The Revolution Might Just Start with a Mirror.

In case you haven’t been watching the Olympics, I’ll start with something obvious. The human body is pretty miraculous. For some folks, it can run, jump, swim and defy gravity, although momentarily. For other folks, it can produce innovative inventions, or world-shifting ideas, or even tiny humans. All of our bodies possess different capabilities and talents and gifts, but they all have one main job—to carry us through our one, precious and beautiful life. 

But even though our bodies wake up in morning and treat us to this incredible luxury every day—most of us are not very nice to them. In fact, sometimes we’re downright mean. I could name eighteen thousand examples of how mean we are to our bodies, but the most ironic example to me is how all our bodies really ask of us to perform and function is sugar, and we’ve now spent decades demonizing sugar.

Whether it’s with eating, drinking, thinking, believing or just looking into a mirror—we all struggle with our bodies, and it’s not our fault. We live in a world that constantly rains down comparison, criticism, unfair demands and unattainable standards for everything about our bodies from the way they look to the way they move to the way they work to the way they play.

Don’t be too big.

Don’t be too loud.

You have too much hair there.

You don’t have enough hair there.

The gap between your thighs isn’t big enough.

You’d better watch your figure.

You’d better not eat that donut.

You’re sweating too much.

Your muscles are too manly.

Your laugh is too girly.

Your nose is too big.

You’re not productive enough.

You’re not thin enough.

You’re not tall enough.

You’re not healthy enough.

You’re not enough.

We’ve heard these messages in both plain-spoken and coded ways our entire lives, and we’ve internalized them so that we talk to ourselves this way (and then we beat ourselves up for beating ourselves up). Society’s expectations of our bodies are made clear to us from the moment of the gender reveal party—before we’ve even made our debut into the world. And when we don’t measure up,  we’re told we’re “wrong” and need to fix ourselves. The body image issues alone are enough to screw us up—leading to anxiety, perfectionism, self-torture in the name of beauty, disordered eating and the loss of joy and productivity that results. Even the most feminist women I know (myself included) put our bodies through physical pain and fry our hair and spend our precious time and dollars on things that are detrimental to our physical and mental health.

But for those of us with chronic illness, anxiety, depression, infertility or disability, the shame storm can feel like a hurricane. It’s self-consciousness and feelings of inadequacy on a whole new level. I’m certainly not perfect at this, but I’m learning to have gratitude for my chronic illness because it’s forced me to look at my body in new ways. To acknowledge its strength. To understand the gravity of the decisions I make. To thank my body for carrying me through this beautiful, hard life even when I’ve pushed it to its limits. 

I think this is how we attempt to flip the script, and even though it’s hard, I think it’s revolution material. There is no quick fix, and there’s no one way for everyone to start loving their bodies instantly. But we can learn, over time, day by day, to be a little bit kinder to them. We can ask questions like…

• If I’ve got an hour and $80 to spend, do I want to spend it getting tortured or getting pampered? Do I know the difference?
• Does being “professional” require me to slather on beauty products that disrupt my endocrine system and might give me cancer? 
• What are the costs and trade-offs of being small and pretty? Do I even want to be small and pretty?
• Is the short-term social reward of fitting in now really worth the long term effects of me making myself palatable to a world I think is pretty messed up anyway? No.

I recently listened to Glennon Doyle’s podcast, We Can Do Hard Things. In Episode 10, called Our Bodies: Why are we at war with them and can we ever make peace?, Glennon reads something she wrote years ago that I’d like to leave you with today.

“Your body is not your masterpiece — your life is.

It is suggested to us a million times a day that our BODIES are PROJECTS. They aren’t. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.

Stop spending all day obsessing, cursing, perfecting your body like it’s all you’ve got to offer the world. Your body is not your art, it’s your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that YOU HAVE A PAINTBRUSH which can be used to transfer your insides onto the canvas of your life — where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it.

Your body is not your offering. It’s just a really amazing instrument which you can use to create your offering each day. Don’t curse your paintbrush. Don’t sit in a corner wishing you had a different paintbrush. You’re wasting time. You’ve got the one you got. Be grateful, because without it you’d have nothing with which to paint your life’s work. Your life’s work is the love you give and receive — and your body is the instrument you use to accept and offer love on your soul’s behalf. It’s a system.

We are encouraged to obsess over our instrument’s SHAPE — but our body’s shape has no effect on its ability to accept and offer love for us. Just none.  Maybe we continue to obsess because as long we keep wringing our hands about our paintbrush shape, we don’t have to get to work painting our lives. Stop fretting. The truth is that all paintbrush shapes work just fine — and anybody who tells you different is trying to sell you something. Don’t buy. Just paint.

No wait — first, stop what you are doing and say THANK YOU to your body — right now. Say THANK YOU to your eyes for taking in the beauty of sunsets and storms and children blowing out birthday candles and say THANK YOU to your hands for writing love letters and opening doors and stirring soup and waving to strangers and say THANK YOU to your legs for walking you from danger to safety and climbing so many mountains for you.

Then pick up your instrument and start painting this day beautiful and bold and wild and free and YOU.”