I made the decision on a Tuesday, March 4, 2025, in the bathroom of my apartment in Atlanta, looking at my body in a full-length mirror I had, for years, been mostly avoiding. I was thirty-four. I had been apologizing to my own body, in small daily ways, for as long as I could remember. The decision I made that morning, looking at the man in the mirror, was that I was not going to do it anymore.
I want to write a letter to myself, one year in. Not a manifesto. A practice report. So that if some other man reads it, in some other bathroom, on some other Tuesday, he has a sense of what is possible.
Dear Rashid.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being too big. You are a big man. You have been a big man since you were nine years old. You have, for twenty-five years, been apologizing for taking up the seat on the airplane, the booth in the restaurant, the shower stall, the office chair, the queen-sized bed. You have, for twenty-five years, tucked yourself into spaces that were not, in any honest engineering sense, designed for you, and apologized for not fitting better.
You stopped, this year, doing the tuck. You ask for the seatbelt extender. You ask for the bigger booth. You take the chair that fits. You sleep diagonally across the bed on the nights you sleep alone. You do not apologize, in your body, for the volume you displace. The volume is the volume. The volume is, in fact, you. You stopped apologizing for being you.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being hungry. You used to apologize, internally, every time you ordered a second sandwich. You used to apologize for being hungry an hour earlier than the friends you were eating with. You used to, on long flights, apologize for needing to eat the airplane meal, as if the appetite of a six-foot-three two-hundred-and-eighty-pound man should match the appetite of a six-foot one-eighty-pound man and any deviation was a moral failing.
You stopped, this year, internalizing the apology. You eat what your body asks for. You eat it without explaining it to anyone, including yourself. You have, in the year of not apologizing, eaten less in some weeks and more in others, and your body has, with surprising calm, stabilized around what you actually need. The apology, it turned out, had been adding more weight than the food.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being tired. You used to apologize, in your head, every time you needed a nap. You used to apologize for wanting to leave a party at nine-thirty. You used to apologize, internally, for being a man who, after a hard week of work, needed Saturday morning to lie on the couch for two hours and not, in any way, be useful.
You stopped. You nap when you need to nap. You leave the party when your body says it is done with the party. You spend Saturday mornings on the couch and do not, when you spend them there, narrate to yourself a story about being lazy. You are a body that, by mid-week, has burned what it had. The Saturday couch is what the body asked for. You are giving it what it asked for, the way you would give it to a friend.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being soft. You are, in the lower abdomen, in the chest, in the inner thighs, in the upper arms, soft. You have, for thirty years, been treating this softness as evidence of personal failure. You have, for thirty years, been comparing your body to a fitness magazine ideal that, even if achievable, would not, in any honest read, be desirable. The comparison was, by your own current accounting, the largest single chronic source of low-grade suffering in your adult life.
You stopped, this year, doing the comparison. You look at your soft body in the mirror, when you remember to look, and you say, in the voice you would use about a friend's body: this is a strong body that has carried me well. The softness is part of what makes it warm to touch. The softness is, in this culture, treated as a problem. It is not, in any honest sense, a problem. It is, in many cultures and in most of human history, a sign of a body that has been well-fed and well-loved.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being horny. This one was harder than the others, because the apology was older and more layered. You had been apologizing, since adolescence, for having a body that wanted what it wanted. The apology had cost you, in retrospect, a great deal of accurate self-knowledge about your own desire. You had, by the time you were thirty, become a man who treated his own sexual signals as low-grade interruptions to be managed rather than as accurate information about what your body wanted, when, and from whom.
You stopped. You let yourself be horny without apologizing, internally, for it. You let yourself notice what you actually want, without immediately editing the noticing for moral acceptability. The noticing has been, in the year since, a revelation. You did not want most of what you had, for a decade, been pursuing. You wanted, very specifically, things you had been ignoring. The non-apology has, slowly, allowed you to become accurate about your own desire — which has, in turn, allowed you to be more honest with the people you sleep with. The sex is better. The sex is also less frequent than it used to be, because you are no longer manufacturing it as a self-soothing measure. The trade is fine.
