On body image

I tweaked the look of my blog today and I thought it would be a good idea to write a post on body image. I have been thinking about writing one for some time, so today is a day as good as any. 

When I was a tween I was chubby (as I have said before), had lots of acne everywhere, had braces, and I was flat as a post. Let's just say that my "awkward years" stretched for a long time and were very very awkward. And, of course, my classmates never considered me to be pretty, I was the nerd, an ugly nerd on top of that. I don't know if it was only in my school, but the girls from my class were obsessed with good looks, at 12. One time, one of them wrote: "You'll be prettier next year" on my "yearbook". I was eleven. ELEVEN. And that was all she could think of. Anyway, I did have a really bad case of acne, not a clinical case, but I was embarrassed to show my back in public, I would even wear shirts to the beach. My biggest worry was that my back would be covered in scars and I wouldn't be able to wear a strapless dress for my wedding (can we all please laugh at this?).

Once I started "becoming a woman" (as grandmas like to call it) I had some stretch marks appear on my skin. My first thought was that they would get worse when I became pregnant (yeah, like that is going to happen soon). When I was old enough to start considering sex (which was probably embarrassingly late, but I was always more worried about studying), I was convinced that no one would ever want to get in bed with me because my body was flawed. During my life, I have struggled with body image. I've thought I'm too hairy, that my skin is not soft enough, that I'm too fat, that I'm too pale, that my ribs are too visible, that my tights are too wide, and my arms too flabby.

Guess what? I've forgotten most of it. I wear tank tops and sleeveless shirts most of the time. I lost lots of weight to the point you could count my ribs through my back, but I've gained some back including some badass muscle mass both on my arms and my legs. I still have never had anyone tell me to get dressed and get out after they have taken my clothes off.

We, as women, are told how our bodies should look. All the time. Our bodies must not show our age, our bodies must not show our lives. Our bodies have to look and be flawless to the point of perfection. Our bodies only matter if they look like what society says they should look like.

Bullshit. I say bullshit. It's not about what my body looks like, it's what my body can do. My body can walk for hours, my body can swim in the sea, my body can carry weight, my body has run a half-marathon. What if I have scars from pimples? What if I have scars from falling off my bike? What if I have stretch marks? What if there is hair in places where there should be? What if I look pale even if it's August? What if I have tummy fat? What matters to me is that my legs are strong enough to do all they do. That my arms are strong enough to swim in the sea. Soon I will be told that I need to use anti-aging stuff and dye my hair so grey hairs don't show off. Are we this afraid of aging that we need to look like twenty-year-olds all our lives?

I don't. I will embrace my flaws and love my body for what it is. I'll take care of it accepting its changes and finding the beauty in it at every moment. I'm the one who decides how my body should look like and I'm the one who decides that my flaws are not such.