Before we talk about loving your body, we need to have a basic understanding of identity.
You are not just a body.
You are a collection of experiences, memories, values, beliefs, desires, wounds, gifts, contradictions, and possibilities. You have parts of you that are confident and parts that are afraid. Parts that are still healing. Parts that remember who you were, who you had to become, and who you are trying to be now.
Your body holds all of them.
Your body is the container of your identity. It is the home of your character. It is home base for your entire human experience.
Every relationship you have ever experienced, every loss you have survived, every moment of joy, every lesson, every prayer, every dream, and every version of you has been experienced through this body.
Mentally, your body gives your thoughts and emotions somewhere to live. It communicates with you through tension, exhaustion, hunger, pleasure, fear, intuition, and relief. It remembers what your mind tries to minimize. It lets you know when something feels safe and when something feels wrong.
Spiritually, your body is where your life is happening.
It carries your breath. Your purpose. Your ability to love, create, nurture, serve, connect, and become. It is the physical home you were given for this human experience.
That does not mean you have to love every part of it every day. It does mean your body deserves to be understood as something far more sacred than an object for society to evaluate.
The reason you do not feel safe in your body is not necessarily because your body did something wrong.
Many of us were taught that our bodies were wrong.
Too big. Too dark. Too loud. Too soft. Too sexual. Not feminine enough. Not desirable enough. Not disciplined enough. Not healthy enough. Not shaped correctly. Not worthy of being seen unless somebody else approved of what they saw.
Eventually, other people’s opinions became our inner voices.
We started looking at ourselves through the eyes of a society that was never committed to seeing us clearly. Then we blamed our bodies for the discomfort that society created.
But your body did not reject you.
Your body did not create the beauty standard. It did not humiliate you. It did not withhold affection from you. It did not teach you that being desirable was the same thing as being valuable.
People did that.
Systems did that.
Experiences did that.
Your body has been trying to keep you alive through all of it.
I recently saw a pregnant woman say that she hated her body, and I could not ignore the irony. Her body was actively producing a miracle while she was speaking to it with disgust.
Your body is doing the labor of your legacy, and you are treating it like it has failed you.
Think about that.
A body can create life, adjust its organs, increase its blood volume, stretch, nourish, protect, and prepare to bring another human being into the world, and society can still convince the woman living inside of it that the most important thing about that body is whether it looks acceptable.
That is insanity.
And pregnancy is only one example. Bodies are producing miracles every day.
Your heart keeps beating without being reminded. Your lungs keep receiving breath. Your skin repairs itself. Your nervous system works constantly to protect you. Your body carries you through grief, heartbreak, trauma, childbirth, illness, work, caregiving, and every ordinary day you barely remember to appreciate.
Then we punish it because it does not look the way somebody told us it should.
We become angry when men and other people across the gender spectrum objectify our bodies. We are rightfully offended when someone humiliates us, dismisses our physical needs, ignores our discomfort, pressures us sexually, comments on our weight, or treats our bodies as though they exist for somebody else’s consumption.
But we also have to tell the truth about the ways we participate in our own objectification.
We dismiss our hunger.
We override our exhaustion.
We ignore pain.
We force ourselves into clothing that makes us uncomfortable just to prove something.
We deny ourselves pleasure, movement, photographs, intimacy, and visibility until our bodies become more socially acceptable.
We use the body we claim to hate to seek validation from strangers online who are part of the very society that taught us our bodies were not good enough.
That is self-betrayal.
We hand strangers the authority to determine whether the home of our entire human experience is worthy of kindness.
And when they do not validate us, we take their judgment back home and punish our bodies with it.
Your body deserves better than that.
You do not have to wake up tomorrow and love every stretch mark, roll, scar, wrinkle, or changing part of yourself. I am not asking you to perform body positivity while secretly feeling miserable.
But there is space between love and hate.
That space is respect.
Body respect says, “Even when I am struggling with how I look, I will not speak to myself with cruelty.”
It says, “My body’s needs matter.”
It says, “I will not punish my body for failing to meet an expectation it did not create.”
It says, “I am allowed to pursue change without making war with the body carrying me through it.”
Your body is not the enemy.
It is the place where your life lives.
It is carrying every part of you, including the part that has not yet learned how to appreciate it.
Be careful how you treat your home.