Our bodies sustain us. They carry around our hearts and minds and hopes and dreams. They can communicate the most subtle (yet complex) feelings with the blink of an eye and a smile. They rejuvenate themselves when we slumber. They produce enough energy at times, it seems, to light up an entire city or at least get us through a cross-fit class. They come in all kinds of amazing colors and shapes and sizes. Some of them are weathered with creases and lines and folds from smiling and laughing and crying and simply existing (and surviving) for generations. Some of them are brand new and haven’t even been taken for a real test drive yet. They process, assimilate, distribute, cleanse, move, and eliminate all kinds of things through our corporeality. The internal systems at play within us know what to do and thankfully do it without us even having to worry about it. (We have a hard enough time breathing deeply, can you imagine if we had to flush our own kidneys of toxins everyday?)
Our bodies do all these miraculous things ”“ from the physical to biological to the physiological and spiritual ”“ and yet we heap so much scorn on them. We despise them or resent them or blame them or mistreat them or punish them.
We examine them and re-examine them. With a microscopic lens.
We compare them and despair them.
We build an image of what we think beauty or desirability or sensuality looks like and practically kill ourselves to achieve it.
If only we looked like the people on that billboard we would be lovable. Or successful. Or seen.
But the target is always moving because we ”“ in these bodies ”“ are also always changing.
As we get older, we start working overtime to not face the inevitable, which can be a harbinger of our own mortality. Our fragility. Our humanness.
Let’s break it down again and then try to shift the paradigm to support this new understanding of life.
We’re interested in you. Not the idea of what you think you should be. Not the way you want you to be perceived. Simply you. That’s it. Your stuff. Your greatness. Your failings. Your shit. Your shine.
So if it’s you we are interested in, then here’s the light bulb.
The you who you are is also the body that contains you. This outer luggage that’s wheeling around something much more interesting than the package ”“ is, simultaneously, a part of your unique self.
Stop trying to make it look like everyone else. Honor that all of humanity is different.
And all we’re doing is telling human stories. So why can’t the story you tell be in a package that looks like you?
The thing that we’re searching for is not to become pod-people who all look the same. The thing that we’re really yearning for deeply is to know that we’re okay. As we are. In the cracked shells we inhabit. (Even if the outer shell appears perfectly polished, at closer inspection you’ll see that all shells have cracks.)
The next time you look in the mirror at your (naked) self. Instead of cringing at the sight in front of you, or verbally assaulting yourself, could you try something else?
Thank that crease in your tummy that’s been earned by all the sleepless nights you stayed up to help your best friend through her heartache. That gray hair? Well, for sure it’s there because you survived high school and the bullying that came during lunch period. That bicep? From the countless hours spent working out at the gym. (Still not as big as that Instagram model’s? It’s okay.) The lines on your forehead? For the times you bawled your eyes out but also laughed and screamed at a rock concert. Instead of noticing the creases around your eyes, just look at the eyes themselves. Shining brightly by being the work-in-progress you and I and he and she and everyone here on this planet will always be.
Now if that’s not enough reason to celebrate all of you, I don’t know what is.
Actors in the Video: Tamara Perry and Frances Roper