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We struggle to hold the truths of others because we have so rarely had the experience of having our own truths held.
“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”
“An acorn does not have to say, ‘I intend to become an oak tree.’ Natural intelligence intends that every living thing become the highest form of itself and designs us accordingly.”2
Humans unfortunately make being human exceptionally hard for each other, but I assure you, the work we have done or will do is not about acquiring some way of being that we currently lack. 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.
Self-esteem and self-confidence are fleeting, and both can exist without radical self-love, but it almost never bodes well for anyone involved when they do.
Glen Marla’s quote, “There is no wrong way to have a body,”
We apologized for our weight, race, sexual orientation. We were told there is a right way to have a body, and our apologies reflected our indoctrination into that belief. We believed there was indeed a way in which our bodies were wrong.
We, too, have snickered at the fat body at the beach, shamed the transgender body at the grocery store, pitied the disabled body while clothes shopping, maligned the aging body. We have demanded the apology from other bodies. We have ranked our bodies against the bodies of others, deciding they are greater or lesser than our own based on the prejudices and biases we inherited.
When we are honest with ourselves, we feel gross about the way we vulture other humans, picking apart their bodies, consuming them for the sake of our own fragile sense of self. We feel gross when we think about all the vicious, cruel comments we’ve heard leveled against people’s bodies; comments spoken around us without a single protest from us.
“Why do I need people to be the way I believe they should be?”
If your body were an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, it would be getting framed for crimes it did not commit.
Many of us have oriented our entire lives around an effort to be normal, never realizing that normal is not a stationary goal. It keeps moving while we dance a perpetual foxtrot, jitterbug, and paso doble around it, trying to catch up and confused when we finish each day exhausted and uninspired by this party called life.
Seeing difference as synonymous with danger is an aspect of our social evolution that can and should be shifted.
Remember that we live in a world of default bodies, the bodies we imagine when we close our eyes. The default body becomes the template for the normal body. The only reason we would need to erase someone’s difference is because we still equate difference with danger or undesirability.
“Am I changing my body in ways that an oppressive body-shame system will reward me for?”
“The dive is a spiritual thing,” Davide said. “I learn how to listen to my body. I must listen or I will die. In the water, I must learn the difference between fear and danger.” He did not know it, but Davide was describing the journey of radical self-love. It is damn scary to probe the depths of the thoughts, ideas, and subconscious principles governing our daily lives. To be fear-facing is to learn the distinction between fear and danger. It is to look directly at the source of the fear and assess if we are truly in peril or if we are simply afraid of the unknown. The unknown is like fog,
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We are not either/or beings; we comprise a multitude of gray shades.
Not only have we avoided intimately knowing our bodies, we have forgotten that our bodies like doing stuff—walking, dancing, running, having sex! Body shame has severed our love of activity.
Many of us cannot recall a time when moving our bodies was something other than a way to punish them for failing to meet society’s fictitious ideals.
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.
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.
Yes, we believed that our bodies were too big, too dark, too pale, too scarred, too ugly, so we tucked, folded, hid ourselves away and wondered why our lives looked infinitesimally smaller than what we knew we were capable of.
We desperately want our good intentions and niceness to be enough. Although each of us is inherently “enough” to be loved, valued, cared for, and treated with respect, our efforts to raze systems of oppression and injustice will require more than our niceness.
It is thin privilege that installs the belief that if someone cannot fit in a chair at a restaurant, their body is the problem, not the manufacturer who made the chair or the restaurant owner who chose it.
Systems do not maintain themselves; even our lack of intervention is an act of maintenance.
Acknowledge and embrace those things that are varied in us. Notice when difference is absent and investigate why.
Ask who is not in the room.
We treat new ideas like we treat bodies, dismissing what we can’t understand, what we view as too different.
Do I make assumptions about people’s health based on their weight? Do I believe “healthier” bodies are better bodies?
Do I believe being fat is fine for others, just not for me?
Am I afraid of becoming fat?
Do I assume disabled people hate their bodies? Do I pity them?
Do I use ableist language like lame, blind, dumb, crazy, insane, nuts, or crippled?
Recognizing Wholeness: People have inherent worth outside of commodity relations and capitalist notions of productivity. Each person is full of history and life experience.
Do I make assumptions about people’s gender based on what they are wearing or look like?
Do I assume people’s gender without asking them, using he or she pronouns based on only my assessment?
When I meet married people, do I assume their partner is of the opposite gender?
Do I equate being a woman or a man to genital or reproductive body parts?
