Two sides to each oreo.

Okay, I wanted to write this whole blog with a clever, chipper little voice rallying against the feeling of not being good enough in comparison to all the shit we see.

But I was up for a couple of hours last night while the baby decided pooping was the scariest thing that had ever happened, and it took a really long time to get him to fall back asleep.

So I am without cuteness, cleverness, and the whole lot.

This is what I want to say:

I love the body positivity movement.
I mean. I really really love it. There's never been anything like it for as long as I can remember.
My generation doesn't even get to claim it, I'm pretty sure it didn't really start until about five years ago, which is too late for a chick who grew up in the 80's and the 90's busy watching chiseled cheekbones, whittled waists, bored looking heroin addicts, and starved, white, cis-gendered females get hauled to the highest platforms for beauty worship.

If you look at me, you would probably assume I have no need of the bopo movement.
I'm a thin(ish) white, able-bodied, (cis-gendered)woman.
You would probably look at me and think, wow, she's got a lot of nerve claiming she needs this. Is she not aware that there are women who walk down the street and get yelled at for just existing in their bodies because they don't fit a standard? There are women who are told by completely straight faced strangers that their health is in danger if they don't change their habits? Does this privileged idiot going to sit here and tell us that her struggle is at all comparable to a woman in a wheelchair's, or a woman in a head scarf who gets stared at anytime she's in a public place?

No...and...yes.

Here's the thing.

I think every person, every single fucking person, who does not conform with the "mythical norm" of white, male, hetero, able bodied whatever has encountered individuals, if not entire media campaigns, designed to make them feel like they are not good enough as they are. After all, unless you convince the population to whom you are selling a product that they desperately need the product, you don't have a market.

What pisses me off, is the people who just accept the sales pitch, internalize it, and then use it on others.

We're all victims of a fucked up corporate manipulation scheme.

The companies that sell shit want us to believe we aren't living our fullest lives without their "thing" so they sell us discontent. They sell us the idea of comparing our lives to our neighbor's. They want us to compare and contrast and then find fault in what we have. That way, we'll scramble desperately to throw our money at whatever product they've convinced us will make us the superior ones.

But what if we decide we don't want to be superior to anybody?
What if we decide that the goal is just to be happy, and not to be "better than"?

This is where I am right now.

I was bullied as a kid.

You wanna know why?
Because I was an immigrant.
I had an accent. I didn't know what was current, popular, or interesting. More than that, I didn't care, because I didn't understand why the things that I had loved back in Australia were not the same in the U.S.
It was that not caring that made me a target.
If I had succumbed and conformed. Bought the right clothes to fit in, joined the right clubs, and played the game, then I could have saved myself a whole mess of ostracism and jeering.

But I didn't.

I didn't want to like the things everyone else liked because they liked them. I wanted to like things because I liked them.

I was heavier than most girls by 8th grade.
I was not athletic or thin.
I was thick thighs and big boobs. I was clumsy and awkward because I'd gone through a pretty fast puberty, and I didn't quite understand how this body worked yet.
I was struggling with looking in the mirror and seeing a person capable of making babies, who still liked hanging out with her sisters on the playground and reading books in the corner of her room under the window facing the West.

I still had nightmares so vivid and terrible that I would occasionally need my mother to turn the lights on in my room in the middle of the night and explain to me that I was safe. I felt like at any moment my life would be ripped away from me again and I'd have to go somewhere new and start from scratch again.

I remember kids throwing food at me in the cafeteria. The teachers didn't bother to intervene.
I remember in gym class we were forced to do a group activity that involved lifting every student over a fence without touching it. One of the more agile boys jumped the fence, another couple managed to get over by balancing on each other's shoulders. As soon as there were about five boys on the other side, I remember the entire class looked at me, the heaviest, most clumsy girl, and it took four of them to lift me, and then the three on the other side tried to catch me, but I lost my balance and fell. The teacher made us start all over again.
I remember the looks of hatred from my classmates. How my body had failed them.
I remember on the last day of high school, in my last class, which was AP English, and it was my favorite class, the teacher, notoriously strict and hard to please, had allowed all the students to spend the time signing each other's yearbooks, and nobody offered to sign mine.

I sat for eighty minutes staring out the window wishing I was anywhere else.

This is why inclusivity is so important to me now.

I remember how being alone makes you feel so worthless.
How you wonder what, if anything, your purpose is.

I love seeing the women of the bopo movement because they are so committed to make everyone feel welcome. They remind me not to take my healthy body for granted, not to punish it for things the marketing industry has told me are within my control that actually are not.
They remind me that every day is a shifting landscape of self perception that can be built up or torn down by what you expose yourself to and what you allow your mind to buy into.

You know what I've learned in the fifteen+ years since high school?


My body is sexy.
It holds a fascination I never dreamed.
I've learned there are ways I can move and things I can do that can bewitch people.

My body in endlessly forgiving.
It really is. It heals. Over and over. It rebuilds and starts again. It processes, detoxifies, resets and keeps going. I am in awe of how efficient it is. Every day, every hour, my body is being kind to itself, taking care of itself without my even being aware of it. That's pretty magical.

My body doesn't owe anybody anything.
It doesn't owe it to anybody's expectations to look a certain way.
It doesn't owe anybody any action it can perform.
My body doesn't have to perform a task in order to deserve food, rest, sleep, sunshine, or love.
It deserves those period.

My body is not yours to comment on. Ever. If you want to tell me I look beautiful, that's great, but leave it at that, and then let's talk about something else. Gone is the satisfaction of just "looking beautiful" if ever there was any to be had. I want to be more. I want to be clever, compassionate, funny, kind, inventive, and brave. Pretty is incidental. The other qualities I contain, those I chose.

My body is here to experience all the pleasures my senses can conceive of.
I am convinced that the reason our souls choose to inhabit these fleshy consoles is so that they can interact more sensually with the world around us. We are here to enjoy the feelings our biology drive us to feel.
Hunger is to be met with satiety.
Desire is to be quenched with touch.


Your body is so much more than anything anyone has told it is so far.
So stop listening to me.
And start listening to it.