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

by Sonya Renee Taylor

About five years ago I shared with an ex how something he’d said had hurt my feelings. After twenty minutes of his dancing around any admission of offense, it became clear this guy was not planning to issue any apologies. According to his logic, he did not intend to hurt my feelings and therefore did not owe me an apology. Like many people, he felt that his intention should have absolved him from his impact. I countered his reasoning by asking, “If you accidently stepped on someone’s foot, would you say sorry?” “No, not if their foot was the only place to stand,” he replied matter-of-factly. (Why had I dated this guy?)

When we decide that people’s bodies are wrong because we don’t understand them, we are trying to avoid the discomfort of divesting from an entire body-shame system.

We must make peace with not understanding. Understanding is not a prerequisite for honor, love, or respect. I know very little about the stars, but I honor their beauty.

When we liberate ourselves from the expectation that we must have all things figured out, we enter a sanctuary of empathy.

We can accept humans and their bodies without understanding “why” they love, think, move, or look the way they do. Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

our propensity to shrink human diversity into sameness creates exhausting barriers for the bodies that do not fit our default models.

When we say we don’t see color, what we are truly saying is, “I don’t want to see the things about you that are different because society has told me they are dangerous or undesirable.” Ignoring difference does not change society; nor does it change the experiences non-normative bodies must navigate to survive. Rendering difference invisible validates the notion that there are parts of us that should be ignored, hidden, or minimized, leaving in place the unspoken idea that difference is the problem and not our approach to dealing with difference.

What is incomplete, unexplored, ignored inside me because of my belief that something about me and my body is wrong?”

Have you ever felt like you were living your life on autopilot? Somehow you just keep recycling old behaviors and ideas that you know do not serve you, but you can’t seem to interrupt them. Yeah (in my best Michael Jackson vocal impersonation), you are

not alone! That sense of autopilot is the result of being disconnected from our thoughts. Without our awareness, thoughts run covert operations all through our lives, assassinating our sense of worth and blowing up our connections with other humans. When we avoid our thoughts, they go rogue. Awareness of our thoughts highlights the how and why of our behaviors. It gives us a fighting chance at transforming how we live in the world.

For most humans, transformation does not seem achievable from the distant shores of another person’s life. From far away, transformation looks like a miracle, or the result of magical powers possessed by the transformed person. Transformation is not magic. It’s hard work. But it is also doable work. When we can see another person’s labor toward their transformation, we know it is not some secret sauce but instead a daily commitment to a new way of life.

Removing ourselves as a barrier to other folks’ radical self-love only becomes possible when we are willing to fear-facingly examine our beliefs. It is not enough to transform our relationship with our physical and emotional selves and leave the world around us unexamined or unaltered. Messages we received about the validity and invalidity of our own bodies did not occur in a vacuum. We were simultaneously receiving and spreading those messages. Dismantling oppression and our role in it demands that we explore where we have been complicit in the system of body terrorism while employing the same compassion we needed to explore our complicity in our internalized body shame.

“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.

even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance.