How can I feel better about my body?

It takes a lot to feel good about your body in society today.

For starters, stop reading the mainstream glossy magazines, whose primary function in the world is to make you feel bad about yourself so that you buy the stuff their advertisers paid them to advertise.

Similarly, only watch music videos and awards shows with a highly critical eye, recognizing the extent to which the images are designed to destroy women’s power, by making us small, fragile, incurious, anti-intellectual sexual objects or cold, sexless, neurotic brain-boxes or shrews.

Value your sexuality as it is, not as someone tells you it “should” be. Women vary from each other tremendously, so hearing about other women’s experiences will only tell you how varied we are, not what “normal” is. There is no normal. There is only “healthy,” and healthy just means pain- and infection-free plus content.

Practice living inside your body. Your body is the one and only thing you’re guaranteed to have your whole life. It’s your home for the duration of your stay on Earth. Living inside your body is merely the practice of living inside yourself. Which is good for you, I promise.

And finally, listen to your instincts. Tuning out pop culture and living inside your body will make this a lot easier because you’re quieting the extraneous noise and attending to your own inner life. The quiet voice inside you, the voice under the fear and panic, under the learned self-doubt and the need to be right, under the need to be good, the need to be in control, under all those defenses, you’ll find your core voice, speaking truth to you, quietly, steadily, if only you listen.