Your Body Is Not Other People's Business

My daughter was just over two years old. We were somewhere, I don't even remember where, and she did what she always did: snuggled up against my leg, comfortable and completely herself. A stranger smiled at me warmly. Asked how old she was.

And then, completely unprompted, said: "It's time to get her out of diapers."

I have thought about that moment more times than I can count. Not because it was the worst thing anyone has ever said to me. But because of how normal it felt. How the woman said it warmly, kindly even — as if she were doing me a favor. As if my daughter's body and its timeline were simply available for public comment. As if that were just how things work.

I keep seeing that moment echoed everywhere lately.

A hair vitamin commercial where a man's wife comments on his balding and his friends mock him about it — and the solution, the resolution, the happy ending is that he changes. That he fixes the thing that was apparently everyone's problem to begin with.

A weight loss commercial where a man holds up his before photo and says: "When I look at this, I see failure." And goes on to describe himself as a better father, a better husband now that he's lost weight.

We have decided that other people's bodies are our business.

Strangers. Friends. Advertisers. Doctors. Well-meaning relatives at Thanksgiving.

And the message — delivered warmly, delivered harshly, delivered in thirty-second increments between the shows we're trying to watch — is always some version of the same thing:

Your body is a problem. And we've all noticed.

Here is what I want to say about that.

The woman who commented on my daughter's diaper timeline was not offering wisdom. She was doing something else, something so normalized we often don't even recognize it as intrusive. She was treating a stranger's child's body as available for her opinion.

The advertisers who have decided that a man looking at a photo of himself should feel like he's looking at failure, they are not helping him. They are manufacturing a wound and then selling him the bandage.

The friends who comment. The family members who notice. The culture that has decided that bodies — your body, my body, a two-year-old's body — are appropriate subjects for unsolicited commentary and public opinion.

They are the ones with the problem.

Not you.

Not your body.

Not your toddler's diaper timeline.

But here's the hard part.

After enough of it, we start to agree with them.

We internalize the comments until they become our own voice. Until we are the ones looking at our before photo and seeing failure. Until we are the ones deciding, preemptively, what everyone else must be thinking.

That is not a personal failing. That is what happens when you have been swimming in a particular kind of water your whole life.

The work — the real work — is learning to notice the voice and ask: whose is this? Did I choose this? Is this actually true?

You did not come into this world believing your body was a problem.

Someone taught you that. Many someones, probably. Over many years.

And it is not your job to make peace with their discomfort about you.

It is your job to come home to yourself.

If you've been carrying other people's opinions about your body for so long that you can't tell them apart from your own — that's worth exploring. That's exactly what therapy is for.