fabulous in what we choose to wear? Why should we be limited by made-up rules and the ridiculous idea that dressing should be about pleasing other people’s eyes before pleasing ourselves? Here’s the only fashion rule you really need to remember: YOU CAN WEAR WHATEVER YOU WANT TO WEAR.

Even shorts? Uhm … yes. What about bright colours? Hell yes! Bold patterns? Yep. Tight dresses? Of course! Bikinis? Did you read the first guest essay? But surely not … crop tops?! CROP ALL OF YOUR TOPS IF THAT MAKES YOU HAPPY. But what if it doesn’t suit me? If it makes you happy, it suits you. But what if other people don’t like it? You’re not dressing for them, you’re dressing for you. But what if it’s not flattering? Forget everything you’ve been taught about flattering. From now on whatever makes you feel the most you, is what’s flattering.

My ‘I can’t wear that’ item was always bodycon. I was convinced that I could never wear anything tight-fitting until I had a flat stomach, a rounder arse, perkier breasts, and could buy a size 10 or smaller. But funnily enough, no matter what size I shrank myself down to, I still wouldn’t let myself wear it.

When I found the body positive community, I was suddenly seeing people of every size and shape rocking bodycon. They were even embracing their non-flat stomachs and highlighting their visible belly outlines (VBOs for short). Before ‘they shouldn’t be wearing that’ could pop into my mind, a different thought appeared instead: ‘They look fucking fantastic … maybe I can wear that, too’.

So I did. I bought my first bodycon dress and challenged myself to wear it – at first just in my room, then in front of a camera, and then in public. And you know what? Nothing happened. The world didn’t implode because I’d broken the fashion rules of what I was supposed to be wearing for my body type.

Little by little, I broke more, until there weren’t any left. Sometimes even now when I catch my reflection in a shop window I’ll get a flash of ‘this isn’t flattering’, until I remind myself that flattering is whatever I want it to be, and I strut on feeling like a body positive queen. Wear whatever you want to wear, buy the size you actually need, and forget the fashion police. You look flawless.

Kelvin of Notoriously Dapper (@notoriouslydapper), author of Notoriously Dapper: How to Be a Modern Gentleman with Style, Manners and Body Confidence

When people think of body positivity they automatically think of women who are powerful and voice the feminist right to love each and every inch of their body. It’s rare that men ever get a chance to be thought about when it comes to body insecurities or emotions. As a man, I can admit I have suffered from depression, anxiety and eating disorders. The societal standard for men has always been that we’re supposed to be masculine and not show emotion. Men don’t cry, boys don’t cry. Why is it not okay for a male to cry?

Men make up almost 79 per cent of suicides and that is a scary number. When you think about it, it all makes sense. Due to the societal standard of masculinity, men have been told to be quiet about their emotions and insecurities, they’ve been emotionally suppressed. Women for so long have been breaking the societal standard of what being feminine is. Women have shown that just because these ideals were somehow made doesn’t mean they are right, nor should they be followed. Now more than ever women all over the world believe they can be anything, anywhere at any given time, and that’s a beautiful thing.

I can remember my first time seeing my dad cry when he was explaining to me how his father passed away. I felt pure emotion, I felt his heart and mind. I could understand his pain and it made me realise it is okay to cry. My father never told me that men don’t cry, he never shut me out and told me to not be emotional. He embraced who I was and loved me for being me like any parent should. Still, there was that societal standard telling me to be strong, tough, and don’t ever show emotion, especially as a black man.

Being a black man in America can be a difficult experience. We are stereotyped everywhere we go and still have to fight to be seen as an equal in most circumstances. I can honestly say as an Instagram influencer/model I feel like I have to work a bit harder to be seen as something important. In the black community we aren’t supposed to be emotional in any way, and if we are we’re perceived as being weak. We are supposed to be confident, strong and tough in every way.

But how can you be body confident if your body isn’t valued, or is seen as less important than others’ bodies? How can you feel comfortable in your own skin when you are always profiled because of your skin? How can you love yourself when the media puts so much hate and fear on the idea of a black man?

I can honestly say that my confidence took a back seat when I watched numerous news outlets report unarmed black men being gunned down. It just happened one after the other and it’s hard to worry about body confidence when your body doesn’t matter. It’s hard to feel comfortable in your own skin when you get gunned down because of your skin. People can deny this all they want and say that I’m just using this as a ploy (or pulling the race card). I live in this body, I know what it is like to be treated differently simply because of your skin tone or the way you are dressed.

