Body image is something that everyone needs to deal with at some point; I'm sure even the biggest supermodels in the world have days of feeling inadequate or unsexy.
I am the epitome of frustration because I have lost 50 pounds but I can't tell. I went down from my size-22 jeans to my size-20 and my bras are looser in the cup area, but other than that I haven't seen much difference. I went to try on clothes to find something to wear for the weekend and still bought a shirt in my usual size. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time in the dressing room, wondering where fifty pounds had come from and why I couldn't see it gone. My body is still something that I loathe to the deepest core of my being.
People react in shock when I say that, because I've done erotic modeling before. I've stripped down to corsets and thigh-highs and heels and done sexy poses in front of a camera, and then posted those pictures to the Internet. But the difference was, those pictures weren't me. They were all personas, just like an actor slipping into a role. I can play sex kitten like a harp. I made money doing phone sex audio recordings and I write erotica frequently. So why is it so hard for me to tune into that in real life? Why do I prefer to flirt and then balk back when it looks like things might actually go somewhere?
Things I can't do: I can't have sex with the lights on. Or with any part of me visible, really. I hate my body; we've been at war for what feels like centuries. Every adjective someone else could use on me to hurt, I've used on myself; I've criticized the jiggle of my ass and the way my thighs rub together and the flabbiness of my belly and the size of my arms since I was a kid. I feel insecure in my own skin. In an attempt to make it into something beautiful I began collecting tattoos, ink spiraling up and down my arms, across my chest and back, over my leg and foot, trying to hide the stretch marks and the ugliness. I wanted to see art, not a vast canvas of pure white skin.
Things I can't do: I can't get out of my own head. When I was in fifth grade, a girl named Jeanette said that I was so fat it looked like I didn't have knees. I didn't wear shorts again until I was seventeen years old. Every time I went to try on a pair, I thought about what she said. When I was twenty-three, a girl made fat jokes about me on the Internet. Nearly four years later I sat in my best friend's office, sobbing so hard I could barely talk as I forced the words out and told him why a thousand 'I'm sorry's would never fix anything even if the girl meant it. I watched my mom, one of the most wonderful women in the world, date abusive asshole after abusive asshole, watching them sugarcoat everything and play her like a hand of poker for the first few months, earn her trust, get her to let her guard down before they delivered the killing blow. Each time it happened I made myself tougher, told myself I wouldn't be like that. I went on dates with boys who promised to call and never did, boys who only kissed me when they made me swear I'd never tell anyone--- boys who couldn't be seen dating the fat chick. After years of that it wore my self esteem down to a see-through pane of sugar glass.
Oh, I hid it. I'm a professional at wearing masks. I can laugh and use a tongue borne of a high SAT verbal score to tear someone apart and my friends commend me on being strong. I got up and spoke at my grandpa's funeral and then a few months later, my mom's. Everyone kept saying "You're so strong, you're so strong" and all I could think was What choice do I have? You're not strong if you're backed into a corner. You're just taking the only way out, and if that way out happens to yield a favorable result, then good for me. I'm not 'strong'. I made my friends come take the good drugs out of the house after Mom died because I was afraid there might be a night when the siren call was too strong. I used to cut myself in high school and I still remember how my mom's face looked when she caught me sawing at my wrist with a broken pair of scissors, how she yelled at me about how without me she'd have nothing worth living for. And now she's gone and for a long time after that (and even now sometimes, when my heart hurts so much it feels like someone's kicking me in the chest each time it beats) all I have to keep me from reaching for something sharp again is remembering my best friends, my chosen family, and my grandmother. They're the only people I have left in this world who I trust, the only people I let in. These people have earned their war medals; they've sat with me through my depression and my grief, my anger and my self-doubt. They've led cheers for me when I needed encouragement and beaten my ass into submission when I forgot who I was. And they are the reason the mask slips, when it does. They are the ones who make me feel beautiful or strong or capable, if even for a moment before I remember who I really am.
