The Trio & Me

21. Go skinny dipping

For most of my life, I have hated my body.

I’ve picked it apart in mirrors. I’ve wished parts of it were smaller, smoother, different. I’ve battled weight gain, struggled with weight loss, and spent far too many years believing my body needed to look a certain way before it deserved to be loved.

But the relationship I have with my body goes much deeper than what I see in the mirror.

This body has been through trauma. It has experienced sexual abuse and physical abuse. There have been times when my body hasn’t felt like it belonged entirely to me, and times when I have blamed it for things that were never about how it looked, and times it was used for others enjoyment. I haven’t always cared for it the way it deserved to be cared for. Sometimes I have punished it, criticised it, hidden it and wished it could simply be different.

But lately, I’ve been trying to change the way I see it. Because this body has also done some pretty incredible things.

This body has grown and carried babies. It has held the people I love tightly in its arms. It has comforted children, wiped tears, worked ridiculously long days and kept going when I thought I had nothing left. It has danced. It has laughed until it hurt. It has loved deeply. It has carried me through some of the hardest moments of my life and somehow continued moving forward.

It might have scars, softness, stretch marks and imperfections, but every part of it tells a story. And maybe loving my body isn’t about finally getting it to look the way I once thought it should.

Maybe it’s about finally appreciating everything it has already done.

So, somewhere on my 40 Things Before 40 list, I wrote:

Go skinny dipping.

It sounded cheeky and adventurous when I wrote it. Something slightly outside my comfort zone. Something that would make a good story one day.

And wow… it was certainly an experience in itself.

But standing there, completely exposed, there was something unexpectedly freeing about it too.

No hiding behind clothes. No carefully chosen angles. No sucking my stomach in. No worrying about whether something was flattering. Just me – exactly as I am.

And for once, instead of immediately finding something about my body to criticise, I made a different choice.

I chose to let it exist. I chose to appreciate it. I chose to be grateful for it.

And somewhere between taking my clothes off and taking that plunge, something shifted.

It wasn’t suddenly believing my body was perfect. It wasn’t magically undoing decades of insecurity or pretending that I will never have another day where I look in the mirror and struggle with what I see.

It was simply deciding that I don’t want to spend the next forty years at war with the body that carried me through the first forty.

I want to look after her now. I want to move because it feels good. Nourish myself because I deserve care. Wear the clothes I love. Swim without worrying about how I look getting out of the water. Take the photograph.

And apparently… occasionally swim completely naked. Because this body is mine.

After everything it has survived, everything it has created, everything it has carried and everyone it has loved – I think it’s about time I started loving it too.

Turns out I took off a little more than my clothes that day. I left behind a little piece of the shame, too.

I’ve also shifted the music on my social media for the next 20 items on my 40 list – to be all of my favourite songs. Starting with my favourite band – the Cranberries, I love all of their songs (they may feature again in the next 20 items 😅)

(Tried to post a photo that was ok to send into the world 😅)

🤍 K