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Dear women,
There is something painful about looking at yourself through the eyes of a world that has spent years teaching you what you should look like, and, somewhere along the way, beauty became a list of requirements you had to meet before you could feel comfortable in your own skin. The world says your body has to be small enough, your skin has to be clear enough, your waist has to be shaped a certain way, your breasts have to sit in a particular position, and your face has to carry features that fit whatever standard is being celebrated at the time. You were taught to look at yourself and immediately search for what needed to be fixed. I need you to pause there for a moment and consider how unfair that is, because you were given a body and then you were taught to apologise for having one. Wow, it must be one hell of a job to be a woman.
You have spent years feeling uncomfortable about your weight; maybe you look at photographs, and your first thought is about your stomach, your thighs, your arms or the number that appears on a scale. I think you have also convinced yourself that love will feel different when your body becomes smaller, when your clothes fit differently or when you finally reach the version of yourself you have been trying to become, but your body was never supposed to be a project that had to be completed before you could be worthy of tenderness. There is nothing morally wrong with taking up space; there is nothing shameful about having a soft stomach, wide hips, thick thighs, narrow hips, broad shoulders or a body that does not resemble the bodies you constantly see on your TV screen. I need you to know that your body is not an apology, and that means you do not have to become smaller to become deserving.
Is it your skin that has made you question yourself? Perhaps you have looked at lighter women and wondered whether the world would treat you differently if your complexion were different, or someone made a careless comment when you were younger and you carried those words much further into adulthood than they ever deserved to travel. Colourism has a way of making a woman look at the skin she was born with as though it is something she needs to negotiate with, but your skin was never an inconvenience. It does not need to be lighter to be delicate, darker to be powerful, clearer to be worthy or closer to somebody else's complexion to be beautiful. Nothing is missing from you because you do not resemble another woman. Your skin is yours, and you deserve to live inside it without constantly wishing it belonged to somebody else.
Is it your face? Maybe you have spent too much time studying the mirror and too little time allowing yourself to simply exist in front of it. Perhaps you dislike your nose, your lips, your forehead, your cheeks, your jaw, your teeth or the shape of your eyes. Beautiful queen, you have learned to angle your face in photographs because you have decided that one side of you is more acceptable than the other, but there is something cruel about believing that your face must be symmetrical, polished and perfectly proportioned before it can be loved. Human faces were never meant to look manufactured. They carry character, history, expression and individuality. The face you have criticised for years is the same face that lights up when you laugh, softens when you are happy and changes completely when you look at someone you love.
Please be gentler with it.
And those silver stripes on your body? They deserve gentleness too because stretch marks have been treated as though they are evidence of something going wrong, as though the skin became less worthy because it stretched while your body changed.
But…bodies change, right?
They grow, they shrink, they carry weight, they lose weight, they experience pregnancy, hormones, age and all the ordinary transformations that come with being alive. You do not have to hide every mark before you can wear something that reveals your skin. You do not have to edit yourself out of photographs. You do not have to touch your stomach and immediately think about what you wish were different. Those marks do not make your body unfinished. They simply remind you that your body has never been a statue. It has always been alive, always.
Do you worry about your breasts? You probably think they are bigger than you want them to be, smaller than you want them to be, uneven, heavy, soft, firm, widely spaced, close together, lower than they used to be or simply different from what you have been told they should look like. You may have compared yourself to photographs you saw in a Vogue or Fashionova magazine and wondered why your body does not resemble what you see, but there is no single correct way for a woman's body to exist. Bodies are not manufactured according to one design; therefore, you should not apologise for the way yours sits beneath your clothes. You do not have to measure your femininity against another woman's proportions.
Your breasts do not determine your worth, desirability, dignity or your capacity to be loved. They are simply part of the body that carries you through this life.
Maybe you have insecurities that you have never spoken about because they feel too small to explain, yet they have occupied tremendous spaces inside your mind. I know that you worry about the darkness around your knees or elbows, the texture of your skin, the shape of your legs, the size of your feet, the appearance of your hands, the hair on your body, the shape of your stomach or the way your body looks when you sit down. I think these are parts of yourself you only tolerate when nobody else is looking. I want you to know that you are allowed to stop examining yourself like a problem that needs to be solved. You are allowed to have features that do not fit a trend, and you are allowed to look like yourself. There is freedom in finally understanding that not everything about you needs to be corrected but embraced.
I also want to apologise.
If I have ever said something about a woman's body that made her feel smaller, I am sorry.
If I have ever made a joke about weight, skin, facial features, stretch marks, breasts or any other part of a woman's body and left someone questioning herself afterwards, I am sorry.
If I have ever contributed to that voice in a woman's head that tells her she is not attractive enough, feminine enough or desirable enough, I am sorry for being part of the noise.
