On My Body.

35mm self portrait from 2018.

Once on a scorcher of a Los Angeles day, Joan Didion went grocery shopping in a bikini. Most days(the good kind), I slip on some sort of water proof get up. I stretch on sand. Hoping for bronzed skin and new freckles. 

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I have had to learn to love my round belly and like my thick thighs. The tolerance for the shape of my body mostly grew out of loathing how much I loathed loathing the contours of my body when I was sitting or standing or running away from responsibilities.

Science likes to tell us that our bodies on any given day commit so many microscopic duties. In order to live and hand the judgey barista our overdrawn credit card to purchase overpriced coffee, our bodies had to shed new cells to make room for new ones that can withstand overrated coffee. In the grand scheme of the universe, we are microscopic whether the hotel bathroom scale agrees or not. We are all runway bodies underneath the fake smiles.

I cannot recall exactly when I started to accept my body, but it is as though a switch turned on in my brain and I realized that my body is more than the number the hotel bathroom scale reports back to me. My liver detoxifies my weekend benders. My fingers disguise imitation jewelry as expensive counter parts, and my feet get me from place to place. My hips that protrude wider than my waist make the slip skirt I wear too often hang just right.

I move my body daily in a kind of sweaty ritual because I know it is good for me and also because it makes me feel good. I get sweaty. I shower. Afterwards then, I usually admire the naked glory that is my physical form.

So on those countless days, when I stretch out on the sand under the sun wearing next to nothing I do not care that I am not insanely thin. I am more so worried about soaking up the sun and thinking about what could I possibly wear later that night depending on my flighty social calendar. My body protects my brain which in theory is what is making this explanation possible. I do not want to say this is a spiel of how to love yourself, but rather that it is not insane to wear a bikini to a Ralph’s when it is over 100 degrees.