Dear Savannah,
I've told you already how people will paint your body with angry hands and cruel colors. I've said that they will tear down your body, bruising you with their harmful remarks, prodding you with every passive aggression.
And I've told you that you will eventually learn to hate your body.
Because that's the easiest explanation. When you're young, you'll have no idea what to think of the curves of your hips, or the soft creases along your torso. You're made up of gentle bends and delicate careening lines. You'll find very few sharp edges, and much fewer points. Everything about you will be rounded off and sanded down.
Your breasts will fill in to the point where you'll feel outlandish for wearing them out in public and wish you could fold them away. Your thighs will rub snugly against each other as you walk, and your hips will sway along to the rhythm.
And all of this will feel so painfully awkward while you're in high school.
Because the pretty girls in high school are slender and lean, narrow chests and tight abdomens, smooth hair.
"Effortless," you'll think to yourself.
Your beautiful friends will tell you how pretty you look some days. They'll point out how nice your butt looks in certain pants. They'll tell you how envious they are of your chest.
None of it will feel quite right. You'll wonder to yourself whether their comments are sincere or if they're being kind to you because they like you. You'll thank them and make a point to hide those features better next time you go out.
And then, little creature, you'll meet a girl with unruly hair and the curves of Aphrodite herself. She'll be something straight out of a Botticelli paint, or a figure that Michelangelo mercifully freed from marble. You'll see her and you'll see those familiar lines, curves and gentle bends, those curls, those soft, bohemian corners; you'll see this girl like your reflection on the surface of a lake.
You'll see her, and she'll be the most lovely thing in the room. When previously you had felt so inexplicably wrong against your backdrop of slender, tight-bodied friends, you'll see her and realize how misguided you were to see yourself as a anything but marvellous.
This will start a quiet revolution inside you. Cautiously, as if you were approaching a sleeping feral beast, you'll admire yourself in the mirrors of your house, taking inventory of those once infernal curves. It'll be a slow progression. The ugly voices in your head from high school will jabber on, but you'll begin to tune them out.
Once you cross that fine threshold into adulthood, your body will start to feel more appropriate and desirable.
Like, hot damn.
I know this is hard to imagine, especially after battling those harmful voices in your head for so long, but there will come a time when you will long to retain the shape of your body.
I'm not saying you won't have rough days. Those are inevitable.
But, little one, you will love the body you have. It's a good body. It's a body that is pleasing to the eye, perhaps even to the touch. There are men who will look at you as if you are a divinity. There are women who will long to have a body as "effortless" as yours.
You've got a heart for strength and for pumping blood through your system. You've got a stomach for poetry and for nourishment. You've got legs to support yourself and to stand up for the downtrodden. You've got hands to hold and to heal.
Sweet little thing, you are valuable and your body is good.
Love,
Yourself
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