The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

by Sonya Renee Taylor

Reintegrating our brains and our bodies is a necessity for a radical self-love life.

Phrases like “Get over it!” and “It’s all in your head” are rooted in ableism. They are body terrorism against non-normative brains. Let’s stop telling people to “get over it” and start asking, “How can I help you heal?”

Without compassion for ourselves we will never stay on the road of radical self-love. Without compassion for others we can only replicate the world we have always known.

“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.

None of us are solely culprits or solely victims. We all get a bit of what we give. Each person in a society is obstructing someone’s road to radical self-love while simult aneously being obstructed on their own road.

Radical self-love is a manifestation of our interdependence. Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal Australian artist and activist, along with the activists of 1970s Queensland are credited with saying, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”2

The fastest way to devolve a dialogue is to turn to mean or hurtful language. Our anger need not be expressed as cruelty.

Start from the assumption that we are all doing our best at any given moment with the tools we have.

binary thinking, when expanded to include all the ways we marginalize the gradients of human behavior and identity, illuminates how either/or thinking limits the fullness of our human potential and clouds our radical self-love vision. We are not simply good or bad; vessels of pure, divine light or mongers of hate; interrupters of body terrorism everywhere or single-handedly upholding the oppression of bodies across the planet.

Binary thinking limits our possibility, squelches compassion, and reinforces narrow ideas of how we get to “be” in the world. That marginalization is a function of internalized body terrorism.

Honor that you will be many things throughout the course of your life. Sometimes you will be a phenomenal gift; sometimes you will get on someone’s damn nerves. There is gorgeous potential and heinous instinct in us all.

We have the power to change the narrative of body shame in our lives. We are not bound to the tales of teasing and criticism we were subjected to as children. The good news is we are the authors of our own lives. Let’s make every day an ode to radical self-love.