m.o. kng

The moment I saw my friend’s suggestion in my inbox, I knew I needed to prepare myself:

“Huge emphasis on the dumpy 🍑”

To be frank, this theme raised my blood pressure. I’ve never felt confident about my body – for most of my life, bad experiences in P.E. and team sports deterred me from the world of exercise and fitness. It wasn’t until I stumbled across Ring Fit Adventure during the pandemic that I finally discovered how much I enjoyed working out: even after finishing the game five months after starting it, I found myself hungry for more, eventually supplementing my virtual sessions with weights, calisthenics, and rock climbing. (By the way, you can read about my Ring Fit journey, among others, in this IGN article!) I’m now more active than I’ve ever been in my life, and I look forward to continuing to pursue new challenges and grow into my newfound identity as a gym person.

But that change in my physical well-being hasn’t necessarily translated to a positive difference in how I feel about my body. I was the kid who stubbornly refused to take their T-shirt off at the pool; the cousin who never seemed to put on weight; the student who deliberately wore baggy overcoats to hide the frail frame underneath. It’s hard to unlearn decades of shyness about my appearance – and though I’m grateful to have friends and a partner who have made me feel beautiful, I’m still getting to a place where I feel comfortable openly owning the way I look.

All this is to say that today wasn’t just a fashion challenge – it was a mental challenge, showing off a part (hah) of myself I normally keep hidden!

But once I got over my trepidation, I felt better about my outfit. In fact, most of the people I met (other than my sweet boyfriend, who patiently waited as I tried on a dozen pairs of pants) didn’t even register that I was wearing anything particularly different. It turns out that the clothes that emphasize, ahem, my dumpy, aren’t too far off from the clothes that I’ve already been wearing this February: these pants weren’t much tighter than some of the jeans I usually wear to the office (which begs the question of how they look from behind, and whether I’ve been showing my ass off this entire time without realizing it). I have so many questions, but mainly I’m relieved that my butt didn’t feel like it was suffocating today. It, like me, deserves some room to breathe.

And that’s the biggest lesson of the day: ultimately, there is no external validation that matters more than my comfort with my own body. I spent so much of my life measuring my figure against invisible yardsticks: not strong enough, tall enough, toned enough, hot enough. I used to think that if I worked harder to change my appearance, maybe those insecurities would finally disappear – it’s only now that I realize that I’ve had the power to respond to them all along. I don’t need anyone to tell me my butt is beautiful. Hell, I don’t even need to have a beautiful butt. I just need a butt I can live happily in – one I get to move and groove however I want. And fit into a pair of skinny chinos when I feel like it.

Steal the look:

• Baseball hat, cream (Mostly using this to cover my messy bird’s nest hair at this point in the month. I know, I know. I’ll get a haircut soon.)
• Banana Republic graphic tee, light pink (I know that peach has a very specific connotation on the Internet, but it is also a fruit, so I thought this color would fit!)
• Bomber jacket, maroon (I tried to use this to cover my dumpy. My boyfriend was not having it.)
• Banana Republic skinny stretch chinos, thyme (A lot of people have mentioned that they like the way I look in pastel colors, which I’m surprised by! I guess these might make it into the regular rotation moving forward!)
• ASICS OC Runner in Cream/Beryl Green

Coming tomorrow: I go back to work and get ready to earn my stripes…