Sonya Renee Taylor

It was not until I was in my thirties that it occurred to me that perhaps I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fighting myself. Perhaps the victory that lay at the end of the long road of self-denial and repression was not a reward that I actually wanted. Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself into a new me didn’t exist. Perhaps I was going to spend my entire life fighting my own existence and then just . . . die.
I would like to say that this revelation led me to immediately toss a lifetime of self-loathing aside and fully embrace proud ownership of my self, but there are no epiphanies that outweigh a lifetime of conditioning. Slowly, and often painfully, I started to risk moments of authenticity. I started to share my opinion without apology. I started laughing loudly without embarrassment. I started creating and growing into myself. And slowly I started to believe that perhaps I did have the right to take up space. Perhaps I had not only the right but the obligation to love myself as I was.

I was transported to all the times I had given away my own body in penance. A reel of memories scrolled through my mind of all the ways I told the world I was sorry for having this wrong, bad body. It was from this deep cave of mutual vulnerability that the words spilled from me: “Natasha, your body is not an apology. It is not something you give to someone to say, ‘Sorry for my disability.’” She began to weep, and for a few minutes I just held my maybe-pregnant friend as she contemplated the fullness of what those words meant for her life and her body.

Marianne Williamson offers us a perspective of natural intelligence as a source of innate perfect design, and yet her own bias and learned body shame contradict its efficacy.