Loving my Belly
For my 35th birthday, I asked my friends to write messages of love on my belly. Birthdays, like the New Year, sometimes have this “It’s now or never” effect on me. I’m halfway through my thirties. I decided it’s time to start loving my belly.
See, my belly is often the scapegoat for all my bad feelings about my body. As my body has aged and parts of me have expanded and softened, it’s my belly that I worry has grown less attractive to others. I remember one night watching abbywinters.com porn (which I highly recommend), because they use "normal people" as opposed to porn stars. And I scrutinized each naked belly that was curvier than the others to see if any of them looked like my own. Did any of them curve the same way at the bottom with extra padding? Like if my belly were a speed bump, there would be a rough ride en route to my pelvis. I saw no belly like my belly. I worried my soft, round belly was an ugly anomaly.
And it was a belly that often hurt. I have bladder issues, and I’m often bloated. I’ve stopped wearing almost all pants with a regular waistline, because nearly all options will, by the end of the day, cause me pain.
How can I love a belly that hurts? How can I feel sexy when I’m bloated?
A week or two earlier, I went to Strip Joker, an amazing comedy event in which the performers strip on stage to advocate for body positivity, and I felt like a hypocrite. I was there with friends sharing in this beautiful moment, and I’d chosen to wear jeans that were a tad too small for me because I was tired of my stretchy pants that weren’t as flattering. And by the end of the night, my belly was a hard ball of discomfort. I left the button unbuttoned. I took a picture with my friends and worried that I looked weird with my unbuttoned jeans bulking out from under my shirt.
This was right before my birthday, as was a walk I took with my friend Alecia when she told me she was going to do a Radical Body Positivity series and asked me what I thought radical meant in this context. I thought about it for a long time. Radical body positivity, for me personally, would mean somehow learning to love my belly.
So I thought deeply about what prevents me from doing so, and it has something to do with this cycle of thinking. The cycle goes something like this:
- I should love my body because fuck societal norms.
- I can’t love my body as it is because I make bad food choices and don’t work out enough, and if I love my body I am excusing my bad behaviors.
- I should love my body for political reasons, because my body is normal and I don’t want other people to feel that their bodies are not worth loving.
- I am a hypocrite who can’t love her own body and who worries that my lack of body love negatively impacts other people. I want to lose weight and still be fat positive. I am ashamed of my own desires.
- I should love my body because fuck societal norms.
- I can’t love my body because it feels bad and my clothes don’t fit, and those seem like good reasons to judge myself unworthy of self-love.
And so on.
When Alecia asked me what radical body positivity would look like, it struck me that maybe there are truths to be found outside of this cycle. And with that, I started seeing them.
Some truths:
- I can choose to love my body even when it feels bad.
- Who is to say my food choices are bad? Who gets to decide that?
- I get to decide what is “normal” and what is “sexy.”
Every day, I slide back into the cycle of unhealthy thinking about my body, and many days I still hate my belly. But not always. Radical isn’t a destination; it’s a journey. And one I’m not taking alone. On my thirty-fifth birthday, when I asked my friends to write love messages to my belly, I learned how very not alone I was. Other people love my belly or relate to how I feel about it.
I'm not big on telling people what to do, and I'm not going to tell you that you need to love your body. But I do believe that we'd grow stronger communities if we committed to helping each other have more radical self-love. It's not an edict—it's an invitation.
What is radical (meaning what toxic cycle we each need to break out of) is very different. But breaking any of them starts with being vulnerable and valuing each other's vulnerability. Metaphorically (or literally exposing) our bellies.
