A field guide to loving myself

*I imagine this to be read aloud*
*This is a tribute to Ashe Vernon's "A field guide to loving yourself". Go here for the original.

So, I’m five foot and three inches in my hiking boots with my hair puffed up. It’s sometimes hard to not feel looked down on by everyone I meet. When I tilt my chin just to look most people in the eye, I have to remind myself that the world isn’t talking down to me. I’m talking up to it. The trick, I’ve learned, is not to think of myself as short, but to think of the rest of the world as tall. Ungainly even. Limbs out of proportion. I am the standard and most of them are an unfortunate deviation. That’s right, I’m looking at all the presidents of the United States, this far.

I’ve learned to find my poise in being closer to the ground. I’m harder to knock over with my lower center of gravity. I’d make an excellent wrestler. Not that I’d ever wrestle competitively, but theoretically I’d be good at it if I did. I bang my head on fewer cabinets because of my height. I have to duck through fewer doorways. The number of trees I’ve walked into in my lifetime is well below average. Yes, I might have to sometime stand on a chair or climb onto the counter to reach the top shelf, but you know what else? I’m great at hide and seek. Though rarely do I make myself willingly invisible.

Feeling at home in my body has been a hard lesson to learn. I had to school myself in how to take up space. I used to practice sprawling on the couch, draping my legs over the arm of a chair again and again until it felt natural. I learned to keep my hands at my side, to look everyone in the eye, straight on. I steeled myself with studied confidence, straightened my spine with affected ease. Every morning I ran until I fit into my own legs. Until I didn’t see the shape of my body but the power of what it could do. I do not run to look like anyone but me. I run because it makes me forget how I look. I run because knowing that I can count on my own legs feels like an act of a rebellion, and I am a one woman army, fighting for the rights to my own skin.

The glorious thing about the human brain is that you practice anything for long enough and it becomes habit. It’s flexible and subjective and most importantly, it can change. So for me, I practiced love until it stopped feeling farce and became truth.

Now, when I stand next to my roommate of two years, she looks at me in surprise, “I never noticed you were shorter than me,” she says. And those words feel like victory. Now, I can lift a crate of squash over my head and even though I’m short, that’s as high as anyone I know can lift a full crate of squash. Now I talk loud enough to fill a room and my laugh sprawls on furniture for me and I have it on good authority that my anger can bring the mighty and the tall to their knees.