The system is broken, not you
You’re not worthy of love because of how your body behaves.
You’re worthy of love.
Your body is you, and you are it, and your body is worthy of love because it is, because it is you, because it behaves as it does.
This is not easy news to hear, I know.
Because in the world we live, so much of our worthiness is hinged on community contribution, and contribution is often limited to physical works and labour that some of us cannot partake in, no matter how much we want to.
We place our elders behind closed doors. We are infatuated with smooth skin and flat bellies. We deny women dignity during hormonal changes. We deny men their softness. We are unaccepting of different bodies and people with different abilities, of aging flesh and slower limbs. We demand much, forgive little, and accept less. We judge the long-term unemployed and we declare people, not the system, broken and faulty when they can’t make a living. If only people tried. If only people went to the right doctor, made better choices, could be brave and diligent and “do the work,” then they’d be fine, THEN they would fit in, THEN they would belong and find meaning...
Your body, with all its wild and different ways and wisdom, is not the problem.
Your body is not the problem.
Your body is not the problem.
You and your body are worthy of love.
No questions. No reasons. No contributing factors. No proving. No working. No tests.
Life is not an employment trial, and heaven (whatever comes next beyond this life) is not a performance review.
I know it doesn’t feel that way. Because, yes, something is broken, but it is not you, even though you feel it, even though you may have the scans and the tests and the stories to prove it, even though you may feel as though your body has betrayed you, and offered you up as a living sacrifice to the gods of colonialisation, consumerism, and capitalism,...
The system is broken, not you.
You are not loved in spite of who you are.
You are loved because of who and how you are.
Your body, with all its kinks and breaks, its lines and creases, its pains and aches, its weirdness and wisdom, its stories of fear and anxiety and tales of enduring and triumph; the way it changes and grows, blooms and becomes, rises and falls…
Your body is worthy of love, not when, not if…
Now.
Perhaps you’d join me as I take a moment to hold my body and ask its forgiveness for berating it, hating it, disowning it; for wanting it to be something other than what it is… These pressures come from a false belief that to be worthy, we have to play a certain part a certain way, but all you need to do to be worthy is be
You.
Please be patient with me, oh body of mine, as I dig out these toxic beliefs of what you need to be and how you need to perform to be worthy. Forgive me for all the times I rejected you for not being something or someone else. And be with me as I give myself to you in love, and declare us worthy here and now, because of who we already are, not what we might become.
And may we rage against a system that denies us our worth and dignity and dares place any value other than fullness on our beautifully different bodies.
LISTEN: The system is broken, not you. Your body is worthy of love now, not when, not because, not if.
Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco
From this week’s series titled "Worthy of Love", with a subscription, in the App.
