JoJo’s comeback is finally here. On Friday (October 14), she’s dropping her first record — Mad Love — in a decade. It’s an appropriate title, because she’s all about the self-love in her new personal essay for Motto.

“I will never have a thigh gap,” she wrote. “Nobody has ever worried the wind might ‘wooooosh’ a little bit too hard and knock me down. At 25, I’m a brick house adorned with battle scars and cellulite, curves and confidence. Some days I have abs, sometimes mehhh … I don’t know where they go. And you know what? It’s all good.”

But her confidence wasn’t always this strong. After the success of “Leave (Get Out)” in 2004, she felt like a pawn in Hollywood’s harsh “comparison game.” She worried she wasn’t “skinny, pretty, feminine” enough for the industry.

“I felt like a product,” she explained. “I was told that I didn’t look good enough to sell the music I was making. Other female artists were brought up and my image was compared to theirs. The president of my former label sat me down and told me that losing weight was ‘about my health.’ But we both knew it wasn’t.”

So she dabbled with dangerous weight-loss methods like injecting herself with hormones and hoping to develop an eating disorder. Thankfully, now she’s done with all that and ready to move on with her career the way she sees fit.

Her latest single with Wiz Khalifa, “Fuck Apologies,” sums it up pretty well. You do you, and if anyone has a problem with it, don’t say sorry. There’s absolutely nothing to apologize for.

Read her full essay for Motto here.