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

by Sonya Renee Taylor

As a Black girl, I quickly learned from others that there were many things about myself that needed to shrink. Not just my body—my laugh, my ambitions, my imagination, my will, and eventually my anger—everything I was would need to be less. But even as I fought to make myself smaller, my self would fight back. The diets would not stick, the laughter would not quiet, the opinions would not hide, the anger would not die. Every attempt I made to be less of myself would fail, and I would come back bigger than ever—in every way.

When we hear someone’s truth and it strikes some deep part of our humanity, our own hidden shames, it can be easy to recoil into silence. We struggle to hold the truths of others because we have so rarely had the experience of having our own truths held. Social researcher and expert on vulnerability and shame Brené Brown says, “If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”

My poet self knew that the words were demanding to be more than a passing conversation with a friend. They wanted more than my own self-flagellation. The words always had their own plans. Me, I was just a vessel.

In it, she described the principle of natural intelligence. She posited, “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.”

No matter how “enlightened” our ideas, none of us is immune to the social, political, and cultural indoctrinations of body shame. Without an intentional exploration of how (not if) we have adopted biased body-shame beliefs and a commitment to interrupting them as we continually seek to uncover them in ourselves, we will continue to obstruct the full manifestation of someone else’s oak tree.

If self-esteem and confidence are primarily fueled by ego and external conditions, they are inevitably going to be a shaky platform upon which to build full, abundant lives. If they can barely hold up our expanding dreams and awakenings, they are certain to buckle under the weight of oppression.

If radical self-love is an oak tree, it is an essential part of an entire ecosystem. When it grows stronger, the entire system does as well. 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.

Too often, self-acceptance is used as a synonym for acquiescence. We accept the things we cannot change. We accept death because we have no say over its arbitrary and indifferent arrival at our door. We have personal histories of bland acceptance. We have accepted lackluster jobs because we were broke. We have accepted lousy partners because their lousy presence was better than the hollow aloneness of their absence. We practice self-acceptance when we have grown tired of self-hatred but can’t conceive of anything beyond a paltry tolerance of ourselves. What a thin coat to wear on this weather-tossed road. 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.”2 We can change the circumstances that have had us settle for self-acceptance. I assure you there is a richer, thicker, cozier blanket to carry through the world. There is a realm infinitely more mind-blowing. It’s called radical self-love.

Concepts like self-acceptance and body neutrality are not without value. When you have spent your entire life at war with your body, these models offer a truce. But you can have more than a cease-fire. You can have radical self-love because you are already radical self-love.

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.

A radical self-love world is a world that works for every body. Creating such a world is an inside-out job. How we value and honor our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.

It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on our planet. As we awaken to our indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies.

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. We did not start life in a negative partnership with our bodies. I have never seen a toddler lament the size of their thighs, the squishiness of their belly. Children do not arrive here ashamed of their race, gender, age, or differing abilities.

Kimberlé Crenshaw gave a name to this long-understood dynamic. She called it intersectionality and defined it as: the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination. The theory suggests that—and seeks to examine how—various biological, social, and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, age, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels. The theory proposes that we should think of each element or trait of a person as inextricably linked with all of the other elements in order to fully understand one’s identity.16

“I read somewhere that freedom lies in being yourself. I hope you guys are free.”

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. There is a level of “not enough” or “too much” sewn into these strands of difference.

20 For far too many women, the expectation of apology began after the sexual-assault report ended in an interrogation about the length of the skirt she was wearing or how many drinks she had at the party.

For decades, I spread out before the world a buffet of apologies. I apologized for laughing too loudly, being too big, too dark, flamboyant, outspoken, analytical. I watched countless others roll out similar scrolls of contrition. We made these apologies because our bodies had disabilities and needed access. We made them because our bodies were aging and slower, because our gender identity was different than the sex we were assigned at birth and it confused strangers. 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, at every turn, have decided that we are the culprits of our own victimization. However, not only are we constantly atoning; we have demanded our fair share of apologies from others as well. 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.

Dismantling the culture of apology requires an investigation into the anatomy of an apology. Generally, people committed to their righteousness rarely feel the need to apologize.

