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

by Sonya Renee Taylor

Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself into a new me didn’t exist. Perhaps I was going to spend my entire life fighting my own existence and then just . . . die.

body shame was a tool of White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.

The work is to crumble the barriers of injustice and shame leveled against us so that we might access what we have always been, because we will, if unobstructed, inevitably grow into the purpose for which we were created: our own unique version of that oak tree.

Radical self-love is not a destination you are trying to get to; it is who you already are, and it is already working tirelessly to guide your life.

Radical self-love starts with the individual, expands to the family, community, and organization, and ultimately transforms society. All while still unwaveringly holding you in the center of that expansion. That, my friend, is scale.

Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.

Radical self-love demands that we see ourselves and others in the fullness of our complexities and intersections and that we work to create space for those intersections.

Remember that body shame is as contagious as radical self-love. Making peace with your body is your mighty act of revolution. It is your contribution to a changed planet where we might all live unapologetically in the bodies we have.

We may be trying to convey how we don’t judge people based on racial identity, but “color blindness” is an act of erasure. Not only does it make invisible all the experiences a person has had that were shaped by their racial identity or color, it implies that to truly respect another human being we must obscure their areas of difference.

Naomi Wolf, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”33

I may never get rid of my clinical depression, but I can disentangle it from body shame. Mind-matters tools like meditation and reframing have helped me see my depression as another unique way my body exists in the world rather than as a shame to avoid or hide.

Each invitation to risk social comfort for an interpersonal act of justice disturbs the social contract of body terrorism. Even a small wrinkle in the bed of privilege is enough to force some of us awake. It is in our awakening that we accrue the collective power to bring into being a transformed world predicated on radical, unapologetic love.