For years, I believed body acceptance and weight loss couldn't coexist—that I had to choose between loving my body and changing it. I thought those were my only two options. They weren't.

The decision isn't whether we'll belong. It's where. We can keep belonging to everyone else. Or we can begin belonging to ourselves. We stop waiting for permission. We become the ones who grant it.

What's happening here, Suzanne? you may be asking. Aren't you anti-diet? Aren't you all about loving your body as it is? Don't you have a history of disordered eating? ARE YOU OKAY? All excellent questions—ones I have been asking myself for weeks. (The answers, by the way, are yes, yes, yes, and no.)

Being unseen and feeling unseen are not the same thing. If the story is 'I'm unseen,' no amount of recognition will ever feel like enough. Because the mind will simply dismiss it and keep searching for evidence that confirms what it already believes.

Unworthiness is a narcissist in disguise—a self-absorbed lie that convinces us we’re in control. If we believe we’re the problem, at least we know the rules. But certainty isn’t truth. Overcoming unworthiness means fixing the hole in our worth from the inside—with self-trust, self-permission, and the courage to claim our value, even when doubt roars like a bear.

What if our dreams are part of our life’s design, something assigned to each of us when we entered this wild place?

I often wonder if what we call depression is the perfectly reasonable feeling we have when we move around life without ourselves.

So much of the current talk about improving body image, body positivity and body acceptance feels like yet another set-up for women.

What starts in elementary school with cliques and mean girls smoothly morphs into the sophisticated adult savvy of dominance and exclusion.