Would You Talk to Your Crush the Way You Talk to Your Body?
I was a gymnast for years, competitive and consumed by it, the kind of training that asked everything of a young body. It was after all that training, once the stress symptoms started showing up and I went looking for relief, that a doctor looked at my joints and said something I've never forgotten: that the stress on them had left them like those of an eighty year old.
He probably didn't mean much by it. A clinical observation, said in passing with a chuckle, likely forgotten by him before he left the room.
But I didn't just hear it, I interpreted it. My body was damaged. I was weak. I was doomed to never feel healthy and good in my own body again. I even started repeating his exact words back to other people, introducing myself as though it were fact: "I'm a twenty-something year old living in an eighty year old body." I said that. About myself. As an introduction.
I didn't know it then, but every time I repeated his words, I was planting a seed. A seed of doubt in the body I actually lived in, and I kept watering it, speaking it into being, until it grew into the only truth I knew. That interpretation became the reality I lived in for a very long time, quietly convinced that something in me was broken beyond repair.
It wasn't until more recently that I took my identity back. I'm not a damaged former athlete. I'm a strong, capable former gymnast who still carries incredible flexibility and mobility, and who gets to keep strengthening those gifts while supporting the mature body I live in now. These days I tell my joints I love them. I remind them they're strong. I thank God for the ability to keep them that way.
The Other Voice: Comparison
The doctor's comment is one kind of inherited language. But there's another kind that I think almost every woman knows intimately, and it doesn't come from a clinician. It comes from scrolling. From media. From every image of a woman's body we're shown as the version worth wanting.
I'm not like her. I should be like her.
It's such a quiet thought. It rarely announces itself as cruel. We don't pause to question it. We just let it settle in, uninvited, and start speaking as though it always lived there. It runs underneath everything, a quiet weed taking root, measuring what we have against what we're told we should want instead. And that quiet measuring is its own kind of shaming, maybe more insidious than an outright insult, because it doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like the truth.
My heart genuinely breaks thinking about how many women, myself included, have lived inside that reality. Some of us knowingly. Most of us without ever realizing that's what we were doing. I've said it myself, more times than I can count. I wish I had bigger boobs. I wish I had straight hair. Small sentences, said almost absentmindedly, and yet each one was another seed planted in soil that deserved so much better.
What If We Said the Opposite?
What if, instead, I said: I love my smaller breasts. I adore my curly hair, frizz and all.
Can you imagine what that would do to a life? Not as a one time affirmation said into a mirror, but as the actual, repeated, lived language we use about ourselves. What would it feel like to build an entire relationship with your body on words like that instead?
If old language was a seed of doubt, maybe new language could be a seed of devotion. Not just spoken once, but tended daily, spoken like a prayer, until it roots and becomes lived language, the kind that quietly grows into what we believe is true.
Loving Your Body Like a Crush
What if you spoke to your body the way you speak about a crush?
Think about it. When you're smitten with someone, you don't measure them against a checklist of who they should be. You notice them. You're curious about them. You want to be near them, exactly as they are. Their quirks aren't flaws to fix, they're the very things that make you fond.
And you don't just feel that admiration quietly. You say it. You tell them what you love about them. You point out the freckle you adore, the laugh that gets you, the way they move through a room. Giving compliments to a crush is practically instinct, we can't help but make our love known out loud.
What if we gave ourselves that same instinct? Not a quiet, private fondness kept to ourselves, but spoken admiration. Told to our own reflection, our own skin, our own body, with the same ease we'd tell a crush. Even more of it, since we're the one relationship we're in for life.
Your body has been waiting a long time for you to look at it that way. Not diagnosed, not compared. Just noticed by your own eyes, wanted in your own voice, admired by no one's opinion but yours, frizz and all.
An Invitation
I don't think the goal is to never again notice an old weed pushing back up. Mine still surfaces sometimes, an echo of "old joints" or the familiar pull of comparison. The goal isn't perfect eradication. It's awareness, and then choice.
So here's a small invitation, for you and honestly for me too: notice one piece of inherited language you've been carrying about your body. Where did it come from? Is it even true anymore? And then, just once today, try the swap. Say the loving version out loud, even if it feels foreign at first.
One sentence, spoken like a prayer, planted like a seed, until it starts to feel like home. Until it becomes lived language, embodied.
If this resonates and you're ready to explore the relationship you have with your own body, a Complimentary Connection Call is a gentle first step.