How I Learned to Love My Body—Especially in the Summer
There is a day we New Yorkers quietly celebrate, that we don't have a name for.It's the morning when I can feel the earth peel back her blanket and stretch out for the first time in months. For once, she doesn't have to reach for a sweater to throw over her nightgown; she might even step outside to greet the day.I do the same, stepping outside to bask in the symphony of new sounds: the silly flap of sandals against the pavement, the no‑nonsense buzz of a bee hard at work, the crunch of a bunny snacking on wildflowers. No, that's me getting carried away; there are no bunnies in my industrial part of Brooklyn.But it is the first kiss of summer. If you live in bear country and not Brooklyn, the warm months are signaled not with sundress debuts and iced coffee orders, but with the grumbles and growls of furry beasts who have emerged from hibernation.Hibernation isn't sleep. It's a mastery of evolution, a collection of advanced adaptations and seemingly miraculous physiological strategies that allow so many critters to burrow underground for months without food or water and still look like their fuzzy, glorious selves as they totter out of their dens. After a hearty shake, the animals are rested and ready for action, with healthy, shiny fur coats at that.But, however wondrous and exotic the ritual seems, hibernation is a challenging concept when you really get to thinking about it: What if humans were just as in tune with our bodies? Would it work out for us? What if we followed our bodily cues as attentively as bears and other animals do?It took me a long time to learn I am a body. In a society that splits the mind as separate from the body, I question my own desires and needs as they arise. I even distrust them, commanding them to keep quiet so I can function normally in this culture that has so many ways to hide bodily requirements.
In most of contemporary society, we are practically forced to disembody if we want to have any chance at fitting in, keeping a job, getting accepted, even being seen as fully human. It is so outrageous (yet somehow normal) that grocery stores sell 'hunger-reducing' gum and Ozempic is easily accessible so that our bodies can't tell us when to eat, and absurd that we follow a labor schedule that was created for machines, and so upsetting that things like periods and panic attacks are seen as pesky hindrances to be hidden and worked through rather than honored with rest and support.Read More: How To Use Your Body To Make Yourself Happier
Something I love about animals is that you never have to tell an animal 'Be yourself.' They know no other way to be. Animals go to the bathroom, reject unwanted affection, gobble food, sleep for hours, and bite their toenails without a moment of hesitation or a shameful glance around to see if anyone's looking.
The messages between their fuzzy bodies and their brains don't go through any filtering system. Thought and action are practically one and the same: Hungry! Eat; Tired! Rest; Curious! Explore.Animals have mastered embodiment, the experience of being a body rather than having a body. They don't separate their physical self as an unruly object to control, argue with, be proud of, or disdain.And for a long time, we humans were the same way. That is, until Plato came along and decided that body and mind were two different entities. His coping mechanism to escape the grind of Ancient Greece was to call the mind the 'true self,' whereas a body was just a sloppy vessel to carry it around. While bodies were used and hurt by others, and, let's face it, were kind of embarrassing, the mind was pure and could attain enlightenment.It's an interesting idea, but it's gotten us into all kinds of trouble throughout history. Disembodiment, which denies any inherent preciousness of the body, has been used in service to humanity's most egregious sins, from slavery to eugenics. If you can separate a body from a person, you're more likely to accept the use of that body as an object. It now means that we endure the legacy of disembodiment as an accepted concept.
Take swimsuit season. As far as we've come from the SlimFast lunches and cabbage soup diet of the early 2000s, a lot of us still have diet culture leftovers lingering around in our minds when it comes to public displays of body appearance—especially their annual debuts in the summer.
I used to feel nothing but dread when I'd realize while packing my beach bag that I'd forgotten to get those abs I meant to get over the winter, or that last night's dinner party with friends was showing up in some extra tummy bloat. I treated my rolls and squishy parts like they were evidence of my failures—a visible symbol that I lacked the saintly discipline that I've envied in other girls since middle school.
But bodies are living things who are entitled to change, strengthen, soften, expand, and spill out as evidence of a life lived—not a life restricted. A dinner party with friends is one of my greatest pleasures, and I didn't get around to those abs in winter because I was too busy enjoying time for needed and delicious rest. If I'm a little flabbier for naturally responding to my joys and environment, so be it. Plunging into a swimming pool is another one of my greatest pleasures, and we all deserve to feel the unselfconscious glory of being a body in water on a hot day.
I quit blaming myself for my body's naturalness when I learned to love life—not just my life, but the existence of any life on earth. The more I appreciated living things and their living-thing-ness, the more merciful I was toward myself. Subsequently, I learned to love signs of life: eye wrinkles, rolls of fat, chubby cheeks, jiggly arms, laugh lines, stretch marks, cellulite dimples, and colorful veins...all signs of vitality, age, changes, growth, and aliveness.I smile when I think about bears who never have to learn any of this. They eat when they're hungry, wander when they're restless, and sleep when they're tired. Somehow, after months in a comfy cave, they witness summer as the rest of us do: with energy and renewal. And it's because they never questioned what their bodies needed.
When I catch myself questioning my needs, or scrutinizing my physical appearance, I remember what my soul experiences as a body: smelling the clothes of people I love, hearing cumbia music, applying blush, swimming in a cold lake, trying to stifle a laugh when it's not appropriate to laugh, carrying an ice cream cone, twirling.The first time I realized all that was the first time I really felt at home here, in my body. I know what it's like to hate this home, and I know what it's like to love being in it. I know what it's like to feel my body as a brutalist office building made of concrete walls and right angles, restrictions and doors where I didn't know the entrance code. And I know what it's like to be in my body as a cozy cabin on a lake.When I splash around a pool, more attentive to my soul's elation than to the shape of my being in a bathing suit, I feel in touch with my human animal self, who experiences all the joys on earth through this natural, ever-changing body.
From HOW TO BE A LIVING THING by Mari Andrew, published by Penguin Life, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Mari Andrew.
Contact us at letters@time.com.
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