My body is thick. I have solid wrists and shapely calves. My thighs touch when I stand and rub when I walk and work holes through all my pants. My belly is sometimes bigger and sometimes smaller but never completely disappears. I’ve gone moderately up and down in weight over my adult life, but it doesn’t really bother me very much. I was never the fat kid, but I was always almost the fat kid, and certainly never the skinny one. I’ve been a fat-ish girl with a fantastic ass since I hit double digits.

I have perfect breasts. They aren’t the same as they were when I was 17, and when I entered my mid-twenties, and I realized I had woman-breasts and not girl-breasts any more, I mourned a bit. I was confused and disappointed by the way my flesh sloped down towards my nipples, mostly because things had changed without me realizing, and now they weren’t the same as they used to be. But then I stopped mourning my girl tits, and embraced my woman tits, because I remembered that they were still perfect. I’ve seen some breasts I liked as much as mine, but none I’ve liked better.

My face is stereotypically pretty. I have big blue eyes, with pupils that usually seem abnormally large. Coupled with my public personality people often think I’m high, though I’m never high. I have rosy cheeks, and teeth which every dentist and hygienist have told me are beautiful. However they aren’t perfect, and they don’t reach each other in front; when I bite down only my molars are touching. I’ve never had a cavity. My lips are full and pink. I have a big tongue.

I produce plenty of keratin. I have nails that grow fast and strong and straight, though a couple start to curl at the corner when they get long enough. The hair on my head grows quickly, and I have lots of it. The same friend has been cutting my hair for 7 years, and I give her carte blanche to completely change my hair every 3-5 months. I usually have at least one “natural” colour and at least one “unnatural” colour at any given time.

There are other places on my body which enthusiastically grow hair, though I don’t always share that same enthusiasm. I removed most or all of my pubic hair for a while, but then decided I liked having a little bush up front. The strip down the very middle, which I kept most of the time, is curlier than the rest of my bush. I wish I hadn’t taken the hair off the rest of my mons for so long, because I feel like then maybe it would have stayed curlier. Now it gets straight and silky pretty fast. One of my favourite things about my body is the way my pubic hair looks and feels just after a bath or a shower. So curly and fluffy and bouncy and soft. I usually look at and pet it a little if I have time.

I grow or cut the hair on my legs and in my armpits depending on the season and the company I’m keeping and the clothes I’m wearing and the shows I’m performing and my whims. I didn’t know that there was anything “wrong’ or “bad” about having hair grow on your body until I was going on a rope swing when I was about 11, and another girl loudly commented that I had armpit hair, and that it was disgusting. I honestly didn’t even realize that I had started to grow some hair there at the time, but I felt confused and ashamed and I knew immediately I’d broken a rule that I hadn’t even been aware of until that moment.

In my later teens I started to occasionally get a longer or darker hair growing on my neck. I’d generally just pluck them out when they showed up, but over time it’s gotten to the point where if I just left my body to it’s own devices I would have a little goatee-ish beard that would put many teenage boys to shame. It’s my least favourite part of my whole body.

My size/weight/shape aren’t so much of an issue to me as they used to be, and my pit/leg/pubic hair are something I (mostly) feel comfortable making my own decisions about, but the hair on my chinny chin chin is a source of great insecurity for me. I generally wax it off, but there’s always some hair in some stage of regrowth at any one time, and the waxing sometimes irritates my skin, and leads to tons of blemishes, which I’d always been lucky to never really have to deal with before.

I worry about what potential lovers will think, and what people on the street might think, and what my friends think, and I don’t even know what I personally think. I sometimes tell myself that no one can see, or that no one notices, but I know it’s a lie.

A couple months ago a friend said she was inspired by how comfortable I was with my occasional chin/neck hairs, and that she found it inspiring. And I thought, That’s not how it feels inside, but at the same time it made me think that even if everyone is seeing/noticing, maybe it’s not occurring to them as a negative.

Sometimes changing how I view my body includes realizing that the negative reaction I might feel internally might not be universally shared, which then helps me rethink my appraisal of myself. For example, I always thought my vulva was pretty standard. Or rather, I didn’t even think about that. Until I got to my mid/late-teens and started seeing and hearing about other vulvas, until I heard the vast variety of slang, and which expressions were said with delight and which with disgust, I didn’t realise that my larger inner labia/smaller outer labia were “not ideal.” Or even “gross.” I internalized some of that dislike, but I also had very positive early sexual experiences which helped me let that go, and love and appreciate my vulva as uniquely mine, and not particularly better or worse than any other. Since that time I’ve seen a much wider variety of vulvas, and I no longer feel at all “odd” or “wrong.”

I think an important step in (re)normalizing my body, undoing the harmful lessons about that I and most people absorb, has been the process of thoroughly exploring my body. Familiarizing myself with its curves and crevices, finding new delight by seeing myself through someone else’s eyes, touching and playing and thoroughly enjoying it. Even the things that I like least, the bits that I feel insecure or even ashamed of, are becoming more familiar and less threatening to me over time. My body is mine and mine alone, and I’m growing to love it more each day.