The truth of the matter is that a suit is armour for a black man. We are viewed as a priority and important in a suit. If we are seen, or if we approach someone while wearing ‘regular’ clothing we can easily be perceived as a threat. I view my clothes as my saviour and my armour. Style has helped me become more confident in life and my style has also helped me be viewed as less of a threat to society. I feel confident in what I wear; when I style an outfit I feel invincible and it helps me exude confidence. It’s sad that we live in a world where you’re more valued in a suit than you are in a hoodie. Whether I’m in a blazer or hoodie I am still the same confident, positive individual I was when I got dressed. Still, my journey to being a body-confident black man has not been an easy one.

I have learned to love myself through being true to who I am. I have a wonderful support system of friends and family who embrace me for the original person I am. I have learned over the years of personal experience how to care for my mental and physical health. My style is me and I am my style. I think it’s vital to wear what makes you feel happy and surround yourself with positive energy. It makes the bad body days good and the good body days better.

Everyone has a struggle we don’t know about, so always be nice to people even when they are mean to you. Kindness can change the world, and when you are kind to yourself and others you can truly make the world a better place. Be sure to care for yourself, take a mental health day from work, and do something to make you happy. We often forget about ourselves in this busy life we have. It’s easier to love others when you love yourself.

Masculinity and society

FELLAS, REMEMBER THAT you define what masculinity is, not society. If you want to be a fashion designer do it, if you want to be a ballet dancer do it, or if you want to be a computer engineer do it. Don’t let the societal standard stop you from following your dreams or caring for your well-being.

Body confidence is for everyone, every race, every gender and every age. We can never forget that men suffer from these issues, and giving them an outlet to speak about their insecurities and emotions will help breed brave men for future generations. We all deserve to feel safe, loved and celebrated, not feared, hated and ignored. So, spread love and awareness to your friend, boyfriend, husband, brother, dad, uncle and nephew. Show them that it’s okay to make their own definition of masculinity in today’s society!

Dating, sex, and love

I’M GOING TO keep it simple and break this section down into the lies we’ve been led to believe about romance, sex, love and our bodies, and what the truth really is.

Lie: You have to lose weight, be prettier, or change your personality before someone will be interested in you.

Truth: We’ve been tricked into believing that we are unlovable, unattractive, and unwanted as we are. Teaching us that love is the prize at the end of the big transformation means that we’ll keep buying things to transform ourselves. We’ll keep believing that our romantic happy ending will come just as long as we stick to our diets, wear the right perfume, own the right clothes and splurge on the right make-up. The truth is that we’ve never needed any of those things in order to be worthy of love, to own our sexuality, or to have our happy ending.

There are countless people in the world who will be interested in you, physically attracted to you, and would fall head over heels in love with you given the chance. As you are. I know that’s hard to believe if you’ve spent a lifetime believing that you’re unlovable. You might have also had some shitty experiences that have left you even further convinced that you’re the problem. If you just looked different it would have worked. If you just weren’t as … you, then it could have worked. But you can only be you, and you are good enough.

Let’s say you do manage to force yourself into something that you’re not for the sake of making another person fall for you. You shrink yourself down, you fake a different sense of humour, you change your style and put on a whole new persona. The people who never gave you a chance before start falling at your feet, but is it really you who they want?

What good is making people interested in a version of you that doesn’t exist? And who wants to be with anyone who doesn’t appreciate them for their true self anyway? I always thought that once I lost the weight I’d find the perfect man … I realised that an actually perfect man wouldn’t give a damn how much I weighed anyway.

You don’t need to fit an idea of what you think other people want you to be. Because it’s just that – an idea. You will be wanted in all of your real, messy, one-of-a-kind glory. You don’t have to compromise any part of yourself in order for someone to be interested in you. You’re a catch as you are.

Lie: Unless you fit conventional standards of beauty, you should be grateful for whatever you can get.

Truth: You deserve it all. You deserve fireworks, passion, safety, communication, laughter, trust, companionship, romance, butterflies and more. You never have to settle for anything less than that, no matter how that glorious body of yours looks. Again, there will be people out there who love and appreciate every inch of you, and treat you like royalty.

Lie: As soon as they see me naked they’ll run a mile.

Truth: I know this is a wild idea, but maybe if a person has seen you with clothes on, has expressed an interest in you, and has said or shown that they’re sexually attracted to you, you should believe them? Unless what you’ve got going on underneath your clothes is more mysterious than Mary Poppins’ handbag, that person already has a pretty good idea of what they’re in for when the layers come off. They definitely already know what size you are, and if you’ve got to this point, they definitely don’t have a problem with it.

