The waking up part of the story
by Zoeyjane
The post I wrote for the Blogger Body Calendar site was published on Story Bleed yesterday. I would be understating it to say that I feel lucky to have been asked to guest-post for BBC in the first place, and I’m doubly so touched for the syndication on Story Bleed – a site I troll regularly knowing that I’ll find writers. To be included in that group… my mind is just blown and happy and inside of me is a five year old girl who is joyously dancing like she just got a pony for her birthday.
A pony with ribbons in its mane.
And the comments have been lovely and so supportive. And the twitter has been lovely and so blush-inducing. And Jane Devin – a writer if there ever WAS one, said this:
so, here’s how it went:
One day last January, I woke up sane. I felt sane, that is. I probably wasn’t – given all of my acronyms, that would be very Awakenings – but there was a brief time of clarity and sanity and absence of all of the shit, you know?
When I realized it, it hit me like both a pallet of cobblestones and in flashbacks. Do not take the brown acid married with buried alive and happy about it. It was lovely*.
So, on this day that I was trapped by stone, and I was tripping out of my skull on the memories, I was standing in front of the mirror. The full-length mirrored door on my hallway closet.
I do that. I stand in front of the damn thing probably 30 times a day, depending on how low or high my self-esteem is, and how long I’ve been awake for. I do it more when I’m confident, because, I suppose, I’m trying to etch into my mind what I look like then – like me, as always – during a time when that means something better than horrible.
When it’s a bad day, I pass by it and I look for just a second and then I turn away; when it’s a good one, I stare and stare and look for something to hold onto and something to insult. I stand until what I see seems wrong again. I stand until a voice tells me that vanity is disgusting and that even if it wasn’t, I’m not deserved of it.
I stand there, when Zoë’s not watching. When I don’t think it will affect her, to see me standing there, examining fine details. When I know her teeth grinding mid-dream will not be tainted by me staring at my waistline or the protrusions of my hip bones.
When it’s safe to be fucked up about this shit, because it’s not marring her ability to be in love with her reflection.
Because this girl?
Has absolutely nothing to ever worry about. She’ll break hearts, by blinking.
This girl falls over while putting on her coat, because she, a very Leo-ian Leo, if ever there was one, is so busy loving her image in the mirror.
I’m so terrified of fucking that up for her, you have no clue.
Anyway, I stood, on this remission day, in front of that damned mirror and I turned in the way that I used to get paid to turn. Modelling taught be three things: everyone has a price and there are some really sick fucks who will go searching for yours; how to pose, to give the illusion of impressive breasts, thin thighs, high cheekbones and a shapely, but not large, ass; and I like(d) speedballs.
Point being, I know the right angles to look ‘my best’. I rarely use them when it might matter, like during some enforced photograph moment, but goddamn if I can’t make me look 10 pounds lighter with a simple reorganization of my tongue in my mouth.
So, me and the mirror and the light falling well and I guess I probably had at least a day’s remnants of makeup caked under my eyes and I was probably in the blue pajama pants – the ones that Zoë picked out for me that are too large, but don’t create any sort of sausaging when I cinch their ribbon at my hips. And I probably had on a tank top. No, I’d wager my black wife-beater. I figure this because that’s my not-sucky-looking pj outfit, the one that makes me look like a hard-body yoga instructor.
Like I used to be.
So, I maybe noticed the need to exfoliate and coat myself in lotion and considered that I should consider shaving my legs. I don’t do that very often. It’s more like a maybe than a given. I maybe noticed that my hair needed a root touch-up, and that my bangs were verging on not being bangs anymore. It’s likely that I decided that I needed an eyebrow tint and wax, but wouldn’t make an appointment for weeks thereafter.
That’s in the first glimpse.
The second really focuses on compartmentalizing. It notices the curve of the bottom of my hips, one that advertises that they’ve spread while growing children. It sees that curve cut off abruptly, where mere bone is chiseled and it doesn’t taper into a waist, like a woman is meant to. It juts.
It focuses on the ribs, next, and how, when slightly bent over, they ripple from under skin that looks so stretched, it could burst. It sees spinal evidence and it blinks because it’s never mastered the art of winking suggestively. It sees the collar bones that could become home to small rodents, and the sternum that stands out when I breathe in deeply and it sees the breasts that, while beautiful, are obvious appendages on top of the cage that houses marred organs.
The neck, so long and stringy. The jaw, so sharp and curved. The cheeks, hollow, yet full. The expanse of my face, wide, hinting of my native blood. The eyes, large, haunted, tired and ever-so scrutinizing. The hair, which has a mind of its own, just the like rest of me and my life does.
Within about one minute, I have a list of everything that screams dramatic about me. Everything ethereal and hard and soft and wrong and right.
In this remission, I can’t find fat. I can find soft, but not fat. I still have stretch marks, but they’re from a pregnancy whose main trait was that I looked like I had eaten a basketball half-way through it. I still have cellulite, but that’s not a marker for failure, so much as one of genealogy. I have short, thin, invisible eyelashes still, but that is because I was born a blonde. I have nails that split and grow inconsistently, but that doesn’t define my beauty.
On this day of awakening, I can see beauty in my large eyes and dimpled smile and the industriousness of my body. Then came the flashbacks.
The hairdressers who told me that my face wasn’t round and I didn’t have fat cheeks. Boom.
The person in the change room, telling me that I was wearing the smallest size that they carried as I held up the jeans that were sliding down. Bam.
The people who used the actual word Beautiful, even though I was already fucking them. Or even though they had no responsibility or relationship to me and wouldn’t get anything in return. Those faces, who I’ve, at best, considered poor-of-taste. Whoosh.
The photos of me, that if someone scaled up the clothes and photoshopped in a different face and I saw them, I’d think fabulous. Screech.
That’s what hit me the most – that it wasn’t my body I hated, and that it wasn’t my face, it was the knowing. Knowing it was me.
So, on that day of remission, I woke up feeling sane. And I knew that feeling fat while standing in a change room with jeans falling off was insane. And I knew that all of those people, the hairdressers and lovers and friends and acquaintances had nothing to gain from me not feeling ugly. And I knew that, man, I just couldn’t rely on myself to see what was right there in front of me.
So, I woke up to the fact that I’d been hallucinating.
Maybe I don’t feel beautiful. And some days, I still feel weighted down with edema. Maybe I don’t look in the mirror and see a 7 or whatever is the appropriate number to profess myself uncomfortable with being. And some days, I still want to whittle myself down to a cool 80 pounds. Back when the high of being in control and shaky and dizzy meant that there was goodness in my day and allowed me to phase out of what was actually in my day.
But, the point is, my dears, I woke up and knew that I had it wrong.
I was just fucked up on ether.
* Lovely is the word of the day, if you haven’t picked that up yet.
