Dascha Polanco Talks Overcoming Her Issues with Body Positivity

Dominican-born actress Dascha Polanco is known for flaunting her curves and spreading body positivity through her social media channels, but she recently opened up about how her confidence didn’t come easy.

“All this time that I felt that I was alone and hidden, and I felt like ‘Yo, no one is going to understand what I’m going through.’ Now is beautiful time because there are so many people out there that reach out and they’re like ‘Yo, how are you so confident?’ I’m like ‘Yo, in reality, my confidence is not confidence,” she told HOLA! USA while celebrating National Rum Month with the Bacardi Limited Premium Rum Portfolio in NYC. “It’s me having my, life I like to call myself, my night suit on when I’m out because I won’t allow my pride and who I am, I’m my kid’s parent, I won’t let anyone put me down. I can put myself down if I want to, but no one else is going to.”

The 36-year-old mother of two has just two words in her Instagram bio: “Thundah Thighz.” Her feed is full of dazzling photos, among them, one her son Aryam took which garnered a lot of attention. “Honestly I hesitated so much to post that picture because I hadn’t worked out in such a long time,” she confessed to the publication though nonetheless, she’s proud of her “butt ripples.”

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Then she goes on to say that she’s come to understand that sometimes her body is going to “look great” and other times when it might not, it’s still okay. “Learning to love yourself is just like learning to love someone in a relationship. You don’t like every single thing about them, but you love them. You can love yourself without liking everything all the time,” she told Women’s Health last year.

Having worked in the industry now for several years she’s grown to love her body despite the notoriously high standards in Hollywood. Life is short, Polanco says, so why not love yourself, your life, and your body in all its glory? “Tomorrow we’re here [and] tomorrow we’re not and who the f-ck gives a f-ck. Everybody keeps on going and nobody gives a f-ck,” she told Hola!

Now that she’s wrapped the last season of Orange Is the New Black, she’s focusing on her next project, a film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, as a new character named Cuca. 

No doubt that through it all she’ll continue to not only remind herself but other women that self-love doesn’t require perfection.

“I think it’s not a moment of us resisting it’s a moment of us supporting one another evolving. Knowing the balance of what to accept. It’s okay for somebody to hold the door for you. You deserve for that door to be held. We birth,” Polanco told Hola! “We are queens. Embrace every part. What you don’t like you fix. What you can’t fix you love and f-ck it.”