Dear Bikini,
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways… by counting the number of you I own: 23, to be precise, or 23.5 if you count the bottoms I have that got separated from their matching top after a terrible accident in one of those swimming costume dryers. 23 might seem like an awful lot for a woman who lives in the UK and rarely goes swimming, but I think it is perfectly reasonable. Because after a lifetime of being fearful of the bikini - or, more specifically, my body - I am now learning to embrace it with gusto.
Like most women, I have always had a hate-hate relationship with my body. Eventually - via several bouts of depression, a fraught decade of bulimia, and a completely ruinous experience with alcoholism and addiction - I realised I was going to have to start a love-love relationship with it, or spend the rest of my life in misery. So, instead of feeling duty bound to do it down, I started celebrating it. I ran a marathon in my underwear, and started posting pictures on my Instagram of me in bikinis (I am a size 18 to 20). Every time I did this - every time I do this - someone pipes up to tell me I am very brave, and that they wouldn’t have the confidence to wear a bikini in public. This is why I have so many two-pieces: because I am on a one-woman mission to let the world know that in the 21st century, it shouldn’t be deemed brave for a female to step onto a beach in a bikini.
I wrote an entire book about the journey to feeling comfortable in my own body - and while I wrote it, I remembered all those times I felt acutely self-conscious getting into a swimming costume. The times I wanted the ground to swallow my bikini and me whole; the time I spent sucking in my stomach and rearranging towels to cover cellulite that literally nobody cared about but me. And it made me sad that I had wasted so much energy hating on myself. Our bodies are amazing. They keep us alive. They allow us to do incredible things. And I love the freedom I now have from realising that - and the freedom a bikini gives me to embrace my body in public, without getting arrested (seriously, if I could walk around naked every day I would). So, thank you. Thank you to all the bikinis that have held me, and embraced me, and allowed me to be me, in all my awesome glory - cellulite and all. You will never know how much joy it gives me that I can wear you now without giving it a second thought. With pride.
You Got This by Bryony Gordon(£9.99, Wren & Rook) available now