Through my very recent dive into feminism, my experience in liberal and conservative communities, and my passion for yoga, I have learned about and become conflicted on how I see and present my body.

I’ve gone through almost a reverse transformation with body image throughout high school and my first year of college. I’ve been abnormally (what a sad adjective in this circumstance) comfortable in my own skin until very recently. My somewhat sex-positive parents with healthy lifestyles, but not model bodies, made health and happiness the reciprocating functions of a body. As I got more into yogic philosophy, I was indulging in the idea that my body truly is a temple for my spirit and that it was important to keep the home of my soul healthy and fit. The better I became at yoga, the more beautiful and capable my body seemed to me and I was in love. The summer before I came to college, my dad would ask me every single day if I had done cardio because he believed that cardio would burn fat, and that was something I needed to partake in. I could feel them sizing me up when I came home for winter break, deciding what percent of the Freshman 15 I had gained. Now I live in Boca Raton, world-renowned for plastic surgery. With the models on Miami Beach so close, and FAU ranking as the #2 hottest school (for women), I quickly felt the pressure like I never had before. This past year, I have been abusive to myself. I dropped almost 10 pounds in the span of three weeks from not eating. I compulsively stepped on the scale no less than five times every day for months. The day my roommate moved out early, taking the scale with her, I paced for days, returning to that small dark corner where blue numbers used to light up like the back-light of a slot machine.

In high school, I was regularly active and forgot my makeup most days. I was happy with myself. I remember watching "Eat, Pray, Love" for the first time and smiling when Julia Roberts says " Let me ask you something, in all the years that you have…undressed in front of a gentleman has he ever asked you to leave? Has he ever walked out and left? No! It’s because he doesn’t care! He’s in a room with a naked girl, he just won the lottery!" Sex never made me self-conscious. Even now, I am totally comfortable in my naked body in front of someone else, but maybe that is just loyalty—you can pick on your best friend, but you won't let anyone else open their mouth to comment. With that extension, we believe in the beauty of our friends, but we aren’t so kind to ourselves. Realizing my attraction to women and the female body helped me have a better relationship with my own body after losing some of the love that I had fostered. I realize that culturally, bodies are deeply associated with sex in function and imagery, but self-worth and sex don't correlate the same way that self-worth and body image do, so I think it's important to note that body image is not all about sex, although it can be a very empowering or denigrating factor.

I have had so many dichotomous relationships with my body and its parts. At the root of all of the squat challenges, and yoga poses, and skipped lunches, and brow wiz brushes are the questions: how I am accepting my body in the moment? When I actively try to alter it, is it for my own health and/or self-love or for the acceptance of others? If I am making the decision for myself versus for others, what does that say about my bodily autonomy?

There is so much cognitive dissonance in the way I got so wrapped up in being ugly to my body, when as a feminist, I know that patriarchy wins when I try to alter myself to fit the narrow expectations. Dr. Emma Rees speaks about products that are made for women that are historically deadly and metaphorically taint womanhood as dirty and in needing of being cleaned up ("The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History"). When we feel like we need to "fix" our anatomy to fit the misogynistic culture, we have a grave habit of hurting ourselves (13.1 percent of people died from eating disorders in one study). Edward T. Hill notes in his book "The Silent Language" that women being conditioned into thinness and into the longing for thinness is equated with women taking up less physical space, as you can imagine immediately resulting in more space for men (check out this incredible slam poetry called "Shrinking Woman"). Dr. Jane Caputi says “thinness is a fashion” in her essay “One Size Does Not Fit All: Being Beautiful, Thin and Female in America.” This fashion is defined by the patriarchal society: women must be thin and smooth-skinned, weight gain and stretch marks are shameful even though these fashion “rules” are present in a society in which women's one of only two roles is to produce children (just one of many simple, impossible paradoxes). The narrow expectations of the female body and the extremes to which women go to satisfy them is a conundrum. I am not against plastic surgery or people that undergo it. I am not against body modifications or makeup or certain clothing styles. Everyone should be free to make those choices. However, if we really think about it, cutting ourselves, removing part of ourselves, using needles, not eating—all of these actions are extremes and yet I have tattoos and piercings and know people that have had breast implants and tummy tucks. I know anorexic women, and I’ve seen hundreds of scars on wrists and thighs. Conceivably, we can separate these “body modifications” into categories of beauty and pain but we can also admit that this line is blurred so intensely that we might as well not try to make the distinction. Maybe in writing this I am hoping to clear some things up for myself, but I don’t think it is easy to come to a conclusion about how to treat our bodies and what we should reject and embrace. I think it is important to just have the conversations with ourselves on why we are doing what we do. Ask ourselves the questions I mentioned earlier. We cannot escape a misogynistic culture immediately or change it overnight, but we can be conscious about our actions, our presentation and make our own decisions and our own statements, finding a way to love ourselves more deeply than we have realized we had the power to do.

I recently attended an Oxfam Hunger Banquet. When you enter, you receive a card with a story on the back. That evening, I was Charles, a Malawi man that was having difficulty feeding his children because the rain didn't come regularly for his crops. Sitting on the floor where the lower class was sectioned, I noticed the laughter and nonchalant socializing of the people around me as the statistics of malnourished children dying were spit into a microphone. Every 11 and a half seconds, a child dies from hunger or malnourishment, and the case of food insecurity in the U.S. is astonishing. The inappropriate atmosphere kept me from deeper feelings until I spoke to one of my close friends that I know to be food insecure and told them about my recent weight loss. They said to me, "Don't ever go without eating if you don't have to." There was this real person in my life that didn't need a lesson in hunger, and there was Charles, thousands of miles away, who was desperately trying to feed his children; and then there was me deciding in a moment that my petite frame would never starve myself again to be a woman because there was a woman very close by that had only 63 cents in her bank account and a woman that didn't eat during her entire 10 mile trek to get clean water. When I read about how body wraps are supposed to be done with a heating pad to sweat out the fat, I think about the little girl set on fire by ISIS because she wouldn't undress in a public square to be sold as a sex slave. When I think about actresses getting labiaplasty, I think about the millions and millions of girls that have their labia sliced off with a unsterile shard of glass.

I cannot be the perfect human or the perfect woman or the perfect feminist, but if we wish to be the most we can be, I think it is important to keep these ideas in our minds (and our hearts). In a world where women are trespassed against so fiercely, we have to make sure that we are exercising the rights and choices that make us and our sisters more free to do the same. It doesn't mean never get a nose job or shave your legs again, it simply means doing it for you.

Tomorrow I will go eat brunch at the caf, take a shower and shave and spend a therapeutic amount of time doing my makeup. I might post a selfie on Instagram, or go out with friends in an outfit that shows my midriff and includes heels. I will make every seemingly superficial act that might look like compliance to the patriarchal standard of femininity a statement of who I am and how I choose to express myself: worthy of others, but most importantly worthy of myself.

We women are great, beautiful contradictions.