Serena Williams Reveals How She Managed to Cope With Constant Body-Shaming Since She Was 15

Serena Williams has won 23 Grand Slam singles titles with 4 consecutive Slams in a row, and despite that, she still faces many negative comments about her athletic figure. It all began on the very first day she was in the public eye and still continues today. Yet, she somehow figured out how to filter out the bad from the good at an early age, and now shares with us how she managed to do that.

People started to criticize her appearance from the very beginning.

The tennis star says she’s been body-shamed basically since a very young age. “I liked how I looked until I got in the public eye,” she recalls, “and then it became this different conversation. ... Suddenly, I didn’t like who I was.”

She was 15 when it all started, and it took her a while to figure out what to do with it — it wasn’t overnight. “As I got older,” she says, “I understood that this is me. I love who I am. I love how I look and my body. It created all these opportunities for me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

She managed to find a way to not let public opinions influence her life.

She started to purposefully tune people out when she was just 17. And at the time, it was basically newspapers and website articles. She even stopped reading headlines if they were about her. If she saw her name mentioned, she would just look away.

Williams didn’t know why she did it — it was mostly an intuitive decision. Yet, nevertheless, it helped a lot. Of course, she could look at her pictures but that was pretty much of it — she didn’t want to ever have that negative energy in her life.

Between the public and her own opinions, she always chose the latter.

Soon she found out that the only opinion that mattered was her own. “People have been talking about my body for a really long time,” she says. “Good things, great things, negative things. People are entitled to have their opinions, but what matters most is how I feel about me.”

She chose to have confidence in herself, whether anybody liked the way she looked or not. She personally liked her body, and that was what was important. And that’s the message she tries to relay to other women, in particular young girls.

She fully embraced her body and tries to inspire others to do the same.

Learning to love herself helped Williams feel comfortable. “You have to love you,” says Williams, “and if you don’t love you no one else will. And if you do love you, people will see that, and they’ll love you too.”

She even showed up in Beyoncé’s video “Sorry” where she opened up about her femininity, vulnerability, self-respect, and self-confidence without any words. And she looked really great in it!

After the video, people divided into “she’s too strong,” and then “she’s too sexy,” and then “she’s too strong” again. “So I’m like, well, can you choose one?” says Williams. “But either way, I don’t care which one they choose. I’m me, and I’ve never changed who I am.”

She tries to become an encouraging mother to her daughter too.

In September 2017, Williams gave birth to her daughter and that made her write an open letter to her own mom. In this letter, she thanked her for giving her the courage to stand tall in the face of criticism and hate speech.

She wrote that looking at her daughter, she saw she had her arms and legs, her exact same strong, muscular, powerful, sensational arms and body. She doesn’t know how she would react if her baby had to go through what she’s gone through since she was 15 years old. Yet, she says, “I hope to teach my baby how to endure all the hardships.”

She insists we should be proud to be who we are no matter what.

“I’ve been called a man because I appeared outwardly strong,” says Williams. It has even been said that she uses different boosters to look this way. She’s been told that she doesn’t belong to women’s sports because of that, and so on.

Anyway, she is proud she was able to show them all what some women look like. “We don’t all look the same. We are curvy, strong, muscular, tall, small, just to name a few, and all the same: we are women and proud!” And that’s the attitude we can all learn from this spirited woman!