Serena Williams is, hands down, one of the greatest athletes of all time — with the most Grand Slam match wins EVER — not to mention one of the most influential people in the world. Yet, haters have still found a way to target her. But in a new interview with The Fader, she’s opening up about how she deals with them — and it’s one more reason she’s the definition of goals.
“I’ve purposely tuned people out since I was 17,” Serena tells The Fader. “At the time, it was basically newspapers and maybe a website article. Maybe if the web was up back then. Since the day I won the U.S. Open, my very first Grand Slam, I never read articles about myself. If I saw my name mentioned, I’d look away. I looked at the pictures, but that’s pretty much it. I didn’t want to get too cocky, and at the same time I didn’t want to have that negative energy. I don’t know why I did it, but I did it. Ever since then I’ve been really low-key.”
Serena prescribes to the belief that living well begins with loving yourself — and the rest is just noise. “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, because that’s what’s going to permeate the room I’m sitting in. It’s going to make you feel that I have confidence in myself whether you like me or not, or you like the way I look or not, if I do. That’s the message I try to tell other women and in particular young girls. You have to love you, 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.”
Mic drop.
Head over to The Fader to read the rest of Serena’s cover story.
This isn’t the first time Serena has talked about handling body shamers and loving her body. She recently told SELF that “I love my body, and I would never change anything about it. I’m not asking you to like my body. I’m just asking you to let me be me. Because I’m going to influence a girl who does look like me, and I want her to feel good about herself.”
And then, of course, who could forget her amazing response at a recent press conference to a reporter who said “there will be talk about you going down as one of the greatest female athletes of all time”? Serena’s response was absolutely perfect: “I prefer the words ‘one of the greatest athletes of all time.'”
This post was originally published on Teen Vogue.
