It was disorienting to learn that I didn’t just have a body—in the eyes of others, I WAS my body.
~Katie Sturino, Body Talk
For many women, it can feel as though our identity is what others see when they look at us. Who we are is decided by what we look like. Women (and those of other genders) have been working against this truth for quite some time. Pick a sitcom from any decade and see how long it takes for someone, in assessing the value of a female character, to comment on her looks.
Katie Sturino is a Body Acceptance Advocate as a blogger, podcaster, social media influencer, and author.
I was so uncomfortable in front of the camera on the day of—“Do I have a double chin? Do I look like I don’t belong? Do I look enormous? What about now? Now do I have a double chin???”— that the team had to distract me with tactics usually reserved for crying toddlers on Santa’s lap. I felt like a clumsy bear in a tutu. But when the article was published, the comments told a different story. Readers were thrilled to see a body that looked like mine. A body that looked like theirs! In cool clothes!! On a fashion blog that I had long read for my own style inspiration!!! It was my big aha moment, my “Eureka!” A switch flipped and the light turned on: My body was not, and is not, the problem.
My body was NOT, and is NOT, the PROBLEM?! Holy. Shit.
That realization, paired with the commenters’ enthusiasm, gave me the courage I needed to launch an Instagram account that would pass the message on to other women. I called it The 12ish Style because I wore a size 12-ish at the time, but I had no idea that as my weight began to rise, I’d learn to accept my body as I never had before and would eventually speak about body acceptance
of all kinds to an audience of women who came in all shapes and sizes. Shortly after the Instagram account began taking off, I created a blog to give myself more room to dive deeper into the topics I cared about. Writing about how hard it was to find cool jeans that fit me led me to larger conversations about the lack of size representation in fashion, retail, the media, and pop culture. The deeper I dove, the louder my new internal mantra became: MY BODY IS NOT THE PROBLEM.
*Follow Katie @katiesturino