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E.L. Zeitgeist's avatar

Normally I’d never admit this on the net, but here goes because of your generous vulnerability. A couple years ago, I purchased a bra created and marketed to “folks like me” and it kinda changed my life. A part of my body that I grew up loathing suddenly became a celebration, something beautiful. I looked in the mirror for the first time, like, whoa. I’m kinda cute! The irony is that I threw out all the bras from a widely recognized chain that’s supposed to make you feel like a sexual goddess, but all that pomp and pump just made me feel fake. Now I feel real, like I’m finally cherishing the self I was born with after almost three decades of shaming her. It’s wild how easily we turn on our bodies, but it’s awesomely radical to *choose* instead to embrace these precious, intricate, scientifically near-impossible masterpieces.

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Harmony Becker's avatar

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and thinking about how so many of the world’s problems (and my own personal problems) spring from the fact that we forget that we are also animals, not just walking brains. I grew up with the idea of mind over body, mind dominating and conquering and torturing body in the name of discipline, and now I’m trying to transition to something closer to what Mary Oliver describes in one of my favorite poems:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

Love what it loves. “

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