Be Your Own YES!
stock photo by Jon Tyson
I recently saw a video in my Instagram feed where Sonya Renee Taylor was sharing this message: “Be your own yes.” It hit me. Hard.
As a woman, I’ve been taught my whole life to not make people uncomfortable with my presence. I’ve tried to ignore this messaging, but it’s insidious. I have walked into rooms where I knew people were uncomfortable because of how I look—my colorful hair, my tattoos, my weight all draw attention to me, and I would find myself working twice as hard to prove that I am as smart, capable, dependable, and trustworthy as everyone else at the table, if not more so. I would tone down my personality, not talk about areas of my life that might make people uncomfortable and spark unwanted judgment and possibly conversation about my being childless, about my being married to a woman, about anything I could think of that should be avoided. These impulses to hide behind my talents and skills, to prove that I deserved a seat at the table DESPITE (not BECAUSE of) all the things about me that make people uncomfortable, were some of the most self-destructive impulses I’ve had in my life, though they felt normal and constructive at the time.
Sonya Renee Taylor and her book, The Body Is Not an Apology
Self-effacement is self-destruction. Being small is being toxic in your own life. Being anything other than who you really are gives permission to other people to continue to control other people (and you!) with their expectations. Be all-the-way-you. Don’t make yourself small to make other people comfortable. Don’t be another person’s version of you. Don’t aim to meet other people’s expectations of who you should be. You are perfect—a growing, ever-changing, healing, amazing human. You do not have to be who other people want you to be to be good. You do not have to be externally validated to be valuable. You do not have to be seen to be enough. You are powerful, valuable, and worthy. You are already enough, just as you are, in the body you have, with the face you have, with the hair you have, with the life you have. Don’t internalize the messages you are constantly bombarded with that you are doing it wrong. There is no wrong way to have a body. (Thank you, @sonyareneetaylor, for teaching me that.) There is no wrong way to be you.
I strongly recommend that you check out Sonya’s book The Body Is Not an Apology, her website, and her work through her organization of the same name as her book. She’s pretty amazing and inspiring in her analysis of why we think and feel the way we do because of societal messaging and how intersectionality is a critical part of the conversation that needs to happen around value and worth.