You know what really ruins sex? Obsessively thinking about what the other person (or people) is thinking about how your body looks, instead of being present in the moment. Worrying about what’s jiggling, how many chins they can see in that position, or how you measure up to their last partner sucks every drop of enjoyment out of getting it on. And I can guarantee that they are not thinking the same things as you are about your body. Most of the time they’re probably just thinking ‘I’M HAVING SEEEEEEEEEXXXXX!’, or worrying about how their own bodies look to you. Wouldn’t it be so much more fun if we focused on what we’re actually doing instead of how we look doing it?

If you ever do have a sexual partner who dares to say anything negative about your body, then they don’t deserve to even be in your presence, let alone in your bed. The next time they comment critically on how you look, tell them that they can go and fuck themselves, and not you.

Lie: Nobody will love you until you love yourself.

Truth: I see this lie being used a lot as a motivational tool for getting people to love themselves. The problem is that it leaves people who fall short on self-love feeling unlovable all round, which just isn’t true. You are worthy of love even if you don’t see it, even if you’re insecure, even if you hate your body. No matter how you feel about yourself, you are worthy of love.

I like to joke that red lipstick changed my life. I’m fat. I was a fat kid, a fat teenager, and now a fat adult. And trust me, it was never just 10 pounds that ‘I needed to lose’. I spent most of my life as a perpetual work in progress. I had my first gym membership when I was 9 years old. I learned that the purpose of my body moving was so that I would become smaller. Movement was no longer about joy, about adventure, about play. Movement had to yield results. Over the years, I increasingly felt disconnected from my body.

I was never very successful at losing weight and when I did, it still was never good enough. The weight loss was never a victory, but felt more like the price I had to pay to be able to be included and to start living a life beyond dieting. I was a problem, an embarrassment, not worthy of the life I was meant to live, the life that my thin peers were privy to. I really bought into this! I bought into the stigma, the narrative, the lies about what it meant to have a fat body. That was until an image of a confident fat woman in a bikini flashed across my screen one night with the byline talking about body positivity.

I was uncomfortable with it at first, I didn’t have to hate my body? I think I was jealous; I didn’t believe I could ever feel positive about my body. Positivity was reserved for thin bodies, yet I couldn’t shake those images aside and I began seeing my own experience in my body differently. This is where the red lipstick comes in.

I was plain. I thought I had to be. I wasn’t supposed to stand out, I had always done everything possible to bring the attention away from my body. I had on hand a red lipstick that I wore once many years before for my senior prom. One day I got it out and put it on. Was I really going to wear this out? How was I going to wear this out? I knew if I didn’t own it, I would just feel silly. It became a challenge, just like the bodycon dress was a few weeks later, and then going out without a sweater, and so on. Each challenge demanded more confidence. And with the confidence I felt empowered in my body for the first time as an adult.

I wanted to move, I wanted to be seen, I wanted to be heard. Using my body made me feel powerful. I began experiencing life in my body; I truly felt what I touched, tasted what I ate, saw beauty in the world around me. I slowly stopped planning weight-loss goals and began making travel plans, life-changing plans, future plans that were not contingent on me being a certain size.

I took joy in how my body moved, in developing my own style, in feeling sexy, classy, and fabulous. I started dating. Dating for the first time in my life on my terms. I took joy in navigating this new experience for me with a fresh mindset and confidence. And when it came I relished being able to share my body in intimate moments with new partners. I had always been a sexual person, but felt ashamed for feeling that way. I was supposed to be undesirable; I learned I was not.

In my own awakening, body positivity gave me a space to explore my friendships, my dreams, what I valued about myself. Life was exciting. I loved being able to share my joy and excitement with people. My mom had always encouraged me to flirt more. ‘Melissa, I see how boys look at you, you just have to let them know you like them back.’ I hated that. I didn’t want to flirt. I was sure I was always going to be the girl that those boys settled for. I never wanted that. And still don’t, but now I know that I’m not the type of girl guys settle for, I’m the one they want. I had always been.

My new confidence opened a whole new dating world to me. A world where I got to explore what I wanted out of a relationship with a man and didn’t simply have to change to be what they wanted out of a partner. Where sex became an experience, a shared experience where my partner and I got to use our bodies to work towards and with each other for our mutual pleasure, pleasure my body was designed to give me. Where I was valued not for the acts that I could do in bed, but for the simple fact that it was me in all my fat, sexy, confident glory in that bed, couch, car, park, ambulance with them. I explored my sexuality, I valued it, and I kept falling in love with my body.

While our bodies aren’t all that we are, so often our negative feelings towards them stop us from believing that we deserve the life we want to live. Those feelings quieten us, we begin trying to become smaller physically and mentally. We learn to take up less space in friendships, in relationships, in our own minds. We learn that we are not worthy of our own desires and our bodies so often become our very own prisons.