You stopped apologizing to your body for being in pain. You had a chronic shoulder issue for four years. You did not, in those four years, go to the doctor. You apologized to your body, internally, for being unable to perform certain motions without discomfort, and then, to keep the apology bearable, you avoided the motions. The avoidance shrank your life. By year four, you were not lifting your daughter above shoulder height. You were not, in any embodied sense, dancing. You were not, in many ordinary movements, allowing your body to be the body it was.
You stopped, this year, the apology, and replaced it with the appointment. The PT, after eight weeks, said something I want to write down for you, exactly: your shoulder is not the problem. The problem is the chronic guarding pattern you developed to apologize for the shoulder. We are going to teach the shoulder, slowly, that it does not need to apologize anymore. The shoulder, in eight months, has become, almost completely, a shoulder again.
Here is what the year of not apologizing has, in summary, given you.
You have, by your own internal report, somewhere between thirty and forty percent more daily energy than you had a year ago. You did not change your diet. You did not change your exercise. You did not change your sleep. The energy was, by what now seems obvious in retrospect, being spent on the running internal apology. The apology, when you stopped it, returned the energy to circulation.
You sleep better. The thirty-year background hum of I should be different was, it turns out, a thing your nervous system was doing while you were trying to sleep. Without it, the sleep is deeper. The sleep is deeper even though you are sleeping fewer hours. The hours, when not co-occupied by the apology, are doing more of the work that hours are supposed to do.
You have become, by some measure your wife had been waiting for for years, more available to her. You did not realize, until you stopped, how much of your attention had been bound up in managing the running internal commentary about your own body. The attention, freed, has been able to go to her. She noticed within the first month. She did not, then, know what had changed. She knows now. She says she is, in her own quiet way, grateful that she gets to be in a marriage with the man who is not, every day, in a low-grade internal argument with his own flesh.
You have, in this year, started, with great hesitation, to enjoy your body. Not as a project. Not as a thing to be improved. As a place to live in. The body, when not apologized to, has shown itself to be, in many ways, a generous host. It will, for the right reasons, do almost anything you ask of it. It will, on the days you ask too much, tell you. It will, when fed and rested and not, every minute, told it is wrong, settle into a kind of low-key continuous reliability that you had previously, in your apologetic state, never been able to feel.
What I want to say, to other men, who recognize the apology in themselves:
You can stop. The stopping is not, in any single moment, dramatic. It is, in the moment of stopping, just a quiet small refusal — to apologize, in your head, for being hungry, tired, big, soft, horny, in pain, slow, old, or different from the ideal you were issued at seventeen. The refusal, repeated, becomes a practice. The practice, after a year, becomes a different relationship with your own flesh.
You do not, in order to do this, have to fix your body. You do not, in order to do this, have to lose weight, build muscle, increase flexibility, or change shape. You can do all those things or none of them. The relationship with the body is not, fundamentally, about its shape. The relationship is about whether you are, every day, treating the body as a problem to be apologized for or as a place you are allowed to live.
You are allowed to live in it. You are, in fact, the only candidate. The body is yours. The lease, this lifetime, is non-transferable. The apology was not improving the building. The apology was, by every measure I can find a year in, the largest single chronic source of damage to the foundation.
Stop apologizing.
Eat the second sandwich. Sit in the bigger chair. Take the nap. Get the shoulder looked at. Have the body you have. Notice, in your mirror, on a Tuesday, the man who has been waiting, for some uncounted number of years, for you to be on his side. Be on his side. He has been on yours the whole time.
—
Sincerely,
You, one year in.
If body shame is loud in your life, the shame and toxic shame pages have language and tools, and the "he hates his body now" walkthrough is for the conversations partners and the man himself can have when the apology has become loud. The "he's stopped taking care of himself" response is for the other end of the spectrum, when the apology has tipped into neglect. For Atlanta-area men ready to work on this with a clinician, the men's-issues therapist list includes clinicians experienced in body image and self-compassion work.