Your Body Is Yours Again
My body is mine. The choices I make in it are mine to make.
Did your body — after a long, controlling harm — stop feeling entirely yours? Comments about how you looked. Quiet rules about how you moved, what you wore, how you carried yourself. Touch that did not always wait to be welcomed. Closeness that was sometimes given and sometimes withheld in ways that taught you to read the weather rather than ask for what you wanted.
You are on the other side of that now. The body that lived through it is yours. Fully yours. The choices that are made inside it are yours to make.
This sounds simple, and it is also a strange thing to feel for the first time in a long time. You may catch yourself, in small moments, asking inwardly whether something is allowed. Whether you can wear this, eat this, move like this, want this. The asking is the old air still moving through you. The honest answer, again and again, is: this is yours. You do not need anyone's permission.
You can begin with small returnings. Wearing something that pleases you, regardless of whether it would have been approved of. Moving in a way that feels good without apologizing for it. Saying no to a touch — even a small, ordinary touch — when it is not what you want. Saying yes, slowly, to what is. None of these are small. All of them are the body learning, again, that it is home. The body is the harbor you live in. After years of feeling like a borrowed boat, you are finally walking the small interior of a place that is yours.
Your body is not an object to be improved, evaluated, or argued with. It is a place you live. It is the only one you have. You are allowed to live in it kindly.