Julia,

With respect, I’m not sure what your definition of “deserve” is because it’s certainly not the one I learned. As the Cambridge dictionary defines it, “Deserve” is: to have earned or to be given something because of the way you have behaved or the qualities you have.

I did read the entire article and I gleaned your message to my understanding. Your ideas of body positivity are there – as I said in my original comment, though you completely ignored it – this use of the word “deserve” is very much troubling. And I will stand by it, though you seem to be quite agitated by my pointing it out. Perhaps there’s some baggage there too. No one likes to be called out.

There are no other connotations I can discern from the use of the word “deserve,” other than: you earned your body through your actions. And it’s not an untrue statement in some cases. But, I guess you’re under the impression that there’s some higher force who gives us our bodies to what… teach us a lesson?

Maybe you have a large body of work. Congratulations on being so prolific. But perhaps getting defensive in this instance says more about you than it does about me.

As writers, our word choice matters. A lot. Connotations and implications matter. And we can’t expect our readers to have the same understanding of a specific idea as we do. You clearly have this idea of what deserves means in your mind, but you didn’t take the time to lay out that idea and left it up fully for interpretation. If it doesn’t get read the way you want it to, then you’ve left out a key component of this article.