Photo: TikTok
The dad modeled radical self-love to his daughter, who held tight to that lesson.
By Alexandra Blogier — Written on Apr 25, 2023
A woman on TikTok is letting the internet know what her dad did right to encourage self-love and acceptance in her home.
Responding to another video in which a creator stated that she never saw her father shirtless while growing up, Meiling Choy explained how her dad being shirtless inside their home made her realize just how close she was with her parents growing up.
“I actually realized this a couple times growing up and I would share stories about my parents and my family, and people would be like, ‘wow, you’re actually really close with your parents, that’s weird,’ and I’m like, ‘what, that’s not weird, that’s normal for me.’”
“So, I’d come home and I’d ask my dad, I was like, ‘hey, there’s kids at school who have never seen their dad shirtless. Why is it that you walk around shirtless sometimes?’”
Choy shared how her father’s decision to go shirtless at home was actually a tool to help her build body confidence.
Choy reported that the answer he offered was “the best thing he could have given me.” She described her dad as “6’3, sort of on the bigger side.”
“What he told me was just priceless,” Choy said. “He said he would take his shirt off to show me subconsciously that he was comfortable in his skin even though he wasn’t the fittest person.”
As Choy explained, her dad went shirtless “so that when I would see myself in a mirror, I wouldn’t want to hate myself.”
“If my dad could be really open about it and comfortable, I would adapt to that ideology.”
Choy’s dad was practicing radical self-acceptance to show her how to love her body, despite any insecurities she may have had.
She said that her father’s modeling of self-love is “definitely a parenting move that I will keep in my back pocket.”
Learning to love ourselves for the entirety of who we are is a challenge, but it's not an impossible task. Author and activist Sonya Renee Taylor defines radical self-love as a different entity from self-acceptance. Taylor claims that radical self-love acknowledges that humans’ “inherent existence as love is a political act.”
Taylor states that “taking back my experience of being 100% worthy and powerful and divine in the body that I have as it is right now… is an act that interrupts a system that profits off of us not believing that.”
She offers the following statement as proof that radically loving our bodies and our whole beings can alter the world on a collective level, noting that “as we learn to make peace with our bodies and make peace with other people’s bodies, we create an opening for creating a more just and equitable world.”
Taylor explains that “radical self-love is our inherent state of being as worthy and enough.” She believes that “if we don't take intentional time to dismantle these negative ideas inside of ourselves, then we're only going to reaffirm those ideas in the world.”
As Choy’s father showed her when she was a teen, radical self-love is rooted in our right as people to exist, just as we are.
Alexandra Blogier is a writer on YourTango's news and entertainment team. She covers celebrity gossip, pop culture analysis and all things to do with the entertainment industry.