A Quote by Venus Williams

I always thought of it like, 'What can my body do for me?' and not, 'How do I look?' — © Venus Williams
I always thought of it like, 'What can my body do for me?' and not, 'How do I look?'
A lot of people body shame me because I am very thin. They say I have a 'boy's body,' or that I look like a skeleton or like a runaway patient. People can never be happy, so you just have to be happy with your body and how you are.
When I look back, it saddens me to think that I was so hard on myself - when I was younger, I thought I had to look like everyone else, but I learned that beauty comes from how you feel about yourself. Once I started taking care of my mind, body, and soul, I realized that I didn't need to conform to what's "normal" and started to love myself.
I've always thought 45 to 55 is a great time for guys: Your body has filled out. Your face doesn't look old, but you're weathered enough to look like you know what you're talking about.
I grew up with a lot of body image issues - not just about my weight, but I would always see these perfect orb, domed boobs on television, and think, "Mine don't look like that." I thought there was something wrong with me.
I feel like I'm a boy, but I don't feel like I should've been born with different parts of my body or anything like that. I feel like it's just all in how I dress and how I talk and how I look and feel, and that makes me happy.
My body cheerfully informed me that he felt really good pressed against me like that, all hard muscles and smooth contours and ominous bulges. My body liked the air of barely leashed strength and caged mayhem he was giving off. My body thought he smelled really good, like heat and coffee and electricity. My body was going to get me killed.
In previous roles, I have thought of my body as 'Betty's body,' and I try not to eat too many dinner rolls - please don't fire me! I'll make crazy choices from the neck up, but from the neck down, it's just me trying to suck it in. And in 'GLOW,' my whole body was required to do a function and not just to look as good as possible in a costume.
I thought I was pretty average height. And then it just clicked to me - 'Yo, you're undersized.' I guess when I got older and my body started hurting, I'm like, 'I'm not as big as I thought I was.' So I always played with the mentality that I was bigger than I actually was.
I always feel that there are two choices for women. Either be totally confident about your non-size-zero body and say, 'I love what I look like and this is who I am,' or be the person who is obsessed with diet and exercise and keeping toned. What feels more realistic to me is that some days I wake up and think I love how I look. On other days I say, 'If I had real self-control, I would be 10 pounds lighter.' That contradiction is, to me, what being a girl actually feels like.
I still have very normal insecurities, but I've always been made to feel like a body is a body, and it's not supposed to look like what you see in the media.
Whenever we think of the body as a vessel for artistic ideas, we somehow always focus on the surface of the body. But the truth is that there is no surface of the body independent of its interior. It's obvious that the outside of the body is always connected to the inside, to thought processes and to an internal anatomy.
I still have a picture: three cars, big house, I'm standing there like I'm 50 Cent. I look at it sometimes and say, 'Look how stupid you were.' But that made me who I am, and I can look back and see it. I've learned. I grew up. I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and thought, 'No, that's not me. I don't want to be that. I'm a footballer.'
Women in the public eye and on TV are often scrutinized for how they look so I know how easy it would be to fall into the trap of taking on board this negativity. The healthiest way for me to deal with it is by being fit and healthy through activities like swimming, which helps me focus on what my body can do rather than what it looks like.
If you put yourself in a place where you're having to work at understanding something, then you keep yourself awake to all possible choices. How the body will look like in the future, the ethics of the body: those are questions that really fascinate me. Let's get the dialogue going.
I've thought about my relationship to my body, my body dysmorphia, and what that means as someone who's like, 'Oh, I'm going to be on camera.' Sometimes it makes my body dysmorphia worse, but I've also tried to not let my mental illness rob the joy of getting to do something I've always wanted to do.
Then I saw Juli. She was two tables away from me, facing my direction. Only she wasn't looking at me. She was looking at Jon, her eyes all sparkly and laughing. My heart lurched. What was she laughing about? What were they talking about? How could she sit there and look so... beautiful? I felt myself spinning out of control. It was weird. Like I couldn't even steer my own body. I'd always thought Jon was pretty cool, but right then I wanted to go over and throw him across the room.
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