How to Love a Girl Who Hates the Skin She's In, by Alisa Raymond

[My friend Alisa Raymond sent me this. I asked if I could share it. She said yes, so I'm forwarding it to you all. Please feel free to share it, following the permissions info at the end of the article. Thank you and enjoy!]

My poetry mentor gave us a writing prompt to write instructions on how to love yourself.i wrote it this week and won my first slam with it last night i thought i would share it with you..

(for those of you who don't know 2 years ago I was 486 lbs. during that time i had an illness that caused me to lose most of my hair so i wear a wig.also because of the fact that i lost 312 lbs so rapidly my skin is very loose and looks terrible.i'm grateful for my health but the way my body turned out is a constant source of shame for me. i'm working on those feelings.this poem helped a lot. I started it in april but it was very emotionally draining so i put it on the back burner. I finished it today. it took so long because its pretty damn hard to write instructions on something you haven't yet figured out how to do yourself.)

How to Love a Girl Who Hates the Skin She’s In
by Alisa Raymond

1. tell her to stop apologizing for her body. tell her sorry's are serious things and she shouldn't go wasting them.

2. Tell her she's beautiful.she is unlikely to ever believe you but just hearing it will bring that crooked smile to her face.

3. Undress her when you're in bed together.she will fight you tooth and nail because she hates the body that she ended up with, let her know its not as bad as she makes it out to be, but don't ever lie and say its not bad at all, she'll resent you for that.

4. Kiss the soft, loose skin that remains where so many pounds used to be. don't stop when you feel her cringe or when she says "you don't have too" she's just exorcising her own ghost's that have been haunting her for years. Assure her that "you ain't afraid of no ghosts" and help her rid her house of them.

5. If you're serious about loving her,love all of her, unconditionally, from her barely there hair follicles to the tips of her always pedicured toes and everything in between. She may not look like the girl you always dreamed of laying next too but she has the heart and the everything else of the girl you want to wake up to everyday for the rest of your life, and keep in mind, dream girl will be old and grey one day and the one thing that drew you to her will have faded. Stick with the girl who has heart.The heart has staying power.

6. Understand when she insists on only making love when its dark. Don't ask that the lights be on, or candles be lit. Learn every inch of her body in the pitch black like braille, let the fire you start inside of her be all the light that you need.

7. Tell her you like her better without her wig. tell her it's because she's relaxed and more herself. tell her she's beautiful regardless but her comfortable and beautiful trumps any other way.

8. Tell her she has sexy collarbones or wrists.pick a piece of her that wasn't ruined by the surgery and pay extra attention to it. let her own these sexy parts of her like some people do their entire bodies. help her be proud of a small portion of the body she's ashamed of. make her understand that we're all made up of pieces, some bad some good, but either way we need them all for our puzzles to make any sense.

9. Let her know that when she constantly makes negative comments about her body that it hurts you too, that it feels like she is trying to convince you that she is too hideous to be loved and that your love no matter how great will never be good enough. tell her it feels like she is pushing you away, also tell her that the way she obsessively critiques and puts down every inch of her makes you think that she is doing the same to you. That she is silently judging all of your parts while she loudly presides over her own.

10. Hold her hand and keep her busy, because when she's bored she binges and binging inevitably leads to purging whether its an accident or not. There's a tornado of emotion inside this girl that no amount of food will quell,but she can't stop trying, she's a storm chaser. Rescue her from the fingers that mud slide down her throat, from her eyes that burn brush fires into her ruined skin, from her mind that makes her believe her body is a tragedy. Be her diaster relief.


Permission granted to reprint, as long as the content is not altered (grammatical/spelling corrections okay), and credit is listed as: Copyright 2011 by Alisa Raymond. All rights reserved.