They kept echoing off the walls of all my hidden hurts.

Perhaps all the love and acceptance that had been promised me if I could just hate myself

Speak up when you see your friends lauding weight loss as achievement and let them know how “before and after” pictures present “before” bodies as wrong and “after” bodies as better.

releasing our outdated notions of fair and working toward creating systems and structures that are just.

As a Black girl, I quickly learned from others that there were many things about myself that needed to shrink. Not just my body—my laugh, my ambitions, my imagination, my will, and eventually my anger—everything I was would need to be less.

Still we scoff at the rolling out of so many letters, never questioning who we have been erasing and shrinking into a dry binary default.

We practice self-acceptance when we have grown tired of self-hatred but can’t conceive of anything beyond a paltry tolerance of ourselves.

Radical self-love is not a destination you are trying to get to; it is who you already are, and it is already working tirelessly to guide your life.

Genuine acceptance invites reality without resistance.