A Body to Call Home

I have spent years trying to unzip myself. To step out of this body like an outfit gone out of style, to shed it like snake’s skin, leave it behind somewhere on the floor, walk away new, weightless, free. I have spent nights pressing my hands into the parts of me that refused to disappear, mourning an old version of me, grieving the space I take up now. I have learned how to pose, how to angle, how to exist in still frames—never moving, never breathing too deeply, never allowing my body to spill outside the lines I was told to stay within.

And what a cruel fate it is, to be born into a body you hate. To be given a home you cannot move out of, only rearrange. To wake up every morning and slip into the same skin, one that sags here, stretches there, folds and curves and expands in ways you have been taught to despise. To stand in the mirror and pick yourself apart like a crime scene, searching for evidence of beauty, searching for proof that you are allowed to be here, in this body, as you are.

But your body is not your enemy. It is not something to punish, not a machine to be fixed, not a problem to be solved. It is not the villain in your story, no matter how many years you have spent treating it like one. Your body is just a body. A collection of bones and skin, sinew and muscle, cells constantly renewing, a heart that keeps beating for you even when you wish it wouldn’t. It does not love or hate, does not judge or betray—it only is. A vessel. A home. A thing that houses you, that carries you through every moment of your life, through every heartbreak and joy, through every sunrise and sunset, through every inhale and exhale, no matter how much you curse it.

And I know—some days, that is not enough. Some days, you will wake up and feel like you are drowning in yourself. You will catch your reflection in a window and flinch. You will stand in a fitting room, surrounded by versions of yourself you do not recognize. You will press at your stomach, your thighs, your arms, your face, wishing you could melt them away, carve yourself into something easier to love.

And that is okay. You are allowed bad body days. You are allowed to exist without the pressure of always feeling beautiful. You are allowed to wake up and simply be, without performance, without pretense, without the constant need to prove your worth through the shape of your frame.

But let me tell you this: You are not a before picture. You are not unfinished. You are not a waiting room for the person you are meant to become. You do not owe anyone smallness. You do not owe anyone loveliness. You do not have to lose or shrink or tone or tighten to be worthy of love, of joy, of taking up space. You do not have to spend a lifetime apologizing for the body that carries you through this world.

Because one day, I hope, you will stand in front of the mirror and see yourself, not as a project, not as something to fix, but as a person. A body full of breath. A body that has held you through every moment of your life when no one else did. A body that has never once abandoned you no matter times you tried to abandon it.

And maybe you will not love it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But maybe, just maybe, you will let yourself stay. Your body is not a battleground— and you were not born to be at war with yourself.