Hello, all you beautiful, intelligent, and amazing young women out there. I'm Ihsan Muhammad, a Cancerian from New Jersey, here to say "adios" to a lifetime of body insecurities. This is my goodbye to the girl who allowed others to define her beauty and worth, and hello to the woman who loves her six-foot-tall height, wide nose, thick lips, nappy hair, short fingernails, and big feet.

I'm an African American woman who never seemed to be in the right body at the right time. As a skinny teenager, I rarely got attention from the boys in my neighborhood. They preferred the big thighs and round butts that nature seemed to grant every girl except me. In college, I finally gained 20 pounds. For the first time, I had strong thighs, and breasts that you could see through my sweatshirts. But before I could settle into my new curves, family and friends informed me that I was "too fat." At first I ignored their comments, but eventually I began ridiculing my body in the mirror, feeling disappointed with myself for gaining weight, and despising the extra inches and bulges that I'd acquired, originally without remorse.

During my junior year in college, I decided to attempt a modeling career. Suddenly, the semi-voluptuous body I'd learned to embrace became the bane of my existence. Not only would I have to lose weight to model, I'd have to maintain a below-average weight of 125 pounds on my six-foot frame. What?

From age 18-21, I waged a daily war with my body. I replaced my chicken and cheddar sandwiches with salad in a pita, eventually eliminating the pita. I dieted with my mother and my friends, the scale going up and down. Mornings were spent at the mirror, pinching and sucking, searching for signs of weight loss. I tossed and turned all night, worried that I'd eaten "too much."

I relied on the scale and the mirror more than on my heart and mind for clarity on what made me special. I fell prey to the media perceptions of beauty--and I fell hard!

Modeling became a mind trip, and I hadn't packed for the journey. I found myself agonizing over the size of my authentically African nose (most black models have smaller noses than mine). I worried that my complexion was too brown (at the time, black models had to be either really light-skinned or deep brown, and I was neither). My agents encouraged me to lose weight, not for my body but for my face--they wanted my cheekbones to jut out. I scrutinized every inch of my body. Friends and family kept a watchful eye on every morsel I ate, or made sure I didn't stay in the sun for too long.

The summer after my college graduation, I finally won a modeling contract through a national competition. I lasted in the business for seven months. Standing half naked on a runway while dozens of judges looked up at my thick brown behind, I realized that no one cared about my degrees in English and film (I nearly forgot about them myself). No one read the hateful poetry and letters that I wrote to myself at night. No one understood the toll this entire experience was taking on my spirit. I was an artist, writer, and poet - yet, I was being reduced to little more than a walking mannequin.

Now here I am, writing about my experiences and working to help other women embrace themselves. After years of struggling, sometimes unsuccessfully, to love my eccentric, nutty, complex and compassionate self, I am convinced that all of this media hype about external beauty is part of a conspiracy to keep women from taking over the planet. From where I stand, the world is a woman, the universe is a woman, the creator is a woman, and she ain't no two-bit generic doll either. She is big, round, full, and healthy. She is lanky, streamlined and proud. She is compact and strong. She is dark, light, nappy, and straight. Her terrain is vast and original. She is the original. She is only polluted by the ill behavior and false notions of her inhabitants. She's not worried about it either, because she can recreate herself anyway she wants. She has neither the time nor the desire to worry about how others perceive her. She is a woman, I am a woman, we are women. Fine and fierce as can be--and finally, that's all right with me.

Stay strong, ladies, and get to know yourselves--the way you feel, smell, sound, even taste. If we continue to rely only on our sense of sight alone to define our beauty, we will fail to honor the full nature of our being and we will no longer be ourselves. We will simply exist in our skin--and we are way too fly for that!

Peace, Love, and Woman Power,
Ihsan Muhammad
Contributing Editor