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?) Clearly, I do not propose that we, as a species, adopt this sort of thoughtless, self-centered ideology, but sometimes even jerks can lead us to epiphanies. There was something about his refusal to apologize for what he saw as taking up the space he needed that, if wielded authentically, might change how we move through the world.

Space is infinite and yet it is possible to be out of balance. With canyon-sized wealth gaps feeding global poverty but not bellies, billionaires are out of balance. Those of us who believe we do not have the “right body” spend decades of our life and dollars trying to shrink, tuck, and tame ourselves into the right body all the while forfeiting precious space on the planet because we don’t feel entitled to it. We, too, are out of balance.

Why are we constantly apologizing for the space we inhabit? What if we all understood the inherent vastness of our humanity and therefore occupied the world without apology?

Damn, I was hot! And yet, despite feeling vibrant and bold, I was terrified to share the photo with anyone. The voices of apology immediately began a chorus of questions: Would people think I was vain? Would they fail to see the beautiful woman I saw in the image and instead simply remind me that I was too fat, too Black, too queer, too woman, and no one was ever going to think that was beautiful? Unable to answer my litany of shame-based interrogations, the photo remained secreted away in my cell phone, only spied when I needed an esteem boost (see how my self-esteem was floating at sea, buoyed only by a selfie).

“In this picture, I am 230 lbs. In this picture, I have stretch marks and an unfortunate decision in the shape of a melting Hershey’s Kiss on my left thigh. I am smiling, like a woman who knows you’re watching and likes it. For this one camera flash, I am unashamed, unapologetic.”22

And 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.

Our best selves find the evisceration of other humans repugnant. We feel shame when we are shamed. And when we allow ourselves, we feel shame for having shamed others. Feelings of shame suck! So, what do we do? Stop shaming people? No. We distance ourselves from the guilt by couching our body judgment in the convenient container of choice. We say things like, “Hey, it’s okay to judge them; they chose to be gay.” “You know you could lose weight if you wanted to!” “It’s not my fault you are a guy dressing like a girl!”

A particularly strategic maneuver is to decide that if we don’t understand something it must be wrong. After all, wrong is simpler than not knowing. Wrong means I am not stupid or failing. See all that sneaky, slimy projection happening there? Projection shields us from personal responsibility. It obscures our shame and confusion and places the onus for reconciling it on the body of someone else. We don’t have to work to understand something when it is someone else’s fault. We don’t have to undo the shame-based beliefs we were brought up with. We don’t have to question our parents, friends, churches, synagogues, mosques, government, media. We don’t have to challenge or be challenged. 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 extraordinarily 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.

Acceptance should not be confused with compliance or the proposal that we must be resigned to the ills and violence of the world. We should not. But we must be clear that people’s bodies are not the cause of our social maladies. Napoleon was not a tyrant because he was short. Osama bin Laden was not a terrorist because Muslims are predisposed to violence. Our disconnection, trauma, lack of resources, lack of compassion, fear, greed, and ego are the sources of our contributions to human suffering, not our bodies.

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. This is a simple perspective when applied to nature, but oh, how we struggle when transferring the concept onto human forms. 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.”

The idea that we are all the same is often a mask. It is what we tell ourselves when we haven’t mastered the first Peace. 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.

Rather than acknowledging and basing research on the premise that diversity in weight and size are natural occurrences in humans, we treat larger bodies with poodle science and then pathologize those bodies by using the rhetoric of health. “I just want this complete stranger, whose life I know nothing about and whom I have made no effort to get to know beyond this Twitter thread, to be healthy.” This is called health trolling or concern trolling, and it is just another sinister body shame tactic.

In Sabrina Strings’s 2018 release Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia she traces the beginnings of our fear of fat bodies back to the proliferation of Protestant religious dogma in North America and African chattel slave trade, offering that not until theology converged with an influx of African bodies in America did fatness become part of a medicalized public health ideology. She states, “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.”

“Celebrating difference” is nice but not transformative. It is constrained by the boundaries of our imaginations. We must strive to create a difference-celebrating culture where we see diversity as an intrinsic part of our everyday lives.

am not simply proposing that you make peace with your body because your body shame is making you miserable. I am proposing you do it because it’s making us miserable too. Your children are sad that they have no photos with you. Your teenager is wondering if they, too, will be obligated to hate their body because they see you hating yours. The bodies you share space with are afraid you are judging them with the same venom they have watched you use to judge yourself.

