I write this through tears of love, anger, and empowerment.

I look at this picture and see so much. How I almost went on a faulty helicopter this day, and how my sisters and I drove up to this beach last-minute and had one of the best days ever laying around and taking walks in the Hawaiian sun. Going in the warm water, catching the sunset then to one of the best meals I’ve ever had in my life. Looking up the unobstructed stars while we happily waited outside the busy restaurant. To innocently putting this photo on my dating profile when I got back, because its one of my favorite photos of myself. Feeling happy, carefree, confident, and how I passed my sister my phone to capture that moment, that feeling. And I’m so happy I have the photos from this moment - because one does not have enough proof sometimes that you can feel that way. With two dogs running in big circles around us chasing each other having the best day of their lives. Looking around at all the other people on the beach, collectively feeling so peaceful. I remember the moment so well. I know it’s to be expected for men to drool over any woman in a bathing suit, which is really embarrassing (for u) and not only is that so boring, it means nothing to me. This specific photo has helped vet creeps away from me for 3 years now. Taking that moment that felt so pure and saying something vulgar to me like “I went to your instagram after seeing that to see if you had an ass or just those hips.” Real words spoken to me by a man with a girlfriend who at first presented himself as someone that wanted to work with me in music. And its not just the initial comments, but the attempts of gaslighting that typically come after. These were obviously the last words I let him speak to me, he’s dead now (just kidding). I have had my own words of seeking casual dating experiences used as justification of why they thought it was okay to speak to me how they did. Like, “you’re looking for casual dating or sexual experiences and I can’t objectify you?” Responses that imply, what right do I have to ask this person to see me as something other than a bag of meat in a skin suit that is filled out in the places you were told to like while my body is “trending.” I think about the long journey with my body no one knows about. I grew up being bullied for what I looked like, for the weight my little baby body carried, made to feel hyperaware by the time I was in the second or third grade, told to always be sucking in my stomach by my own mother when I was only 6 or 7, and laughed at at school after losing weight as a depressed 12 year old whose clothes didn’t fit right after, to being complimented for my weight loss by the school nurse and other adults around me as that same 12 year old who no one was really seeing or listening to when I desperately needed an advocate who knew what was going on in my head. As a high schooler I remember running around town with my friends in the summer, jumping in to my friend’s backseat looking down at my thighs in shorts squished on the seat, thinking I was taking up too much space being who I was and if I had my choice I would shrink until I disappeared. To grow up from that little girl who was always made to feel “fat,” like that was the worst and most undesirable thing I could be, and that I was it, to that teenage girl surrounded by friends ingesting the same toxic diet culture and receiving thousands of unsolicited comments on my body, to have grown into a woman’s body where now my once undesirable “fat” is now called “curves” and they’re not degraded they’re now fetishized, is a fucking TRIP to say the least. Now I don’t have to worry about having “fat” slung at me like a fist, but to vigilantly watch out for men that see women as prizes to be won and claimed for themselves. As an accessory to dinner. To impress other straight men. Those same men were definitely the ones hurling insults to girls like me in adolescence and I don’t feel safe with them. Whether you’re degrading me unknowingly by fetishizing my body or hurling insults at it, these three things are the same: you’re boring - so uninteresting, you’re insulting me, and you never had the eyes to see me for who I am. The happy carefree feeling captured in that photograph is so much more elusive and satisfying to me than male validation. IF I want anyone - I don’t want someone who likes what society tells them to like about me, I want someone that sees me. My body and I don’t need you, we need more of that happy feeling and more of the freedom that comes from inside. To be farther and farther from the teenager staring down at her thighs, wondering why I couldn’t lose weight like my friend that used to be my size, who was going through an equally meticulous and painful journey similar to mine in ways I was also unaware of. The tears have dried, and I’m going to keep loving and standing up for myself. I’m sorry to me for all the times I put myself in harms way when I didn’t realize who I was, and the subsequent damage that caused me. And blocking creeps to high heaven at the first sign of disrespect. Thank you to my legs, feet, arms, hands and torso for getting me here after all the bullshit. Thank you to my mind for realizing it was all bullshit. Thank you to my voice and throat for speaking for me instead of staying silent when someone tries to reduce who I am to the most inconsequential parts of me. I will forever defend my right to be nearly naked or fully naked and still not deserve objectification.

My body is mine.