Work from love

Welcome to summer, or at least to June.  A lot of us confront our body anxieties as summer sets in.  I will lay a lot of the blame for this on the capitalist imperialist cis-hetero-normative white supremacist patriarchy and its advertising machine—anxious people buy stuff.  But I have good news.

 

First of all, smashing the aforementioned many-adjectived patriarchy is good exercise.  We burn a lot of calories that way and build our muscles.  (Please do not smash any actual humans.  This is not good.  Use the energy to lift the weights and power the cardio.)

 

Once we’ve calmed down a little due to the exercise, we may be able to remember that we are more than just pretty faces/bodies.  We are valuable no matter what we look like.  When we are in tune with our actual worth, we find much better ways to motivate ourselves to do things that are good for our bodies and may incidentally make our outsides as lovely as our insides.  Working from love is always better than working from fear—the workout becomes a gift we give ourselves rather than some obscure form of punishment for our imagined sins.

 

All of us are allowed to take the bodies we have right now to the beach to enjoy sun and water and fresh air; anybody who says different is not our friend.