Dear Warrior Women

Dear Warrior Women,

You know who you are. You are the women who have a quiet strength, a silent fortitude. You don’t show weakness, and when your reality is crumbling, you whisper to yourself, “I’ll try again tomorrow.” You are a tumbling sea inside that precariously reaches your toes and rushes back. You are the bluest sky on a halcyon day. You are one of a kind.

You may not be the smallest waist in the room, or the most stylish, or the most put-together. You are a warrior woman, and it’s been a long time since you’ve had time to care about what others thought of you. You’ve been fighting a war, after all. With society, some of the time. But mostly, with yourself. You are on the front lines in more than a metaphorical sense. You are attacked, hated, and fetishized. But now you are fighting back.

You are broad shoulders, you are thunder thighs, you are big-boned, you are full-bodied, you are curvaceous and proud of it. And yet, you are none of these things because they can’t fully define you. Your vessel, your body, is bigger than a size 0 because of all of the spirit and beauty it must contain.

And to all of the petite women, the size 4’s and down, who were not born with big child-bearing hips, or large breasts, or even great height, you are warrior women, too. You fight in the same war with a different weapon.  And when you fall, you represent an important casualty. Because in giving in to the opposition, you are conforming, as well. And that’s not a victory for anyone.

We have all struck ourselves with deafening blows. We all forget our warrior status once in awhile. But there is a way to remember: help others remember.

Remind them that you have filled your cup, and you have drank it all, and you have lived, not vicariously through someone else, but in your own precious skin. Remind them that you have a beer gut from drinking the dregs of life, and that it means you had fun along the way. Remind them that you have a thick, juicy body from letting the juice from so many experiences of your life run down your chin, and that you delight in that fact. Remind them that you have small breasts that allow you to go without the trappings that cage you, and that you live a life so much freer than anyone else because you are happy with them. Remind them that you have the body you have because so did your mother, or your grandmother, or your aunt and you should be honoring them, not being ashamed of them.

Dear warrior women of all shapes and sizes, never forget yourself or your worth.