Flow Portraits: Endometriosis, Body Image, + the Boudoir

I would love to be body positive about my own body, but the truth is I’m not. I find it much easier to point out how beautiful my friends are and scoff when they put themselves down.

I don’t *hate* parts of myself like I did as a teenager and a young adult. I’ve come to terms with the general shape of my body and how it looks as it has fluctuated through changes born of surgeries, race training, and new ways of eating.

But I don’t love it either. When I went to try on wedding dresses, the first thing I told the consultant was I wanted to be able to wear a normal bra to minimize my boobs but I also didn’t want something that made me look matronly (something us big-boobers deal with often). When looking back at photos from the NYC Marathon, I’m so grateful that my strong legs got me through the training and 26.2 miles, but how big my thighs looked didn’t escape my hypercritical eye.

In a nutshell, my feelings about my body are complex. Sometimes they’re positive and sometimes they’re negative. But as feminist as I strive to be and as much as I want to love my body, I can’t say my feelings about it ever even approach the radical self-love movement pervading Instagram. And as a feminist I feel guilty about this, a hypocrite when I try to pump up the self-esteem of others.