Body hatred, born out of a fatphobic society, keeps us from being able to look outside of ourselves, keeps us from flourishing, keeps us from being in the moment. Our bodies are ours. They are our tools to feel and be and dance and love and move. I once said, ‘Unreserved, unapologetic joy is the greatest gift the body positive movement has given me.’ It taught me to connect to and experience life not only in this body but beyond it. To live in the moment and to stop seeing myself as a work in progress.

In the beginning, it felt good to see myself as beautiful, to understand that I don’t have to just see my beauty as inner beauty, but also that I could see my outer beauty in all its glorious uniqueness as well. Coming into body positivity for me meant that I could explore so many new parts of myself. My passions, my goals in life, my relationship to sexuality, and lip colour all changed. Symptoms of being able to spend my time aware of the world around me and my relationship to it, symptoms of me feeling connected to my own body and my own life again.

Cake

A LITTLE WHILE ago I asked people online to tell me how their lives have changed since they found body positivity. The next day I woke up to over 1,500 comments filled with all the amazing things people have been able to do since making peace with their body.

One comment read ‘I was actually in my own vacation photos for the first time last year’, another read ‘I wore shorts for the first time (since I was 14) this summer … I’m 35 now and through body positive reminders, I’m not sweating to death in fear of my own and others’ judgement’. And another comment said it all: ‘I am finally enjoying my life again, not counting calories, but collecting beautiful memories. I’ve realised that I only have this one life!’ The overwhelming message was clear: finding body positivity had allowed people to start living.

It turns out that when you stop believing that you exist just to fit an impossible physical standard, you’re free to live the life you deserve. To do that thing you’ve always wanted to do, to wear that outfit you’ve always wanted to wear, to go for that job, visit that place, try that activity, talk to that person. To finally stop putting ‘When I’ve Lost The Weight’ conditions on your dreams and go out and get them instead.

For far too long we’ve believed that the key to being able to do all of those things is changing our bodies. We’ve believed that our real lives would only start once we looked different. We were wrong. The key to starting the lives we want isn’t hiding in a number on our bathroom scales. It’s already in us. It’s reclaiming the space our bodies take up and learning to exist in them, unapologetically.

We need to stop telling ourselves that we’re not worthy of happiness as we are. We need to start taking our happiness now.

After reading all of those comments online there was one that hit me the hardest. It was from a girl called Carrie who was battling anorexia, and through finding body positivity was able to keep fighting, she shared this victory: ‘I’m finally in recovery and on 28 August I will eat my birthday cake’. She sent me a picture of the cake, too.

So, my loves, eat the cake, do the thing, live now. Because life isn’t waiting on those 10 pounds, and neither should you.

When I was four years old, I was convinced I was a Disney princess. My sister and I would twist our T-shirts into makeshift sexy Princess Jasmine tops, put on sweatpants, and lounge across the sofa like exquisite replicas of royal femininity. When we went to the pool, we’d take deep breaths, plunge under water, then burst out into the open air singing, ‘Part of Your World!’ We’d whip our tangled, soppy manes over our heads, imagining our hair blowing in the wind like real-life cartoon mermaids. In those days, I wiggled and flailed and crawled and lazed about in my body – I enjoyed my body – without noticing that my paralysed legs moved and looked quite differently from those around me.

I was paralysed by a pair of tumours wrapped around my spine when I was three. Maybe it sounds strange, but it took me some time to notice my transformation into ‘a kid with a disability’. At first, I didn’t feel that different, but when I started kindergarten, I took my first trip on the short bus. I’d never been surrounded by so many people with disabilities, and it shocked me. These kids didn’t look anything like graceful princesses, but I had been assigned a seat on their bus. Did I look like them? Move like them? I had been so sure I flitted like Belle, lighter than a violet, when I made my way across the room, but as I looked at them I could see – as if for the first time – my own clunky metal braces hugging my calves and thighs with brown Velcro, my scarred and swollen feet, my awkwardly fitting clothes.

Eventually, it became less about how I felt in my body and more about what other people saw when they looked at me. Their faces confirmed my suspicions that something was wrong – their eyes and mouths were marked by pity and heartbroken pride. I learned to tune my senses to these external markers of acceptable and unacceptable bodies.

As I got older, Disney movies were replaced by rom-coms and sitcoms and soap operas and ads for anything from tampons to beer. They weren’t cartoons, but the fairy tales were the same. Slowly, steadily, I came to understand certain Laws of the Universe: attracting men was of vital importance to women, but men only chose beautiful women, and ‘beautiful’ was very narrowly defined.

