stophatingyourbody: TW: Talk of...

TW: Talk of Abuse/Non-consent/ED

In my senior year of high school, I became very ill with Ovarian Cancer and began fainting all the time. I had no control over when I collapsed. My parents became impatient with my illness at the same time that I was becoming dependant on them and other people around me. I thought I owed my boyfriend tolerance for helping me when he did but, in retrospect, I was just sitting by while all of my relationships became extremely abusive.

At the same time, I was molested in a mall and, two years later, I still felt tainted. I threw out my clothes but I couldn’t throw out myself. I was blamed by my school counselor and by my conservative immigrant parents. And I believed them.

I believed that it was my fault that I was touched. My fault that I was sick. And I saw myself as poison, wanted nothing more than to be able-bodied and unscathed, to get a second chance in different skin.

Until, finally, I saw through my mother’s projected anorexia, my queerness, my wheelchair, my history of abuse, and a saw a body. Just a body. A body with beautiful little white and purple stretch marks like lightning bolts on my thighs that jiggle merrily when I walk. It’s got curvy arthritic fingers and oil under gray eyes. My hair falls out in patches now from treatment but it grows back thicker and even stronger. And for every unwanted touch I got, I got a thousand more from a womyn I love. I am beautiful and I am in exactly the right body.

A body can’t be ugly. It’s a body! We all have em. How can one be wrong?

(via thelamedame)