Permission

We are allowed to love ourselves.

We are allowed to show up. We are allowed to take the compliment even when we fall short of our own standards.

We are allowed to determine the standards.

We are allowed to talk about how hard it is to love ourselves. We are allowed to enjoy our own simple company. We are allowed to release our grip. To revel in the small days. To have just one or two good friends.

We are allowed to think of our family, whatever its shape, as worthy of a crest.

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Self, Beloved

The friend says the pressure to love her body is too much.  “Isn’t it enough to not hate it?”  This is what we are supposed to do as women. It’s yet another thing to add to the list.  Love ourselves.  Love our bodies exactly as they are.

That word, love.  It covered my notebooks in junior high, markers and hearts.  As a teenager, those four letters grew far too big for crushes.  They became like currents sweeping the earth in a gusting flourish, ecstasy and aspiration with a peace sign woven into the O.

The tropospheric ribbon of script I tattooed across my days was a declaration of protest.  It was a way to give voice, unformed as it was, to an infant movement.  A confederacy of truth was gathering, and it was growing skeptical, maybe downright mutinous, of the dogma that ordered my inner life.