The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.

Without compassion for ourselves we will never stay on the road of radical self-love. Without compassion for others we can only replicate the world we have always known. Radical self-love is not about “getting it right.” “Getting it right” is a body-shame paradigm. Radical self-love is honoring how we are all products of a rigged system designed to

Practice unapologetic inquiry. Part of helping people sort through their ideas and beliefs is to ask questions about those ideas. That includes asking ourselves hard questions: “Why do I believe this? What am I afraid of? What am I gaining or losing by trying on a new perspective?” The answers that stick with us over time are the answers we come up

Many of us have oriented our entire lives around an effort to be “normal,” never realizing that “normal” is not a stationary goal. It keeps moving while we dance a perpetual foxtrot, jitterbug, and paso doble around it, trying to catch up and confused when we finish each day exhausted and uninspired by this party called life.

I want you to know that this system is destructible, and the fastest way to obliterate its control over us is to do the scary work of tearing down those pillars of hierarchy inside ourselves. At the same time, we must trust that what will be left standing is our own divine enoughness, absent of any need for comparison.

People who are full of hate and anger against their oppressors or who only see Us versus Them can make a rebellion but not a revolution.… Therefore, any group that achieves power, no matter how oppressed, is not going to act differently from their oppressors as long as they have not confronted the values that they have internalized and consciously

Our thoughts are a hybrid of information forged from our own experiences, traumas, successes, failures, etc., and massive input from our external world. All those media messages about “good” bodies and “normal” bodies: they’re in your thoughts. All the government-endorsed ideas of safe bodies and dangerous bodies: they’re in your thoughts. You have

Their lack of awareness about those identities generally means their body falls into a multiplicity of default identities that uphold the social hierarchy of bodies. The luxury of not having to think about one’s body always comes at another body’s expense.

Ignoring difference does not change society; nor does it change the experiences non-normative bodies must navigate to survive. Rendering difference invisible validates the notion that there are parts of us that should be ignored, hidden, or minimized, leaving in place the unspoken idea that difference is the problem and not our approach to dealing