body image and purity culture...

not once in my life have i ever felt a sense of shame towards my body for having a birth defect & being an amputee.

truly, not once.

the one part of my body that was deformed &
disabled & needed lots of extra help from prosthetics & orthopedists to thrive—i owned it completely.

if it made you uncomfortable, get out of my way. in fact, i pitied people who thought i needed their own pity.

the irony is, the one part of my body that was defective, was the only part i didn’t hate…especially around age 15 when my head-to-toe narrow body stopped getting confused for a boy’s, & there were a lot more youth group events where the boys & girls were split up so we could hear about the downfalls of existing as women: aka, now that you look like a woman, you are no longer innocent. you are no longer free to be yourself in “mixed company”.

you, woman of breasts & hips & lost innocence, are no longer free to sit the way you want, hug the way you want, shop the way you want, or exist anywhere in public the way you want. your body is a roaring lion, seeking whom she will devour if you do not vigilantly keep her covered, keep her silent, & keep her presence so small that no man should suffer to “stumble” across her at the youth group pool party and headlong into a life of sex addition.

be invisible enough to go unnoticed, but be beautiful enough to capture a man who will posses you as head of house & you as helpmeet.

i am not alone, or even in a slim percentage, of women for whom this narrative became synonymous with the air we breathed.

the shame of receiving a glance from a boy, the terror of looking in the mirror & seeing curves, the fear of ruining lives for showing too much skin…was just at the shallow end of the pool wading into the churning, reeling monster of evangelical purity culture.

my personal journey to where i am now, free & strong & just as happy to stare back at men i admire on the beach, was brutal, & it’s not over.

THANK YOU to the little amputated nub nestled inside the prosthetics that keeps me running, for making me feel like my body was always at least 1/4th a badass, & thanks for waiting while the rest of me caught up.

i’m still on my way.

~genevieve