Current location:	work
Current mood:	discontent
Current music:	My Chemical Romance - House of Wolves
Entry tags:	emo, life

If you look in the mirror and don't like what you see...
This was inspired by an essay that onceupon wrote, though it's not nearly as positive as hers. If you want an essay about embracing your body, you'll want to look elsewhere.

This isn't easy stuff, and it's not pretty, either. There's a possibility that I might piss a few people off, though that's not at all my intent. So I want to apologize in advance, because I love my friends. It's not them, it's me.

Lastly, I'm leaving this public. I considered locking it, I considered group locking it, but dammit, if my boyfriend is brave enough to leave his personal essays public, then so am I.

That said, it is cut. Because it's long as hell.

There is a red haori that still hangs in my closet. It was given to me by my mother when I was about five or six; when I was that young, it served as a robe I could wear when pretending to be a princess or a martial arts master, depending on my mood. Naturally, I asked her where she got it.

"It was from a campaign," she said. "Back when I was a model. Back when I was pretty."

So years ago, my mama was a model. It was never anything big time - just some promotional work from when she used to work at a mall cosmetics counter. They'd do her up and send her out to pose and point people to whatever latest and greatest product they were shilling. My child mind didn't understand why this still wasn't the case - at the time, my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world. I asked her why she didn't model anymore. She gazed off for a moment.

"Because," she said. "That's when I was thin."

I learned from a very early age what beauty is.

I've never considered myself a beautiful woman. That distinction was always out of my reach, something that was reserved for the tall and blonde in my school classes. And there were plenty of them - growing up in a Wonderbread white town meant that there were plenty of willowy, flaxen-haired, all-American girls running about, each of them looking like the perfect child models you see in Nordstrom ads (and, if memory serves correctly, at least one of them did some modeling). I served not so much as diversity than as contrast: darker complexion, shorter stature, and most notably, a heavier build. Chubby. Stout. Fat.

I learned to hate that last word. Because it not only described me, but it told a story - a story about a stubborn body that refused to change, despite sweat, tears, and more diets than I care to remember. People tell you to love your body, to revel in its shape and feel and curves, but I don't understand that. I never have. How can you love something that is so obviously not right, and refuses to get right? Shopping for clothes became torture as time went on, my mother continually running back and forth from dressing room to rack, trying to find clothes that would fit me properly, tsking and glaring and complaining and rolling her eyes at the increasingly losing propositions. There were diets in grade school, scales in junior high, tape measures in high school, and constant harping on me to exercise and eat right through it all. Again, I was separate. All my other friends could eat what they wanted and remain slender, and I could not.

My view of the other girls shifted from admiration to jealousy to hatred to resentment. In my mind, they were born beautiful by virtue of their thinness. It's a thought that still haunts me to this day, a quiet, simmering knowing in the back of my mind that comes to the fore when I think of my thinner, and therefore more beautiful, friends. I love them all dearly. They're the sisters I never had. I'd endure all manner of torture and agony for them. I'd take a bullet for them, lay down my life for them if it came to that.

But that doesn't mean that part of me doesn't resent them for being what I am not - even when I know it's wrong.

Still, I carried on, since that's what humans do. If I couldn't be thin and beautiful, I'd be something else. My body might be a lost cause, but I still had a perfectly able mind. If I couldn't be pretty, I'd be smart instead.

And though that could be up for debate, I like to think I'm not too shabby in that area. I found my strengths - writing, history, languages, music. I played violin, sang in choirs, took Spanish in high school and Japanese in college. My math skills were usually low, but I cleaned up in every advanced class I took in high school. I could take on one of the smartest guys in our high school class in debates (he's off at law school now - hi, Geoff) and hold my own. Teachers adored me; classmates were awed and a little spooked by my ability to absorb information. I didn't need to fret about looks. That's what I told myself, anyway. I wasn't meant to be beautiful, I was meant to be smart. We're all here for a reason, and mine wasn't to be attractive.

But even with all these accomplishments, my appearance was always in the back of my mind. I continued to gain weight, especially when I was in college. I denied it, ignored it, hoped the problem would disappear, because I didn't want to deal with it anymore. By this point, I regarded my body as a biological machine that kept my brain alive, nothing more. And the machine certainly wasn't doing itself any favors. I'd never particularly cared for by body, but what it was doing now was insubordination bordering on sabotage. When I tried to work out, I would get a strangling bout of asthma. (The closest I have ever come to hitting someone was when a friend suggested that these bouts were merely psychosomatic.) When I tried to keep up with friends in martial arts (don't ask), I would get overheated. And then there were the joints, or more specifically, the right shoulder. The appeal of doing just about anything goes down exponentially when one slip, one wrong move, one stretch or one toss of a ball can result in the screaming, star-seeing, pain-induced hallucination agony brought on by a dislocation. It was the same story from so many years ago. My friends could do things, and I could not. All because of my body.

I hated my body.

Even now, it's an uneasy truce, but back then it felt like the ultimate hostage situation. The brain controls all automatic functions - kill the brain, the heart stops and the body dies. But the body provides oxygen and blood to the brain, that which enables me to cover for my lack in the looks department. Do anything too drastic to the body, and there's a chain reaction that damages and kills the brain. Two people in a small room pointed loaded pistols at each other. And each one knowing that to shoot would be suicide.

I started exercising nightly so I wouldn't be a hypocrite. Plenty of people complain about their weight but do nothing to remedy the situation, and I knew that if I wanted a right to bitch, I at least had to be making an effort to change things so I'd have a legitimate thing to rail against. I have no idea if it works or not - people tell me it has, but I have yet to see any difference myself. Some clothes are looser, some are not. I look better some days than others. I try not to track it, truth be told. I still don't want to deal with it; I just want it to be over.

And I don't understand people who tell me to love my body. It's good for them if they can love their own, but I don't forsee myself loving mine until it's what I've always wanted it to be. Even then, it'll still be blighted - my right shoulder saw to that by breaking down and requiring surgery. Several inches of scar tissue forever serves as a reminder that the body is a machine, one that can break down with no warning. Where is the beauty in that?

Despite all of this though, I've had one hell of a miracle in the past few months. I have a boyfriend - and not just any boyfriend. I have a boyfriend who exceeds expectations, who treasures me and treats me with respect and who shows me on a daily basis that he loves me. I have a boyfriend who, defying all my logic and carefully constructed theories, thinks I'm beautiful. Sexy, even.

And at the same time that that thrills me, it also scares me to death.

Because he's never seen me. All of me, I mean. I've always worn clothes to conceal my body, but I won't have that option in March. I promised I'd teach him to swim, and that means a bathing suit. It means I have nowhere to hide.

Relationships are based on trust and truth, and come March, he'll see the truth.

Sometimes people don't like what they see.

That's not going to stop me, mind you. I'm getting into that pool no matter how I look, because this isn't just some whim. Knowing how to swim is very, very important in my book. Even if it's not your idea of fun, swimming is an effective way to keep yourself from drowning, and accidents do happen. At the lowest common denominator, swimming is like CPR - you may never use it, but you'd better know how to do it. I'll be damned if I let my insecurities keep me from doing this for him.

But it would be a lot easier if I was like everyone else. And so the body I've run from for so long has come back to haunt me.

It's going to be an interesting five months.