Here’s a fun one.

Growing up in the harrowing confines of Catholic school was scarring for reasons that I will never be done exploring. But recently, one in particular has been dawning on me.

Sexuality. Bodies. Nudity. All of the things that art is perpetually enamored by.

Meaning, by interning at an art magazine, I spend a lot of time looking at and reviewing nudes images. Which, let me just tell you, is a very fun thing to do in a crowded coffee shop or in the front row of a classroom, with all eyes gravitating towards your laptop for reasons that you swear are professional.

But beyond that, it’s been a bit of a body revolution, one that I didn’t know I needed.

BODIES

I grew up in Southern California. Meaning, while I might have had to serve my time in Catholic school through the eighth grade, from there I went on to go to high school in a beach community. People barely wore shoes, let alone clothes. During track season, we would sprint to the beach and jump in the ocean. My friends and I ran around barefoot and nearly topless whenever we could, eating açai and drinking iced coffees. I never had an issue with bodies or nudity or liberated sexuality. No one did.

Yet, those early years of learning shame can never be fully erased. I still think about how I cried at my middle school dance because the principal came over to me, on the middle of the floor, and pulled my off the shoulder sleeves up onto my shoulders in front of everyone. Or how one of the secretaries made me lift my sweater over my waistband to prove that I was not rolling my skirt up. Might be time to let the hem out sweetheart. It’s not my fault I was growing a dozen inches over the course of those years.

Or even about the disgrace that was the sexual education that they gave reluctantly gave to us. All I remember is sitting in a stuffy classroom with a bunch of other awkward twelve year olds, listening to some woman with a gazillion children tell us that sex was a special gift, reserved for purposes of procreation. Nothing else.

What.

It wasn’t until my junior year in high school that a teacher actually taught us about safe sex and contraceptives and consent and all of the things that teenagers actually need to know in a world that likes to pretend that they are not fully human. I never understood that.

THE ART THAT IS YOU

Anyway, the point is, the more nude art that I study, the more I fall in love with the intention behind it. The intention being, to admire and accept the human form, not conceal or correct it. The more photos you see of all different kinds of bodies, posed in ways that are not forced or edited, but natural and real, the more that you begin to realize, as least as a twenty-something who grew up in the early 2000s, how incredibly flawed your perception of flesh has been for most of your life.

More and more, I am seeing ads that portray bodies in more natural ways. Stomach rolls, cellulite, curves. Real flesh with real imperfections that map out the story of that human. And they look so beautiful. They look like life itself, not a plastic portrayal of it. It’s only upon seeing those ads, or nudes in an art gallery, that you realize how safe and loving they feel. They invite you to see the beauty in your own body.

Suddenly, you too feel that you are allowed to exist imperfectly.

I wonder all of the time how differently my adolescence might have looked if I had grown up in an era that dished out the kind of body acceptance that we are just barely beginning to come into now. If I had been taught that my body was a miracle, not a secret, like religion told me, or a endless construction site like the media insisted, insisted, insisted.

There is something so special about just loving your body for keeping you alive. You don’t need to love everything about it, but you do need to love that. It works all day and all night just to function. It’s a collection of atoms coalesced from stardust as old as time itself for the mere existence that is you. It bends and rolls and shapes and shifts and allows you to do everything that you love. It’s gorgeous.

It is so gorgeous.

HEALING

To understand that takes healing. Healing that, as I read somewhere, is the relinquishment of fear.

To heal from heartbreak, you have to transcend the crippling terror of it’s reoccurrence. To heal from body shame, you have to let go of the fear that you will be monstrous if you don’t look a certain way.

If I could tell you one thing that Catholic school taught me, more than anything else, it would be fear. Fear that you are not doing things right. Fear that you are not right. Fear that that extra inch of skin showing is what’s going to send you not just to the principal’s office, but straight to hell. I’m laughing but I shouldn’t be.

I let go of those fears a long time ago, but the shame surrounding bodies has stuck in the corner of my mind like a cobweb. I see now that it’s disintegrating, falling in sheets to the floor. With each nude exhibition that I get to write an article about, with each stunning series of authentic bodily existence recorded, I find myself extending more gentle grace to my own body. To my own existence.

A revolution.

Love, m.

For more food for thought on having a body, check out:

• What’s Beauty Anyway?
• Your Body is not a Battleground

Click here to support a small artist with big dreams (me)

GET ON THE LIST

Subscribe to give your inbox something to look forward to.