Happy (just slightly after) Labor Day, babes! In honor of the official end to summer, I thought I’d write about a summer fashion staple: shorts. 

Me and shorts, well, we haven’t always hit it off. In my youth, I looooved shorts. I adored picking out board shorts in bright patterns (90s kids, if you know, you know). I have fond memories of biking around my neighborhood, getting ice cream, visiting my cousins at the campground. I LIVED in shorts for as long as possible. 

But then, something changed. 

I started noticing my thighs, larger than my friends, classmates, celebrities I admired, and I started hiding them. I was ashamed. My legs weren’t lean and toned. I didn’t have a thigh gap. I looked at pictures of myself and felt anger, sadness, frustration. I stopped wearing shorts altogether, for a period of time. It got to a point where I even felt vulnerable in dresses and skirts, also tugging them down and refusing to wear anything above the knee. I wore full-length denim all summer, even in the sweltering heat and humidity of mid-July. Pals, if there’s anything I’ve learned in my 30 years on Earth, it’s that it SUCKS to be constantly hot. 

But why was I so ashamed of my legs? Society has conditioned us to see certain body types as beautiful – namely, skinny, busty, hourglass figures with flat stomaches and skinny legs and arms and huge boobs. And if you don’t fit all of those categories, you start to hide the parts of your body that are “wrong.” How many times do we see magazine headlines telling us how to disguise our midsections, hide our cellulite, cover up our “flabby” arms? Fashion has been aimed at plus-sized people as a way to hide, rather than celebrate, our bodies. And loves, I’m not down with that. 

It’s been a slow change for me. I didn’t immediately decide to start embracing my body and loving my body. Every single day is still a struggle for me as I fight my own internal battle. But what did change is that I decided to just stop caring what others think of me. Sounds way easier said than done, right? It’s taken practice, and I’m certainly not perfect at it, but I have felt so much more freedom. I look at clothing as a way to express my personality, rather than hide my body. And this year, that’s included embracing a long-lost friend of mine: shorts. 

I’ve loved exploring different kinds of shorts this year – denim, paperbag (my current fave), and even a cute romper. If shorts aren’t your thing, that’s OK (I especially feel your pain with the thigh chafing and have been 100% relying on Body Glide this summer!) but for me, shorts were one of the ways I regained confidence in myself.

What item of clothing have you reclaimed? Let me know in the comments!