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May 31, 2023 - April 26, 2024
Our relationship with our money often mirrors our relationships with our bodies. When my relationship with me moves from a fear-based, lack-based, deficit-based relationship into a courageous, abundant, radical self-love relationship, intimate possibilities, financial possibilities, and creative possibilities unfold. Every single time!
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
Remember, most of us live at the intersection of gender, age, race, disability, and so on, our identities overlapping. Which means representation is nearly nonexistent for bodies living at the axis of multiple identities.
Our beliefs about bodies disproportionately impact those whose race, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and age deviate from our default notions. The further from the default, the greater the impact. We are all affected—but not equally.
Leelah’s story indicts our entire society for its unwillingness to care for all bodies, thus making it virtually impossible for some of us to live lives of radical self-love—or even to continue wanting to live at all. A lack
The next day, anxiety hijacked me as I walked into a different airport while headed home from my travels. Initially I couldn’t locate the source of the anxiety buzzing through my chest and legs, and then I recalled the events of the day before: I was having a trauma response. My body had cataloged yesterday’s incident as a traumatic violation and was bracing in terror for the experience to happen again.
Believing that it is preferable to walk into the path of an eighteen-wheeler than to live another day being rejected by the whole of society is a belief rooted firmly in the soil of being subjected to body terrorism.
Our inherent sense of radical self-love doesn’t speak to us with cruelty or viciousness. Radical self-love does not malign our gender, sexuality, race, disability, weight, age, acne, scars, illnesses.
The first two pillars, taking out the toxic and mind matters, ask us to imagine the inside and outside voices as though they were volume knobs in our minds. These radical self-love practices teach us how to adjust the sound and filter the static, turning up our authentic voice and tuning out our body-shame brainwashing. Pillar 3, unapologetic action, integrates our thinking with our physical selves, moving our radical self-love practice out of our heads and into our bodies. Lastly,
Ask yourself, “Do this show and its commercials align with my radical self-love values?” If the answer is no, then the next question is “Why am I giving them my money?” If we think of our time and brain capacity as dollars, we may become a bit more particular about how we spend them.
If pillar 1 is the equivalent of a body-shame cleanse (far more satisfying than the juice version), then pillar 2 is a Marie Kondo purge where we empty out the attic and basement and consider what we might do with all the amazing space we’ve freed up. Once we have stopped imbibing body shame on a daily basis, we can begin to explore how our old ways of thinking have kept us stuck in cycles that dishonor our bodies. Body shame not only shapes how we see our bodies, it also clouds the lens through which we view our lives. If living a radical self-love life is a process of thinking, doing, and
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They needed each other. The concept of “mind matters” asks us to reconsider our relationship with our bodies. How do we end the cold war with it and become allies in achieving our best lives? This pillar of practice is about reconciliation. In her poem “Three,” Nayyirah Waheed captures the fullness of the second pillar in six perfect lines: and i said to my body. softly. ‘i want to be your friend.’ it took a long breath. and replied ‘i have been waiting my whole life for this.’
I broke my arm and never went to a see a doctor, not only would I be in extreme pain, but the people in my life would be incensed by such a reckless choice. Yet we make statements like “It’s all in your head” all the time, minimizing the experiences of our brains and neglecting their care.
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.
It is difficult to deeply love a stranger. Familiarity breeds fondness. Pillar 3, unapologetic action, asks us to get to know these bodies of ours.
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. In the chronicles of body shame, movement became a thing we avoided lest we jiggle while in motion! Unapologetic action is our departure from those old stories, prompting us to reconnect to the joys of movement. 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.
Truthfully, radical self-love is not the work of superheroes but of community and connection. Pillar 4 asks you to move beyond self-reliance to collective care. We must learn to be with each other if we plan to get free.
Before body shame stripped us of our inherent sense of self-worth, it stripped us of compassion. We saw failure in every mirror; we judged our every thought. We berated and abused ourselves because we were berated and abused by others. We thought the outside voice was our own, and we let it run roughshod over our lives. And then we judged ourselves for judging ourselves, trapped on a hamster wheel of self-flagellation. Oh, honey, that is no way to live.
Right this minute, we are sauntering across someone’s radical self-love path like a lumbering bovine. 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.
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. “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.
Remember that we are not the sum of our thoughts or even actions. When we fail to make that distinction, we avoid exploring our ideas and continue to cause harm to ourselves and others. Seeing our thoughts and behaviors as part and not the whole of us allows us to transform our way of being with other bodies.
Whether we chanted and sang along or not, we knew with certainty that we never wanted to be the people in those bodies being targeted. We learned the language of fatphobia and weight stigma, the language of difference-shaming. We were becoming fluent in body terrorism, either as perpetrators or as inactive bystanders, not because we were bad people but because we were in an immersion school of body shame.
None of us are solely culprits or solely victims. We all get a bit of what we give. Each person in a society is obstructing someone’s road to radical self-love while simultaneously being obstructed on their own road. Sometimes we call this obstruction “privilege,” which refers to the unearned benefits we receive in the world as a result of inhabiting some aspect of a default body.
These areas of privilege lead to assumptions that the world is constructed only for specific bodies, while also failing to consider the experiences or needs of other bodies. 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.
Bodies are not the only designators of oppression, but all oppression is enacted on the body. To discuss oppression as a manifestation of body terrorism is to move the conversation out of the abstract and return it to its site of impact, the body. Otherwise we risk forgetting that oppression in its many variations is a shared experience. Everybody with a body is affected.
Lilla Watson, an Aboriginal Australian artist and activist, along with the activists of 1970s Queensland are credited with saying, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Love is bigger, huger, more complex and more ultimate than petty fucked up desirability politics. We all deserve love. Love as an action verb. Love in full inclusion, in centrality, in not being forgotten. Being loved for our disabilities, our weirdness, not despite them. . . . Love gets laughed at. What a weak, non-political, femme thing. Bullshit, I say. Making space accessible as a form of love is a disabled femme of color weapon.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, asexual, agender, pansexual, polyamorous, kink, two-spirit . . . if you read this list and feel overwhelmed, imagine what it might be like to spend most of your life being invisible in film, television, radio, schools, jobs, and so on. When you are represented, it is to provide stereotypical comic relief, sensationalism (see Jerry Springer), or mockery. In fact, there are infinite arrangements for how we experience or don’t experience attraction, desire, and understand our gender. Still we scoff at the rolling out of so many
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“Not queer like gay. Queer like, escaping definition. Queer like some sort of fluidity and limitlessness at once. Queer like a freedom too strange to be conquered. Queer like the fearlessness to imagine what love can look like and pursue it.”11 Brandon’s
