Tara Schuster

We get this one human body, and whether you hate it or love it, it’s yours. Any time spent feeling uncomfortable or ashamed of it, past adolescence, is absolutely wasted.

Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of making space for yourself in A Room of One’s Own. Though written in 1929, her words are just as urgent today. Her most quoted passage is probably that in order to create, in order to pursue her own passions, “a woman must have money and a room of her own,” free from distraction and judgment.

“Oh, how I regret not having worn a bikini for the entire year I was twenty-six. If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini, and don’t take it off until you’re thirty-four.” The first time I read those words, they leaped off the page at me as something incredibly important that I needed to tackle. I might one day regret not wearing a bikini? I might one day feel remorse for how I hid my body? I didn’t want that.