Shiny Bits of Foil

A colleague on the net borrowed some of my words (with permission) for his site’s page on body image. Today, I got this email:

I’ve finally started uploading my new website, called Self Help Collective, and though I would let you know that I’m using your words (as you said I could) on this page about self image – http://www.selfhelpcollective.com/self-image.html

I hope the words I’ve used are okay.

And, if you have time, I’d more than welcome your feedback in general on this particular topic of body image, especially as it applies to women. Unless it depresses you too much…

Depressing? No, not exactly. Despair is more like it, to see how far we haven’t come since I was in school half a life ago.

Let me tell you who I am, based on what I heard during my childhood:

Ugly
Lazy
Dorky
Untouchable
Socially Contagious
In the way
Unlovable
Clueless
Smelly
Loser
Prey

Being smart, naturally skinny and lucking out with good skin were about the only things I had going for me, if reliably ruining the curve and having a figure like Gilligan’s can be seen as assets in high school. How much have I shaken free of? Not so much as I’d like, by a long shot.

I can look back at my old photos from school and see that I was not hideous (dorky, okay, yeah…not much I can say about that other than guilty as charged). And that’s the thing – I look back and am sometimes amazed at how beautiful I really was, given how much I hated the way I looked. I hated my fine, limp hair during “big hair” 80’s, big glasses, crooked teeth…see, I can still rattle off my flaws like it was yesterday. Which sometimes it still is. But I could never see that beauty at the time. All the mirror kicked back was just how not fashionable, not perfect, not even remotely attractive by my social group’s standards I was.

And even today, I sometimes have as much trouble seeing my own beauty now as I did then. Certainly far more often than I would like, even though I know (based on this experiment of seeing it in the past) that my own current assessment of how I look is almost assuredly as skewed as my previous assessments were. The long term effects of full-immersion loathing, they suxxor.

I’ve come up with a lot of ways of dealing with it. For one thing, I just don’t look in the mirror all that much. As a geek, primping (in terms of doing makeup and hair) just isn’t a part of my day. Most days I just dunk my head under the faucet to erase any bedhead and call it a day, so there’s little need to spend time glass-gazing beyond a quick check to make sure my hair is doing something that looks intentional and I’m not going to scare small children on the street. But on a deeper level, I know that the longer I look, the more flaws I’ll see (real or imaginary), so I just don’t.

As long as I don’t look, I can maintain my own rather kinder mental image of myself that is just as skewed as the one I see in the mirror, but thankfully to the other side. In my head I’m sharper and more elfin of feature and far more elegant than I am in real life, rather like one of those pixie anime girls, and that’s just fine. As long as I’m not disabused of that image, I can act and live as though it’s true. But if I have to spend appreciable time looking at myself in the glass, all I can see are the crooked teeth, the round nose, the weak chin with reinforcements creeping up on it from below (an artifact of my current weight that, annoyingly enough, really wouldn’t even be visible if I had one really solid chin to begin with).

I even get a bit of brief body panic about my current weight, even though I much prefer it over my previous skinny version. And that’s what’s so startling – I like the way I look and feel now, way better than back in the day. But the social equivalence of thinness with attractiveness and worth is so beaten into all of us, myself included, that even with a positive body image, any hint of curvature causes minor panic.

Let me restate that, so it’s clear: I have a positive body image. I feel lush and full and sexy, rather than sharp and edgy like I used to (and I’m not cold all the time, YAY!). Hubby loves my curves. I love my curves. And yet, when I catch a sideways glimpse in the mirror and don’t see the figure of a lithe gymnast pre-teen that we’re all supposed to hold as ideal, even I feel a brief moment of panic, disgust and loathing at my fatness, before my brain re-engages and smacks the feeling down.

Yeah, fatness. Folks, I’m 5′8″ with a medium frame and an evenly distributed curvy figure (big boobs, round butt, defined waist). Being a size 14-16 at that height ain’t elfin, sure, but it ain’t fat, either. My waist/hip ratio is within a very few points of the medical ideal – .77 instead of .70. I have a wee bit of abdominal fat that worries me, health-wise, but other than that I love and am in love with my body (and I love my belly, too, I just realize it needs to be addressed for health purposes, since it’s likely to be made up of unhealthy visceral fat). But when I look in the mirror, I don’t see lush, curvy femininity. I see fatness. Because that’s what society has trained me to see my shape as, no matter how hard I consciously refuse to play along.

