Kristin Otts has issued a challenge:

The truth is, ladies and gentlemen, perfection is boring as hell. We are human beings. We are as diverse as the earth we live on. And we need to embrace it.

So, lovely readers, I have a challenge for you. I challenge you to help me start a wave of positive body image – a celebration of pimples and glasses and freckles and curves.

Post a picture of yourself – sans makeup, fashionable clothing, or a fancy-schmancy hairstyle. A picture of yourself in your PJs, hugging your teddy bear, making a stupid face. A picture of YOU.

It won’t be perfect, but that’s the beautiful truth about people. None of us are.

There was a time, age 12-14, when I did not wear shorts. I did not wear shorts because my knees were “fat”–thick and dimpled around the joints. All July and all August, too. I hid my body. I didn’t see that those were strong legs: legs that I hiked with, that I walked with (that same summer that I was thirteen, after my sister left for college, my mother and I walked every night at sunset the entire length of the town, my favorite thing about that summer, that stage in my life when there were few things to love, when I felt so unlovable). I don’t know where I got this idea, but I had it: fat knees, fat knees, had to hide them away.

There was a time, years and years and years, when I tried to smile with my mouth closed. This boy–a friend of a friend-turned-enemy–made a webpage about me when I was sixteen. “Phoebe’s teeth are attacking someone,” he said, and I knew what he meant, of course I knew what he meant–my “gummy smile,” the one that the orthodontist told me he could fix when I was 11, when my mother told him that my smile reminded her of my father’s. We can fix that, he said, but it will mean breaking bones, gum grafts, surgery.

I hadn’t even known there was something wrong with me. I hadn’t even thought I needed fixing before that. So for years, I smirked in photographs, but if you know me, you know that I love to smile, that I can’t help but smile, that everything shows on my face, especially joy. To this day, I can’t help but cringe at my grin, my genuine grin, in photographs.

Do all women–do all people?–feel like this about themselves, to varying degrees? Do we all think we need to be fixed, hidden? This has been a part of my thought process for so long that even now, when I try to change my attitudes, I still whine to my husband, “I’m fat, I’m fat, I have a double chin.” I don’t know how true any of it is–or even how earnest I’m being, and I’m generally pretty earnest. I know he thinks I’m beautiful. I know a college boy driving by in his car honked at me this morning, said, “Hey gorgeous” and I felt momentarily bolstered even as I felt assaulted and annoyed. Validated. Why can’t I validate myself?

Because this is a part of every woman–especially every young woman–I know, I try to put this in my books. How we see ourselves but don’t see ourselves as worthy. How something happens in our brain between the moment we see ourselves in the mirror and the moment we process the image of ourselves. I know that these thoughts are rarely accurate, and even if there are vicious people who would agree with them, that it’s all so, so subjective.

So this is what Irene thinks of her legs:

Irene pulled the drawer open, grabbing clean underwear, then the wrinkled black polo shirt and short cotton skirt that made up her work uniform. Irene hated the skirt. It was short enough that the male customers stared—she supposed that was the point, but it still made her feel self-conscious and lumbering, like her legs were huge, jiggling tree trunks.

And this, of course, is different from what Loril thinks:

Irene was an entirely different sort of wild. Her hair was coarse and unkempt and sheared short, like a man’s, as if she couldn’t be bothered to wear it any other way. Her long, finely muscled legs seemed stronger to him than any writhing, swaying tail. He imagined how they must have been forged—on land, running barefoot, the sand burning her toes.

He liked that image. He kept it in his mind when he spread himself out on a bench that night with his hands propped behind him to try and sleep. Irene—running through the surf, looking back at him and laughing, even beckoning to him to come join her. But he’d have to stay back, away from the water, feet firmly in the hot, dry sand.