While sitting cross legged and hunched over on my parents’ bed playing Nintendo on a television that had seen a generation before me, as I leaned my entire body all the way to the right to ensure Mario would properly land on the koopa troopa and earn ALL THE LIVES, I had become acutely aware of my posture and had a sudden, strange impulse to feel the shape of my spine.
As my fingertips tiptoed along the length of my back, there were times I couldn’t feel bone. Again and again my fingers danced, lightly at first, and then fervently on where each vertebra ought to be. Worried, I asked my mother to check and she swore I was fine. But seventh grade proved otherwise. Seventh grade not only brought overwhelming vulnerability, lockers, crushes and acne, it also brought a clipboard-clad woman to confirm what I had feared not long ago. I was not fine.
I had scoliosis.
After x-rays revealed not one but two curvatures, a spine that looked like a map of the Pacific Coast Highway, I locked myself in a mental dungeon where I expected to forever mourn my disfigured body. The doctor said the percentage of each curve was just under the threshold to require surgery and added, “You’ll be able to lead a normal life. You won’t be able to enter any beauty pageants or anything, but you’ll be fine.”
Mom says I’ll be fine.
Doc says I’ll be fine.
But fine was the last adjective I could use to describe how I felt.
At school I would joke that I was the hunchback of Notre Dame because turning it into a punch line was the aloe vera to calm the burn of shame. “I mean, why get bent out of shape over it, right?” And with crooked teeth and thick thighs inherited from my aunties, I wore my insecurities as chains, clinking through life like damaged goods waiting to get thrown out.
A few years ago I lost over 60 pounds through healthy eating and exercise and it drastically changed how I felt about myself. I still have scoliosis, I still have crooked teeth, and Lord knows I still have thick thighs, but something incredibly unexpected happened.
I was free. Free from the self-loathing, free from the mentality that I was broken.
I didn’t suddenly develop confidence because the pounds themselves were gone; I developed confidence because I allowed myself the right to feel good about my body in all its forms, to treat it with love, respect and even admiration. I am not defective. I know now, as Brother Ali puts it in “Forest Whitaker,” these are God’s fingerprints, but I’m still learning to unconditionally love every part of me.
Over the weekend, one of my favorite poets, Sonya Renee, gave me the reminder I needed.
I wish someone had recited her poem to me all those years ago, that that young pubescent girl could’ve known as she bent over in the dusky, damp locker room of Winton Junior High to have her spine inspected, that the life-changing news she would receive would not destroy her…that she would not be fine. No, not simply fine at all, because she was more than that. She was divine. Divinely made with twists and curves meant to be hugged, traced and loved.
For all the young men and women who still don’t know their divinity, who are still hiding away, here’s Sonya’s poem “The Body Is Not An Apology.”
12/10/13
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