Of course, if I could figure out this not-so-inside joke, certainly the eight other kids milling about would be in on the comedy soon enough. And my God, would this be what happened to me when I got the dreaded bee stings? In a mere five minutes, I had run through every embarrassing disaster scenario my puberty might elicit from the surrounding adults, all while poor Nia fled the scene, retreating to her home. I saw Nia just a few times the rest of the summer. I think she was hiding. From that moment forward, puberty became synonymous with public humiliation. I learned that our bodies and their changes were areas of public domain—and things to broadcast, be teased about, be ashamed of.

Eventually she concluded that it was the color of her skin. What might make this young woman feel as if her Blackness was a disadvantage in her pursuits as a classical dancer? Consider this hypothesis: when we don’t see ourselves reflected in the world around us, we make judgments about that absence. Invisibility is a statement. It says something about the world and our place in it.

In those few brief moments, Daemon’s cousins taught him that “man up” meant he must ignore both physical and emotional pain to be considered a man. His tears were bad and his pain inconsequential. Cultural and familial messages that reduce masculinity to a bland soup of physical strength and stoic emotional response limit the full range of human expression needed for boys to develop a healthy sense of radical self-love. We call these dangerous ideas “toxic masculinity.”8 Specifically, narratives that reinforce masculinity as synonymous with muscles can lead young men to “crash diets, over-exercising, smoking, increased drug and alcohol use or even taking dangerous supplements.”9 For

One of the most impactful, difficult, and underexplored ways we form early messages about our bodies is a result of abuse and trauma. Not only have we grown up in societies that shame difference and judge by the metric of body-based oppression, but many of us grew up navigating personal physical and sexual harm. These memories can shape how we understand touch, pleasure, pain, and whether we experience our bodies as sites of safety or danger. When physical and sexual abuse happen in our childhoods, we are far more likely to personalize the harm, believing we must have done something to cause it. Survivors of abuse may often come to see their bodies as bad or wrong, blaming themselves and their physical form for the violations they endured. This internalization can set survivors on a lifetime path of body shame. In Black feminist scholar bell hooks’s book All about Love, she notes, “Abused children have been taught that love can coexist with abuse. This shapes our adult perceptions of love. As we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us.”

With radical self-love, we welcome what may feel like an entirely new possibility, one that 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.”11

The second state might involve an unexpected hankering to track down and curse Curtis from fifth grade who teased you to the point of tears. You are feeling certain he is the source of your body woes! Maybe you are blaming your mother who scolded you every time you reached for dessert after dinner. Yes! She is to blame! It is not surprising that these folks seem like malevolent perpetrators responsible for our years of body hatred and shame. But before you unleash the radical self-love army of vengeance upon their heads, you should know . . . there is no radical self-love army of vengeance. You should also know that although Curtis and your mother may indeed have helped you cultivate some awful beliefs about your body, they were not the authors of your body shame. Nor are you failing at body positivity. You, your mama, and Curtis have merely been pawns in a much longer and larger game of how we have all come to understand, judge, value, or devalue our bodies and the bodies of others.

Relationships with our bodies are social, political, and economic inheritances. The nature of these inheritances has changed over time, the default body morphing and transforming to suit the power structures of the day.

All our body rules are made up!

Consider that the female body type portrayed in advertising as the ideal is possessed naturally by only 5 percent of American women. Whereas the average U.S. woman is five feet four inches tall and weighs 140 pounds, the average U.S. model is five feet eleven and weighs 117. Now consider a People magazine survey which reported that 80 percent of women respondents said images of women on television and in the movies made them feel insecure.

In the depth of our hearts, we know that the answers have never been liposuction, gray-hair remedies, or the loss of twenty pounds, because in the grand scheme of a life well lived, eye liner, dress sizes, and ripped abs really don’t matter.

We humans are masters of distraction, using makeup, weight loss, and a finely curated self-image to avoid being present to our fears, even as they build blockades around our most potent desires.

am proposing that reflecting on our purchases gives us an opportunity to investigate whether we are in alignment with our own unapologetic truth. Are we being manipulated by capitalism and the BSPC? If so, how we can take our power back?