An Open Letter to Teen Girls Learning to Hate Their Bodies.
Come in close, I want to tell you how worthy you are. And the fight that’s worth your attention.
This is a reader-supported publication. If you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you! If you’d like to become a paid subscriber and support this work financially, I’d really appreciate it!
Hey there, you young, fresh flower, come in close. Sorry, was that so cringe? I have no idea how to talk to teenagers without being awkward. My son just told me you don’t say cringe anymore. Damn, not a great start.
Please hear me out, because this middle-aged hag has something to tell you about body love, even if I might look like a cautionary tale, over here all self-satisfied, with my feral armpit hair and baggy sweats, done with trying to shape myself into being palatable.
I hope you’ll stay for a minute. Because I fear you’re being indoctrinated into something ferocious and beastly that could lead to a lifetime of self-hatred and suffering and I do not want that for you.
If you want to love your body, in this world, you’ll have to fight for it.
At first, it might seem like the fight will end when your body looks the way it ‘should’. You’re being should on from every angle and every app. You’re being shown that the fight you’re supposed to be in is against the scale, against the blemishes, against the perceived imperfections of your dimensions as you look in the mirror.
You’ll be told and sold that you should fight for thinness. Prettiness. Desirability. Less of this and more of that. This is an unwinnable fight, my dear. This fight will create a void of wanting in your heart. A void of wanting in your belly. A hunger that will lead you to binge on shame and starve for the validation that’s never coming.
This wanting to look better than you do, to be someone you’re not, it’s an infection and striving for perfection will not cure it. The most beautiful are not immune to this infection, you may be among the most beautiful, but there’s no way to know because you will always be told and sold that you’re not.
You may look around and see girls who are more or less of the things you want to be and maybe you’ll believe that they don’t suffer the way you suffer. But they do. Because we are all being sold our inadequacies. Over and over. At every age and every size and every feature.
Beauty is currency. Absolutely. Anyone who tells you it doesn’t matter what you look like is being wishful. But it doesn’t matter in the ways you’re sold it matters. The fight is not with your body. The fight is against anything that threatens a deep, kind, loving and joyful friendship with your body.
I’ve been in ongoing conversations and reckonings with women across generations for decades, learning how to be in friendship with our bodies even when being inundated with violent, poisonous and destructive habits and products billed as “health and self-care”.
Sometimes it seems like you’re exposed to a diversity of bodies and ways of relating to self that have far more range than we did at your age. We were all told that Kate Winslet in Titanic was fat and that we were so lucky to have a realistic woman on screen.
But we also just had photoshopped magazine images to compare ourselves to. You have filters and AI. Complete fictitious imagery you’re supposed to preen yourself into. We had to go to a store and buy those magazines. We had to wait for the commercials to come on during a TV show on a Thursday night. You have to look at it, a steady stream on your phone, from the privacy of your bedroom, with no escape, this whole world, all at once. I’m so sorry this is happening.
I’m here to hopefully offer an alternative to a lifetime of trying to fix what you’re told to believe is broken. I had some profound experiences early on that signalled to me that I could waste my entire youth dieting and primping, head in the toilet, hatred in the mirror. Or I could do the hard work of loving what I’ve got. I saw a quote once that said, “Weight loss is hard. Being fat is hard. Choose your hard.” and I thought…ffffffffffff OFF. This binary is exhausting. Loving ourselves despite all the insistence that we shouldn’t. That’s hard. I choose THAT hard. Please, choose that hard.
To be clear, I’m not anti-beauty. I’m not anti-weight loss. I’m not anti-aesthetic-preoccupation. I’m not anti-body-alteration. I’m anti-oppressive ideals. I’m anti-exploitation. I’m anti-self-violence. And this can come in many forms. Even being hard on ourselves for being hard on ourselves can be a loop of a mind-mess to reckon with.
I’m pro-liberation. I’m pro-self-compassion. I’m pro-self-expression. There are many practices, products, habits and rituals that could look the same on the outside. But how we use or abuse them can mean the difference between an act of punishment or self-care, diminished self-esteem or bolstered self-esteem, self-harm or self-celebration. I’ve practiced the whole range. Running for joy and running myself sick. Eating for nourishment and eating for achievement. Dressing for delight and dressing for approval. At the end of the day, no matter how I look, I feel far more beautiful when I like myself. I like myself when my actions are an expression of kindness towards myself.
This time in your life is tricky. If you’re in high school, even if you like it, there’s probably a part of you that knows how awful it is. How relentless the pressure is. To stand out. To blend in. To meet expectations. The comparisons, objectification and judgement can be downright traumatic.
Never have I encountered another place, as an adult woman, that is so ruthlessly critical and cruel as high school.
Except for the internet.
In many ways, social media mirrors high school. The narrow ways you can express yourself without callous scrutiny. To know that you’re navigating both of those worlds at once is heartbreaking and infuriating to me. I want to scoop you up. I want to tell you that there’s so much more kindness and play and self-expression and pleasure and solidarity out there in the “real world” and I hope you find it and build it with others.
I’m not here to tell you how to love yourself and your body. Just that in a sea of relentless critique, it is possible. And if it feels hard, that’s because it is. I don’t know your path to love and liberation, but I’m holding that vision and there’s nothing wrong with you. I know what’s helped me and what’s helped others. I believe for each of us, body love and friendship are a quest that we both have to go on by ourselves AND can be greatly helped along by fighting this fight with those who share our values and our hunger to exercise our right to be free.
I know I kicked off this letter by joking about being a hag. But I value beauty a lot. I love feeling beautiful. And sexy. I love shining and being seen. I love to receive a gaze and be appreciated. I love habits and rituals and clothes and products that make me feel radiant. I love seeing others shine and I love to celebrate the beauty of others.
Loving your body as it is, not only when it meets an ideal, and refusing to constantly try to improve it, is not a sign of defeat. It’s an act of sacred devotion. Pursue all the activities to beautify that you want to. What I hope you strive for is not to equate your value to that beauty. I hope you don’t let how you look hold you back from the dreams you go for or the rooms you enter or how deserving you feel of love, pleasure or having your needs and desires met.
You don’t need to earn those things with the currency of your beauty. You’re whole and deserving.
Hating your body is very, very profitable to others. It makes a lot of companies a lot of money and it distracts you from the power you hold. Two of the most pervasive stories about your body are that it’s an object or a service vehicle.
As an object, it’s for others to judge, behold and enjoy (or not). As an object, all that matters is your desirability, your palatability. As a service vehicle, your body’s function is to sexually satisfy others, to make and feed babies, to engage in care work, and to provide labour through the workforce.
But baby girl, your body is not an object or a service vehicle. Your body is your home. It’s yours. All yours. It’s home to your heart, your mind, your instincts, your soul. How it looks, how it feels, how you move, how you feed yourself, how you dress, how you express, the fight you deserve to win is knowing in every cell of your body that all of that must serve you first. Your needs. Your joy. Your pleasure. Your right to exist as the radiant, worthy, stunning creature you are - fully at home in your own skin, exactly as you are.
You’re not the only one fighting for it. Find the others. Celebrate each other. Build each other up. Challenge the stories and demands. Refuse. Refuse to hate your body. Refuse to hate your body as a protest, as a prayer, as the path to the body love you so deeply deserve.
May it be so.
With Love,
Chela
Yep, sending to my daughter, too. ❤️
This is beautiful, Chela. It's so well written it hurts. I hope many people read it because it deserves it; you've done fantastic work here.