When I was 11 years old, my grandmother gave me a dress that didn’t fit.

It was white lace, vintage style,

almost identical to the famous photo of Marilyn Monroe standing over the street grate. My grandfather had
bought it for her on their 2nd or 3rd date. Despite their questionable emotional health as individuals and the
complexity of their 50-plus-year marriage, I have yet to find two people more in love than my grandparents
were. The dress, to me, captures a timeless moment of a young man deeply enamored, and speaks volumes
of how he sees the woman of his affections.

I had a complex and not-always-smooth-sailing relationship with my grandmother. She was raised in the
American South during the Great Depression; the subject of now heavily scrutinized, if not almost entirely
debunked, cultural and gender conditioning. Like most women of the 20th century, she had an unhealthy
obsession with weight and body image.

Although societal body standards, average lifestyle, and certainly food culture had changed drastically
between the time my grandmother was raised in the 1930s and the formative years of my generation in the
early 2000s; she never hesitated to voice her opinions to the younger women, and sometimes even the men,
of the family. Antagonistic comments and put-downs are rarely an effective method of sparking change in a
person in any situation. So, as could be anticipated, my grandmother’s comments about the looks or weight
of various family members had the opposite intended effect. Overeating was almost a form of rebellion in
our family and as a result many of us, myself included, have struggled with weight issues.

I have saved my grandmother’s dress for 10 years. It never fit me. Every couple years or so I would take it out,
look at it, maybe try it on; hoping that this time the zipper would close. I would struggle this way and that
before officially labelling myself a fat failure and putting the dress away for my next moment of self-loathing.
Somehow, in my naïve mind, I believed that when I could fit into the dress, I would be worthy of the kind of
admiration it represented. Today, after what has been a life-long struggle with body issues, I fit into the dress
for the first time. And the most surprising thing was, I didn’t really care.

Here’s what I know about my body: It has a truly miraculous ability to defend itself, to heal itself and to
change itself. It has, and will continue to, carry me around the globe. It has taken me over mountains and
under oceans. It has endurance remarkable even to me. It can rescue someone in an emergency. It can be
pushed far past what my mind will allow. It can embrace someone with genuine warmth. My scars tell their
stories. My hands can create music, create beauty, write these words. Someday, it could even create life.

When I began to look at my body this way (with the help of yoga and meditation), I started treating it
differently. I stopped ripping through my tangled hair, cursing it’s imperfection, and started handling it like
delicate silk. My hair grew long and silky. I stopped squeezing and picking at my skin, filled with hatred at
each clogged pore. My skin started to clear. I started making a conscious effort to each day use every muscle I
didn’t know I had, internally apologizing for taking them for granted for so long. I started rubbing my feet at
the end of a long day, thanking them for the places they take me. I started using my body to do activities I
actually enjoyed, and realised my aversion to exercise had simply been bad experience. I started paying
attention while I was eating, slowing down, and listening for my body’s real hunger signals. At my heaviest, I
was 207lbs. Today, I am 140. But today, it doesn’t matter.

Being happy with yourself has nothing to do with a number, looking a certain way, fitting into a dress or even
being admired. Loving and caring for yourself doesn’t mean going on yet another ‘diet’ or slugging it out at
the gym, but paying extremely close attention to your body, thanking it for everything it already does, and
promising to treat it with more respect.

Although I don’t need him to, maybe someday an enamored young man will look at me the same way that I
imagine my grandfather saw my grandmother in that dress. But if he sees beauty there, it will only be
because I finally saw it for myself.