You Don’t Get to Tell Me What It’s Like to Live in My Body

There’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, and honestly, I’m just not interested in softening it anymore to make it easier for other people to hear.

You don’t get to tell me what it’s like to live in my body.

And I don’t mean that in an aggressive way, I mean it in a very real, grounded way. You don’t know what it has felt like to move through the world in this body, to be seen the way I’ve been seen, or to have the kinds of experiences I’ve had just existing as I am.

I’ve been told I was “too much” while wearing a turtleneck. Fully covered, nothing revealing, and still somehow it was a problem. Not because of what I had on, but because of how my body is shaped. Because I have curves. Because of the way my body naturally exists.

That’s not something I imagined. That’s something I lived.

And it didn’t start when I was older. It started young, in ways that were subtle at first. Little comments, unspoken rules, things that let you know pretty quickly what is considered “acceptable” and what isn’t.

What’s hard is when someone who has never had that experience tries to explain to you that it’s not real, or that it wouldn’t happen if you just did something differently. That’s not actually a conversation, that’s someone dismissing something they’ve never had to navigate.

And I’m not available for that anymore.

What makes this even more real for me is I’ve watched my daughters go through similar situations.

They are like me, they developed early. So you have this situation where they are still very much a child, still thinking like a kid, still just wanting to exist and be with friends, but their body is already being looked at differently, judged and labeled. 

I remember at the end of one school year, kids were wearing tank tops because it was warm out. Totally normal. My daughter wore one too, but because her body had developed, she needed to wear a bra, and you could see the strap.

She got called out for it. Embarrassed. Singled out.

I got called into the school to meet with the principal.

And I remember sitting there thinking, we are not doing this to her.

We are not going to take a young girl who is just existing in her body and make her feel like she’s done something wrong because of how she developed. We are not going to ask her to hide or change or carry shame for something that is completely natural.

I had a lot to say in that meeting, and I didn’t back down.

And my daughter did not have to change her clothes.

Because the problem was never her body.

That’s what I mean when I say this is lived. This isn’t something I’m making up or exaggerating or trying to turn into a bigger issue than it is. This is something I have experienced, and now I’m watching it happen again through my daughters.

So when someone tries to tell me that this isn’t real, or that it wouldn’t be happening if girls just dressed differently, it completely misses what’s actually going on.

We can absolutely have different perspectives. I’m open to that. I’m open to real conversations where people are listening and willing to understand something outside of their own experience.

But what I’m not open to is having my reality dismissed by someone who has never lived it.

And I’m also not willing to stay quiet about it anymore.

Because this matters.

It matters for me, and it matters for my daughters, and it matters for every girl who has ever started to feel like her body was the problem simply because of how it exists.

And it’s not.

With love, Marianne