So, I don’t look. Luckily, I have a life and a personality that works with me on this. (Wanna hear something even weirder? When I look at myself sans mirror, just looking at what I can see from my own head-mounted visual perspective, I don’t see fatness. I see the lush, sexy, curvy chica I feel that I am. It’s only the mirror that tries to assassinate my happiness. That is weird.)

Another way I cope is simply by dint of having survived. There’s nothing like surviving 12 years of derision, ridicule and torment by the general public to develop a complete disinterest in what the general public thinks and says about you. The key here is surviving. Not everyone who manages to be thrown clear of high school (or any other self-esteem-killing environment) actually survives the ride. Many are permanently scarred for life and missing large chunks of their psyche, gaping wounds ripped out by schools of sharks attracted to the smell of blood in the water. Others spend what’s left of their lives living in the hell others have created for them, never able to escape the event horizon of their own (externally originated) self-hatred.

Luckily, I managed to survive mostly intact, although I have a few bite marks that are still visible if you know where to look. Fortunately, I was born with what I’ve termed a “psychic tattoo” on my personality that basically said, “Fuck this shit.” It was my mantra through most of my craptastic childhood and it’s how I managed to spin free of my martyr-centric cherophobic¹ family, my rurally-isolated and abusive upbringing, and my school-years “Lord of the Flies” socialization to become the independent-minded, self-sustaining dynamo of “I reject your reality and substitute my own” functionality that I am now.

It takes a lot of courage, strength and near-weapons-grade hubris to swim upstream against this salmon run of conformity and mob rule, and it’s not for the faint of heart. Luckily, my heart gave up fainting early on and started strategically hardening into the form of a laser-mounted Mad Max cruiser with an Enterprise-grade forward deflector array that I can repolarize at will for tactical offensive maneuvers. (Ima chargin’ mah lazerzzz!)

But not everyone can do that, or shares my own willingness and ability to so thoroughly cast themselves adrift from family and society to go it alone on their own bootstrapped magic carpet ride. And that’s why it’s such a despair-inducing process to watch the videos Steve has linked to his site. Because I recognize my younger self in these girls. I recognize the obsessive mirror-peering, the absence of positive feedback, the need to fit in whatever the cost. My heart completely broke at the point when the anorexia survivor started talking about how things changed once she started losing weight – people started talking to her, asking her questions, behaving as if she was actually there. You wanna know why girls today kill themselves trying to be thin? That’s why. You’re a normal weight or, God forbid, overweight and you simply don’t exist. You lose the weight and BAM – all of a sudden everyone wants to be your friend. I’m sorry, parents, no amount of “it’s what’s inside that counts” is going to be able to overcome that reality. And trust me, from one who knows, that attention is like crack. It’s more addicting than anything else they will ever experience this side of methamphetamines. And maybe not even then. As a parent, you don’t stand a chance. As a girl, neither do they.

So yeah, it’s a bit depressing. It makes me glad I got out when I did, because from what I can see the pressure is so much worse than it was even when I was in school. And there are so many more opportunities to get lost in the loathing, what with the internet and 24/7 cable channels piping social norms (and usually unhealthy avenues to achieve those norms) directly into their brains from the moment they’re propped in front of the tv as a toddler.

I survived. And I’ve managed to thrive, despite society’s best efforts to put me in my place as the ugly girl who needs to just get her ugly, offensive self out of the way of the Golden Ones before she gets hurt. But I have my scars, my tics, my rituals. Like any sorceress worth her pixie dust, I lay on the protective wards and words with a heavy hand before venturing out into the untamed wilds, and even then I sometimes come home bedraggled and besmirched with troll-prints and smelling faintly of brimstone. But I manage. And sometimes I even win.

I hope the girls I see in those videos find a way to win, too.

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1. fear of gaiety or happiness [↩]

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Tags: beauty, body image, image