When you go through an insurance company to get weight loss surgery, they interview you with a psychologist to make sure that you understand that the surgery isn't an 'easy fix', that your problems don't magically go away. I already knew that. My eating has always stemmed from deep-seated emotional issues inside of me; we could blame my dad leaving and my consequent fear of abandonment, for example. We could talk about how it felt to have him show up in my life when I was eight years old, a girl who shared his chubby cheeks and curly brown hair but not his name, and how it felt to have him put his arms around me and fill my head with lies about how much he loved me, how he was here to stay this time. We spent five days together during spring break, him visiting from Florida with his new wife and new daughter, and I met an older half-sister I never knew I'd had, and I thought This is it, this is my family. I was actually angry with my mom for keeping him from me; I was convinced she'd known how to get ahold of him, that she'd chosen to separate me from my father while all of the other girls in my class went to Father-Daughter dances or talked about their dads in their 'My Hero' papers we had to write in class. Then on Day Six when I was supposed to get picked up by him, I sat outside on the bottom steps leading to our sidewalk and waited. After an hour or so had passed, my mom called him, only to be informed coldly by his wife that they'd left the night before to head back to Florida. He'd left me without saying goodbye and his wife said we shouldn't call again, that he didn't want me in his life anymore. I remember realizing that it was my fault; I hadn't been sweet enough or smart enough or good enough. I hadn't made a good enough first impression and he'd realized his mistake in coming to see me; he'd been better off in Florida with his new family, never even knowing how I'd turned out.
Once I'd decided that things were actually sort of easier. I knew then that if my own father couldn't love me, why would anyone else? I stopped caring about myself. I filled notebooks with angry scribbles about how ugly I was, how much I hated myself. I found one recently where I'd written "I WISH I WAS DEAD" all over the page in pen so hard that it had torn through to pages beneath. It was dated 1995, when I was nine. I was full of anger but I had no way to express it. I couldn't tell my mom because I knew how badly she was hurting from it too; I could hear her crying at night. She was single and alone, struggling to raise a child by herself, working sixty hour weeks; she didn't need to know my emotional problems. So I internalized everything. My routine answer was "Fine" when someone asked how I was doing. I lost myself in books, reading because any world besides mine was better. I'd always been a reader but I was well above my grade level, and I was working my way through Stephen King and Anne Rice. People assumed I was just a bookworm and left me alone. I ate because there was this huge hole inside of me and I had no idea what would fill it up but food seemed like a viable option. My mom was a stress-eater; why shouldn't I be? The adults in my life knew I was hurting and so they looked away. When I was picked last for sports or sat out in gym class feigning injury so that I could read on the bleachers instead, no one stopped to correct me. They just let me be alone and thus it began--- an independent streak a mile wide, never having to answer for anything I did as long as it was only to myself. No one cared if I ate myself into a size 22 in jeans by high school; my mom silently led me from the juniors' section to the misses' to the plus sizes, and I watched the other girls run around in their short shorts and tight t-shirts and all of the other things I couldn't wear and wondered how they filled the holes inside themselves.
Now I'm twenty-six and it's fucking dismaying to realize how I haven't grown up, not really. I'm weaker and more fragile now than I think I've ever been before. I have the best friends now that I've ever had in my entire life, but I hate myself for relying on them as much as I do. I've worked with tons of famous people but it's always shadowed after with those inner monologues--- They don't actually like you, they just know you're desperate to be seen in their 'circle' because you're hideous. They hang out with models and actresses and other musicians. What the fuck do you think you're doing here? So I tried to make myself invaluable; I worked tirelessly, overextending myself on multiple jobs at once, busting my ass to prove my worth to someone.
I haven't worked on anything creative of my own since my mother died in July 2012. Before that really, because I wasn't writing when she was sick. But now I just feel anxiety when I open a word processing program. The stories, which have been there all my life and have gotten me through so many hard times, simply aren't there. The poems, the spoken word pieces, all of it's dried up and I stare at the blinking little cursor until the tears in my eyes blur everything and I click the X in the corner. I don't feel inspired or powerful or strong or anything else. I feel weak and small and frail and I've found that the easiest thing to do is curl up in my bed with my music on, letting one of the great songwriters tell me how to feel.
I am not good at being the girlfriend, the socialite, or the therapist for more than a few hours at a stretch. After that I get caught up in my own head and realize how much I just like to be alone with my own thoughts and my own pressure; if I can just focus on my own problems from the safety behind my mask, then nothing external can hurt me. I don't have to worry about losing myself again because I'm not putting that possibility into anyone else's hands, the power rests solely with me. I want to be strong but I keep coming up short.
Things I can't do: believe in myself.
Things I can't do: let go.
Things I can't do: love myself.
Things I can't do: let others love me.