Sometimes words leave our mouths as jokes and enter another person's heart as evidence against themselves. I cannot undo every careless thing I may have said, but I can acknowledge that words matter. Women deserve to be spoken to with the same tenderness that we expect them to give to everyone else, especially men.
There is also something I want you to understand about being loved. Love does not mean that another person will convince you that every insecurity you have is beautiful before you are allowed to feel secure. Sometimes love is much quieter than that. It is someone looking at you without searching for imperfections. It is being held without wondering whether your stomach looks different from the way you wanted it to. It is being kissed without thinking about whether your skin is clear enough. It is being photographed without immediately asking for the picture to be deleted. It is sitting beside someone and realising that you have finally stopped monitoring yourself, and that is real love.
Real intimacy gives you room to exist without constantly performing beauty.
You have probably been told that confidence comes from believing you are beautiful. I think it can be deeper than that; confidence can also come from no longer believing that your beauty has to be proven every morning when you look in the mirror. There will be days when you feel beautiful and days when you do not. There will be mornings when your skin behaves differently, when your hair refuses to cooperate, when your body feels heavier, when you look tired and when you do not recognise the woman looking back at you. None of those days makes you less worthy, or less deserving of love because you woke up feeling ordinary. Your worth cannot be permitted to rise and fall according to your reflection.
And please do not confuse being desired with being worthy. You deserve to be loved even when nobody is complimenting you. You deserve tenderness even when you are not dressed beautifully. You deserve respect when you are older, when your body changes, when pregnancy changes you, when age leaves its fingerprints on your face and when you no longer resemble the version of yourself that once received the most attention. There is a kind of love that does not depend on novelty. It stays curious about you after the first impression has disappeared. It notices your humour, your fears, your intelligence, your kindness, your stubbornness, your softness and the strange little things that make you who you are. That is the kind of love that sees beyond appearance without pretending appearance does not matter.
I hope you become gentler with the woman in your mirror. Not because every insecurity must suddenly disappear, but because she has spent enough years fighting herself. I hope you stop pulling at your clothes to hide parts of your body that you were taught to dislike. I hope you take photographs without immediately looking for what is wrong. I hope you wear the clothes you love instead of waiting for the body you think you need to deserve them. I hope you stop postponing joy until you lose weight, clear your skin, change your hair, fix your teeth or become somebody you have not yet met. Your life is happening now, inside the body you have now. Please do not spend all of it waiting to become acceptable to yourself.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to change something about yourself. You are allowed to lose weight if you want to, exercise because it makes you feel good, change your hairstyle, wear makeup, take care of your skin or dress differently. Self-improvement is not the enemy; the danger begins when improvement becomes punishment and when every change is motivated by the belief that the woman you are today is not enough. Change should come from care, not contempt. Take care of yourself because you love the woman you are, not because you hate the woman you see in the mirror. There is a profound difference between saying, “I want to take better care of myself,” and saying, “I need to become someone else before I can love myself.”
So when that familiar voice returns and tells you that you are too big, too dark, too small, too flat, too heavy, too hairy, too soft, too ordinary, too different or somehow not enough, I hope you learn to question where that voice came from. Not every thought you have about yourself is the truth. Some of those thoughts were planted there by careless people, beauty standards, photographs, advertisements, comparisons, rejection and years of being told what a woman is supposed to look like. You do not have to keep every opinion that was handed to you. Some beliefs deserve to be put down. Some mirrors deserve to be looked into differently.
And if nobody has told you lately, let me tell you softly. Tseba gore wa ratwa, not because your waist is a certain size, because your skin has a certain tone, because your face fits a particular definition of beauty, because your breasts look a certain way or because your body has never changed. You are loved because there is a human being inside that body who feels, dreams, worries, laughs, gives, hopes and carries more than most people will ever know. You are more than the parts of yourself you have learned to criticise. There is so much more to you than what a mirror can reveal.
Maybe one day you will look at yourself and realise that you spent years asking whether you were beautiful when the better question was whether you had been taught to see yourself with enough tenderness. By that time you will understand that your body never betrayed you. It carried you through every heartbreak, every anxious night, every ordinary morning, every moment you thought you would not survive and every beautiful moment you almost forgot to appreciate. It has been with you through all of it.
You are allowed to soften, put down the comparison, stop competing with women who were never meant to be your measurement, grow older without fearing every change, have softness where the world demands sharpness, be imperfect and still feel beautiful, be ordinary on some days and extraordinary on others, and when you finally understand that, I hope you realise something that should have been told to you much earlier. You never needed permission to take up space or perfection to deserve tenderness, let alone becoming someone else to be worthy of love.
Tseba gore wa ratwa.
With love,
TWT
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