my-cat-said-no:

Just saw a post by a 14 year old girl talking about how she hates the stretch marks on her shoulders because they’re “unnatural.” It broke my heart. I promise you, whoever is reading this, almost everyone has stretch marks. I know cis men with stretch marks. All over their bodies! They are almost never only on your stomach. I have them on top of my shoulders, too – and so does my cisgender brother. I have them on the backs of my knees. I have them on my chest and under my arms and on the sides of my hips.

When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with mine. I was fixated on them. I scrubbed them raw and slathered them in lotion and cried because I thought they made my body ugly. These marks were permanent, and they were flaws – right? Wrong. They are not flaws. It’s just something your skin does. Please don’t punish your body for doing regular animal stuff. I was so fixated on mine as a kid but nobody I know even thinks about them as an adult. I don’t remember where all of mine are anymore. I see them and they’re just a thing that’s there.

You are an animal. And you are normal. You are growing hair and shedding dead skin cells and fighting infections and constricting your muscles and processing data. You’re a beast made of meat and physics and chemistry. All of us are. It would be absolutely ridiculous to see yourself as anything else. The change of elasticity in your skin is just more body stuff. It’s natural and weird and complex and all of that is what makes it beautiful. The people who airbrush the evidence of humanity off the models on tv are just trying to make you feel bad so you’ll buy their products. Gross science is happening to you all the time, and just because some people decided you don’t get to see it on tv, it doesn’t make it wrong or bad.

Keep your chin up, you’re a bunch of electrical signals in a pound of grey meat that moves some bones around. This shit is just gonna get weirder, and the weirder it gets, the more okay with it you’re gonna be.