BlogHer has begun a new initiative. Suzanne Reisman started a campaign called, “Letter to My Body.” encouraging women to write letters to their bodies and begin a much needed, long awaited conversation with their bodies. As a woman who has spent much of my life trying to avoid, run away from and hate my body, this has been a powerful experience for me to participate in this sharing. Even though I’ve done a great deal of work this year to learn how to love my body and spread the message to empower other women to feel the same way about themselves, this is a ground breaking opportunity for any woman. Please sit down today and write a letter to your body. There is such healing and beauty that awaits you. Here’s my letter to my body. I hope it will inspire you to write one to yours.
Dear Body,
I haven’t really gotten the chance to tell you over my life how much I really love you. I know that I’ve been so harsh and unfair to you, riddled you with decades of guilt and hated you for far too long. Maybe it was all those years of feeling so disconnected from you, allowing myself to feel inferior simply by virtue of my pants size, feeling down to my core that it was all your fault that I had an aching, emptiness inside of me, fearing that you were the reason that I didn’t allow myself to feel safe loving or being loved.
I thought if I could just make you small enough, everything would be okay. I spent years waiting for perfection, reasoning that would be when my life would begin, all the years spent hating you, seething inside because I was sweating and uncomfortable hiding in pants when everyone around me wore shorts and bathing suits. I regret all those missed opportunities to play and frolic in the water, all those years of hiding away working when everyone else was playing. Working and eating, that became your sentence. It kept me a busy gal, and a very unfilled woman.
I suppose that you and I never really had much of a chance since I discarded you so early on as a child. I learned from painful life lessons that if I had a beautiful body then I could not protect myself and feel safe. Now I know that I was wrong. I just didn’t have the wisdom or the love inside of me to save myself. I burdened you with my shame. I was taught to hate you. I was told to shun you if you were too big, go for the burn, push harder, get tougher. I was led to believe that I needed to fight you.
Please forgive me. I’m so sorry that I turned off my feelings and spent years trying to push you into a box, a darkened closet or a life of misery. I’m so sorry that I kept you shut away and avoided so many opportunities to be in the company of wonderful people, new experiences and the presence of joy. I’m so sorry that I held you back from being loved and appreciated. I never realized how much harm all those messages I bought into about you was doing us both. I truly believed that the problem was you. I thought by making you smaller, I would get back the power that had been stolen from me. I was so angry that you wouldn’t bend and yield to my will.
Body, it was you who I was fearing. I thought that you had all the power and it was your fault that I had no sense of self around men. I thought that you were all that I had to offer and I resented that.
I hated you and blamed you for my feelings of powerlessness. I felt so small and stupid all the time, despite all the years hungering for more learning, more growth, more wisdom.
I never realized how much of my power I gave away because I spent so much of my precious energy hating you. Now I know that I ate and did things to gain weight because deep down I was trying to pad and protect the soft and still scared parts of me and prevent you from getting all that frightening attention that I feared so much.
I’m so sorry. Please understand that I needed to make you big so that I could stop feeling so damned small. I was afraid that I didn’t stack up, that I didn’t have the qualifications that I needed to feel powerful around so many intimidating, cold, calculating and shallow men.
Perhaps it was all those years of being told that I had no damned common sense and that I was a failure as a business woman, too naïve, too sweet and too stupid, nothing more than a pretty face. I needed to have you to throw my weight around and feel good about myself. I’m so sorry that I glutted you full with bad food and shoveled down mouthfuls even though you cried and sometimes got sick. I was trying to punish you and kill off those scared parts of me, hoping that it would all go away.
Now I realize that was all false thinking on my part. No matter what torture I put you through, I hope that it’s not too late to make amends. I’ve had some really groundbreaking Ahas this past year and I realize that I’ve wasted too many decades living in the past, blaming you for things that were not your fault, avoiding responsibility and just plain hating you. I’ve wasted so much of our precious time together.
Now I know that I am enough, I have enough and big or small, it is what is inside of me that counts, not the outside. I am Andrea, inside and outside. Now as I continue to connect with you more deeply, it is easier for me to see that I was continuing to live in the past, fearing the present and avoiding the future.
I bless the day, August 2, 2006 that I decided to stop dieting because it was never so clear to me that I truly did have all the answers inside of me. That was what I needed to finally know that I could trust myself and that all the lies that I’d been told were untrue.
It’s taken me years of dieting to finally understand that the path to loving you was not found through restriction, but through love. I was so mixed up for such a long time. I thought that I could never love you or live my life until you were what I felt was perfect. Yet with a twist of irony, God and the Universe saw fit to help me find your beauty where I least expected it, in the folds of my imperfection, I discovered your perfection.
I thought that all the years that I spent dieting, I was doing it for you, to make you healthy and beautiful. I never realized that you didn’t need to be made to feel that way. You were already beautiful. It was me, who wasn’t able to see that.
Now I do. It cost me dearly but it was worth it. I had to lose so much of my security to regain my sense of self. Now I am back ready to truly love you and serve you. I want to be your friend.
It’s taken me 45 years, but I really get it. I now understand that you deserve to be loved in the same unconditional way that my Nana loved me or I love my family. It doesn’t matter anymore what you weigh, how you look, if you’re having a bad hair day or nothing fits you in the closet. I now really know that you don’t deserve the pain that I’ve inflicted on you. You deserve to be praised. You’ve been the most loyal, loving dearest friend anyone could ever have. It was you who gave me the strength to bear my children, love my husband and create a wonderful new life. Through all the abuse, you stuck with me.
Now every day when I awake, I feel so blessed to have you with me. The first thing I do each morning is smile and say, “Thank you for this beautiful day. I love you.”
Now I’m enjoying reconnecting with you, especially you legs. You’re strong and muscular. I love holding you, all of you, feeling you as you are right now, running my hands along you feeling the soft warmth of the dimpled flesh on your surface. I love you tummy. I love holding you at night and feeling your warmth inside of me.
I always wondered why my husband, Angel loves to touch and hold you. Now I know. You feel so soft and warm. You are love.
Dear, sweet body, I can’t even imagine putting you through the same torture that I used to, the years of jumping on and off the scale, looking, hoping, waiting for a smaller number to appear, the years of grabbing you with my fist and clutching a roll of fat and screaming that I wish you were dead and gone, comparing your size to every woman I ever met. I regret injuring you and putting you through all the pain that I did. I’m so sorry. I hope now that it’s not too late and we can become friends.
I want to thank you so much and express my heartfelt gratitude and love for you. I now realize that you were never my enemy as I thought. You were always trying to be my friend, trying to let me know when something didn’t feel right, trying to send me messages to know what to do next and I missed so much because I was too busy battling with you and thinking that you were the enemy because you weren’t perfect. It was my black and white thinking that pushed me to hate you.
Please forgive me for discarding you and letting you go, pushing copious amounts of food down your throat in an effort to control parts of my life where I had no control. I’m so sorry I’ve hurt you.
I want to make amends to you now. I’ve realized that you and I were brought together for a reason and now I see what that reason is. We chose one another to both learn how to be compassionate and to love one another. I’m sorry for all the hurt I caused you. Please forgive me for hating you. Thank you for remaining loyal to me and I love you, precious body. I truly love you.
Forever,
Andrea