“Bless your beautiful hide.”

Howard Keel, 7 Brides for 7 Brothers

It’s been just over a year since I started this blog.

It’s not perfect; I don’t post as regularly (or consistently) as I should, I don’t have a specific focus and I sometimes find myself with not much to say.

(Well, that’s not entirely true. I always have SOMETHING to say, but the question is about whether or not I can say it in the right way.)

Be that as it may, I want to take a second to look back. Hop with me into my time machine.

Lots of you remember when I first started the blog. Some of you are new friends and followers…and obviously HELLO! to you. What’s up? What’s poppin’? What it do, baby?

In this particular time machine, I want to just take a second to reflect on where it all started with the blog and the pontificating and the writing…

My thighs.

Yes, you read that properly. My content creation days started with my thighs. Or, I guess, my bottom half in general; there’s just really a lot of real estate in that zip code that we could talk about, but that’s just the point.

My body, and accepting that body, has always been a challenge for me, even from the beginning.

A handful of you may remember my SundayMorningView days. Has that awoken any type of memory for you? Maybe? No? Let me either inform you or refresh your memory.

Let me elaborate. Several years ago, I wrote for a small online publication called SundayMorningView. It was a magazine aimed at women’s empowerment and body positivity, and I became a weekly content contributor for them during a time when I needed that positivity. Badly.

I wrote for them for a few years but eventually stopped when I was in college, because golly day, work piles up! I started falling behind and eventually stopped.

But the message didn’t stop being important to me.

I know, this is a ~lifestyle~ blog. Basically, that means I get to write about whatever the hell I want. Music? You got it. Fashion? Of course, dahling. Boys and dating and romance? Sure, if I ever had anything going on that front.

Before I ever even decided to have my own blog space, where I could take the time to write about how I was feeling and about how my own journey was going, I wrote on a grander scale. SMV helped me to sort of find my voice when it came to body positivity: the first topic I really felt like was a hill I personally was willing to die on.

(What do the above pictures have to do with anything? Nothing. I’m writing about body positivity, so here are some pictures of my body and I being positive.)

I’ve stopped writing for SMV and I’ve branched out on social media, following lots of different body positive content creators and pages. I’m always trying to educate myself, and as I grow and my body changes, that message of self-love and body positivity remains essential to me and my being.

Because I know how it feels to look in the mirror and be really unhappy with what I see.

I know how it feels to hate every dimple on my thighs and be angry that I’m so bottom-heavy or that my feet are massive or that my skin is somehow both greasy and dry (someone PLEASE explain that one to me) or that even the threat of humidity makes my hair poof up.

It’s a community I’m not new to, but I’m trying to grow in it. I’m trying to open myself up to more inclusive accounts with varied stories, because all of us, no matter our size, our gender, our skin color, our height or our age, have stuff we struggle with and are insecure about. It’s no surprise.

I wrote lots of tongue-in-cheek stuff in the past about my struggles with body insecurity and really leaned into self-deprecating humor to get my message across (duh, because self-deprecating humor is funny), but it has become pretty important to me lately to also be honest about the message behind the jokes.

The insecurity is there, and while different people deal with that in different ways, that underlying desire is the same: we all want to be in love with ourselves.  

The moral of this story is that it’s been a while since I’ve died on this hill, but I’m back again. If you’re passionate about something, I’ve found it’s best to just say it out. This blog is just over a year old, and I wrote for SMV before that, and looking back at the past can sometimes help inform our future.

No, the jokes won’t stop. They’ve taken a teeny timeout, but I’ll be back again with talking about back sweat, thigh chafing, being the hairiest person on the East Coast, etc. here shortly. I don’t want there to be any mistake though: just because I laugh at myself, it doesn’t mean I don’t take the cause seriously.

I’m going to be touching on this topic a little bit in some upcoming blog posts, but I just feel like a revisit was necessary with my just-over-a-year anniversary of the blog.

Thanks for sticking with me, and I hope to get back to more regular posting here soon.

Check out the work SundayMorningView does here: https://www.sundaymorningview.com/

Just a handful of body positivity and self-love accounts I’ve been loving lately on Instagram:

Nelly London (@_nelly_london)

Eating disorder recovery, self love

Jules M (@confidentlyjules)

BoPo, self love

Ash Soto (@radiantbambi)

BoPo, vitiligo awareness

Lux ATL (@lux_atl)

Writer, dancer, women’s empowerment

Queen MoJo (@_queenmojo)

Dancer, plus-size advocate

Alicia Jay/TallSWAG (@tallswag)

Speaker, writer, Tall Girl

Big Bottom Behavior (@bigbottombehavior)

Size inclusive brand, fitness, self love

Gabi Fresh (@gabifresh)

Plus size advocate, fashion, mental health

(This is by no means a finished list, just a couple of accounts off the top of my head!)

Your Dead-on-the-Hill Servant,

Em