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Recently I learned about a campaign that BlogHer started to empower women to begin having conversations with their bodies. After so many years of hating my body, I realized that I never realized all the good that my body has done for me. I've done a lot of work work this year in learning how to love and respect my body and teaching other women to do the same. I hope that you'll join me in beginning a much needed, long awaited conversation with your body and making it your friend. Here's my letter. Please feel free to leave a comment. I'm looking forward to reading yours.
Dear Body,
I haven’t really gotten the chance to tell you over my life how much I really love you. I know that I’ve been so harsh and unfair to you, riddled you with decades of guilt and hated you for far too long. Maybe it was all those years of feeling so disconnected from you, allowing myself to feel inferior simply by virtue of my pants size, feeling down to my core that it was all your fault that I had an aching, emptiness inside of me, fearing that you were the reason that I didn’t allow myself to feel safe loving or being loved.
I thought if I could just make you small enough, everything would be okay. I spent years waiting for perfection, reasoning that would be when my life would begin, all the years spent hating you, seething inside because I was sweating and uncomfortable hiding in pants when everyone around me wore shorts and bathing suits. I regret all those missed opportunities to play and frolic in the water, all those years of hiding away working when everyone else was playing. Working and eating, that became your sentence. It kept me a busy gal, and a very unfilled woman.
I suppose that you and I never really had much of a chance since I discarded you so early on as a child. I learned from painful life lessons that if I had a beautiful body then I could not protect myself and feel safe. Now I know that I was wrong. I just didn’t have the wisdom or the love inside of me to save myself. I burdened you with my shame. I was taught to hate you. I was told to shun you if you were too big, go for the burn, push harder, get tougher. I was led to believe that I needed to fight you.
Please forgive me. I’m so sorry that I turned off my feelings and spent years trying to push you into a box, a darkened closet or a life of misery. I’m so sorry that I kept you shut away and avoided so many opportunities to be in the company of wonderful people, new experiences and the presence of joy. I’m so sorry that I held you back from being loved and appreciated. I never realized how much harm all those messages I bought into about you was doing us both. I truly believed that the problem was you. I thought by making you smaller, I would get back the power that had been stolen from me. I was so angry that you wouldn’t bend and yield to my will.
Body, it was you who I was fearing. I thought that you had all the power and it was your fault that I had no sense of self around men. I thought that you were all that I had to offer and I resented that.
I hated you and blamed you for my feelings of powerlessness. I felt so small and stupid all the time, despite all the years hungering for more learning, more growth, more wisdom.
I never realized how much of my power I gave away because I spent so much of my precious energy hating you. Now I know that I ate and did things to gain weight because deep down I was trying to pad and protect the soft and still scared parts of me and prevent you from getting all that frightening attention that I feared so much.
I’m so sorry. Please understand that I needed to make you big so that I could stop feeling so damned small. I was afraid that I didn’t stack up, that I didn’t have the qualifications that I needed to feel powerful around so many intimidating, cold, calculating and shallow men.
Perhaps it was all those years of being told that I had no damned common