I was hopelessly outside the boundaries of that cut-out paper-doll standard. How does a girl survive a set-up like this? If you’re like me, you take pictures that crop out your deformed lower half, you cover your legs with tights or socks (even in the summer), you try to pretend you don’t have a body, and you marry the first boy who likes your body, because you’re sure his attraction is only a fluke, and you’ll be alone for ever if you don’t go with this one. For years, I swaddled my body in shame with ritualistic consistency. Like prayers that never left my lips: your twisted trunk is grotesque, hide those hideous feet, don’t let people see you struggle to stand.

I wish I could point to the day when I finally realised that this shame was built on fiction, but it turns out unlearning shame is a long, complex process, and one I’m still in the middle of. Maybe the binds of shame first started loosening when I left my husband. Not because he was an awful man, but because the marriage existed for all the wrong reasons, and my misery in it convinced me that someone looking at my body as a beautiful object to consume wasn’t the end-all be-all gig I expected. So I left.

I moved into a little apartment by myself and got used to moving through rooms naked – familiarising myself with the soft folds of my belly, my purplish limp feet, and my bony knees. I started to listen to my body – I paid close attention to the way my skin felt in a warm bath – like the mornings my mom would wrap me in hot towels fresh from the dryer – safe and alive. I listened when my body told me I was anxious, acknowledging my beating heart and tense shoulders. Strangely enough, the more I saw my body as an ally – a tool to guide me, a source of pleasure, a conduit for connection – the less I saw it as a shameful object. How can a body that tastes and breathes and cries and laughs and pumps blood and makes up jokes and feels empathy and gives hugs be ugly?

I started a public Instagram account that celebrated my disabled body, because I wanted more images of strong women with different sorts of bodies in the world – because the opposite of shame is coming out of the dark and connecting with others. The first few pictures I posted to my Instagram account @sitting_pretty focused on my floppy scarred feet and shrivelled legs, and I talked about my history of shame for these parts of myself. I started using the hashtag #seenwithoutshame, because I wanted to get back to the childhood bliss of experiencing my body without the weight of evaluation. I didn’t know if anyone would care about these posts – did this kind of shame even affect anyone else?

What I found surprised me. While there were people who made comments about my disproportionately big arms or fetishised my paralysed feet, the loudest song came from people chanting, ‘Me, too.’ So I shared even more personal experiences with my body – the pang I feel when people applaud my boyfriend for dating me, disabled body and all – the immense discomfort I have letting people watch me take laboured steps with a walker – the unique vulnerability of being a teacher to college students when you’re a woman with a visible disability.

As I shared in this virtual space, I found so many sorts of bodies fighting shame together – bodies with disabilities, bodies with scars and stretch marks and cellulite, bodies labelled too big or too queer or too bumpy or lumpy or unmanageable. It was almost like being part of a stadium of people shouting a fight song together. For much too long we have been dominated by a narrow-minded vision of what bodies are acceptable, and collectively, we have rallied our voices to cry: we are here to end the reign of body-shaming – we will see and be #seenwithoutshame because #allbodiesaregoodbodies and #allbodiesarebeautiful.

I never quite returned to that place of seeing myself as a Disney princess with my sister in the pool. When I go to the pool now, I am well aware that my hair sticks to my forehead, the sunscreen makes my nose shiny, my belly swells larger on one side. I think, though, that I’ve landed somewhere better than those early days. When I was little, I thought being seen as a pretty princess was the grand prize. It took time to recognise that pretty princesses are stuck in a two-dimensional world – they aren’t allowed to grow or age or scar, which means they aren’t allowed to go about the business of living.

As I’ve stepped into the three-dimensional world, I’ve begun to see that from the moment I used my lungs to screech – I’m alive! – I embodied the grand prize. My racing, flailing, ageing body is inherently beautiful. It was stunning when I was a soft lump of pink baby, it was beautiful when the surgeon sliced open my back to extricate the tangle of tumours, it was radiant when my newly paralysed body crawled on all-fours until my knees were covered in bright red scabs, it was exquisite when I sat in my wheelchair for my first school dance and awkwardly attempted to sway with the music next to my date, it was beautiful on my wedding day and my divorce day and graduation day and all of my birthdays, and it will keep being magnificent as it wrinkles and sags and scars. This beauty isn’t passive or here to be consumed. My body is beautiful because it’s bursting with the stories of living, because it has the power to interact with the world around it, because it carries me to life on life on life. This kind of beauty has the strength to flip planets.

I’LL DO IT 10 POUNDS FROM NOW

How We Let Our Bodies Stop Us from Living