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

by Sonya Renee Taylor

“Natasha, your body is not an apology. It is not something you give to someone to say, ‘Sorry for my disability.’”

Each day we wake to a planet full of social, political, and economic obstructions that siphon our energy and diminish our sense of self.

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.

While not completely unrelated to self-esteem or self-confidence, radical self-love is its own entity, a lush and verdant island offering safe harbor for self-esteem and self-confidence.

The biggest flaw of investing our time in self-esteem and self-confidence is that neither model unto itself has the ability to reorient our world toward justice and compassion.

radical self-love builds a foundation strong enough to carry the enormous power of our highest calling while also connecting us to the potential power of all bodies.

Famed activist and professor Angela Davis said, “I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”

You, my dear, have a body.

Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body.

Radical self-love is deeper, wider, and more expansive than anything we would call self-confidence or self-esteem. It is juicier than self-acceptance. Including the word radical offers us a self-love that is the root or origin of our relationship to ourselves.

Glen Marla’s quote, “There is no wrong way to have a body,” we learn to love bodies even when we don’t like the humans inhabiting them.

Living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues.

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 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.

Why are we constantly apologizing for the space we inhabit?

We have been convinced we are ineffectual at exacting any real change against our social systems and structures, so instead we land the guilt and blame squarely on the shoulders of the most accessible party: ourselves.

The voice of doubt, shame, and guilt blaring in our heads is not our voice. It is a voice we have been given by a society steeped in shame. It is the “outside voice. “Our authentic voice, our “inside voice,” is the voice of radical self-love!

Quickly it became clear that our brief moments of unapologetic living were highly contagious acts—like the flu but much happier!

each moment that I practice living unapologetically I realize my grandma was right: I wasn’t ever actually sorry. When we genuinely love ourselves, there is no need to be.

What we must ask ourselves instead is, “Why do I need people to be the way I believe they should be?”

Three Peaces. They are: Make peace with not understanding. Make peace with difference. Make peace with your body.

We must make peace with not understanding. Understanding is not a prerequisite for honor, love, or respect.

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

“Her thin body is just wrong” sounds nonsensical because beneath our many layers of body shame, we know that bodies are neither wrong nor right. They just are.

Acceptance should not be confused with compliance or the proposal that we must be resigned to the ills and violence of the world.

we must be clear that people’s bodies are not the cause of o...

Contrary to common opinion, freeing ourselves from the need to understand everything can bring about a tremendous amount of peace.

We must make peace with difference.

The late poet and activist Audre Lorde said, “It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.”

Rather than owning that we don’t understand someone’s experience, we shrink it or stuff it into our tiny capsules of knowledge. We homogenize it by proclaiming we are all the same.

Health is not a state we owe the world. We are not less valuable, worthy, or lovable because we are not healthy.

“The phobia about fatness and the preference for

thinness have not, principally or historically, been about health. Instead, they have been one way the body has been used to craft and legitimate race, sex, and class hierarchies.”27

When we propose that all bodies are the same, we also propose that there is a standard to measure sameness against. I call this standard the “default body.”

Hating your body is like finding a person you despise and then choosing to spend the rest of your life with them while loathing every moment of the partnership.

Being different is difficult in a world that tells us there is a normal.

Many of us have oriented our entire lives around an effort to be normal, never realizing that normal is not a stationary goal.

Children’s bodies are not public property. Teaching children bodily autonomy, privacy, and consent are the cornerstones of raising radical self-love humans.

Consider this hypothesis: when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, we make judgments about that absence.

author and pleasure activist adrienne maree brown encapsulates perfectly when she says, “I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.”

Splattered before us like bugs on the windshield of life are all the ways we have shrunk the full expression of ourselves because we have been convinced that our bodies and therefore our very beings are deficient.

it has become an economic juggernaut for the structure of global capitalism to generate wealth off our body shame—what I like to call the global Body-Shame Profit Complex (BSPC).

We are saddled with body shame because it is an age-old system whose roots and pockets are deep. Body shame flourishes in our world because profit and power depend on it.

Across gender, sexual orientation, race, size, age, and ability level, our systems are constantly affirming or denouncing bodies, communicating to us what we should and should not consider valid about other people’s bodies while simultaneously detailing for us what we should and should not accept about our own.

Discrimination, social inequality, and injustice are manifestations of our inability to make peace with the body: our own and others’.

You can’t self-help your way back to radical self-love. Reading this book will not be enough to get you there because radical self-love is a return to the love of our whole being.

Living a radical self-love life is a process of: Thinking Doing Being

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. You are not alone! That sense of autopilot is the result of being disconnected from our thoughts.

“But how do I break out of the fear of exploring the catacombs of my thoughts?” Great question! Answer: You are not your thoughts! Our thoughts are a hybrid of information forged from our own experiences, traumas, successes, failures, and massive input from our external world.

Say it again, for the folks in the bleachers: You are not your thoughts! That said, avoiding your thoughts will not help you train your brain to think new ones. You must look at them with gentle kindness and say, “Thank you for sharing.” And, with love, release them.