“Hope” - A Body of Resilience - From Being Seen to Seeing Myself

For most of my life, I was taught to dislike my body.

It started young. Bullying, comparison, and growing up without many role models who genuinely loved and respected their own bodies. Being a twin meant constantly being compared, to each other, to other women, to whatever version of “beautiful” I was supposed to be.

Eventually, that became eating disorders.

When I finally became physically healthier, I thought I had escaped that relationship with my body. In reality, my mental health was deteriorating, and I simply found another way to control it.

I trained harder. I restricted more. I pushed my body further. Bodybuilding gave everything a purpose, a program, a goal, a trophy at the end. The encouragement from other people made it easy to believe that what I was doing was healthy, even when the behaviours underneath it weren't.

I also spent years believing that access to my body was something I had to give to be loved. I allowed people I dated to have parts of me when I wasn't comfortable, because I had never really been shown that I could say no and still be worthy of love.

My body carried all of it.

The stress. The pain. The injuries. The rehabilitation. Surgery. The scars.

In 2019, I burnt my back.

I remember thinking that everything I had worked so hard for was ruined. All that time, all that training, all that effort, gone because my skin had been damaged.

But my body healed.

Slowly. With patience, treatment, rehabilitation and care.

And eventually, the scar became something different. Not something that made me less beautiful, less feminine, less worthy or less whole.

It became a reminder.

My body has survived so much, including things I have put it through myself and things that have been done to it by others. And it has continued to carry me.

It took me a very, very long time to understand that I only get one body.

I don't have to earn the right to love it.

I don't have to punish it into being worthy.

I don't have to make it smaller.

I don't have to make it stronger.

And I certainly don't have to give anyone access to it if I don't feel safe.

Being healthy isn't linear. Healing isn't linear. Learning to love yourself isn't linear.

But I have learned that resilience isn't built by constantly fighting your body.

Sometimes resilience is choosing to care for it.

Choosing kindness.

Choosing acceptance.

Choosing boundaries.

Choosing yourself.

My scars don't make me imperfect.

They remind me that I'm human.

And no one else gets to decide whether my body is beautiful, whether it is worthy, or whether it deserves to be loved.

I do.

And after everything we've been through together, my body deserves nothing less than love, kindness and respect.