Eat the Damn Cake

I was doing laundry in the basement of my building today, crouched over, wearing a fuzzy green hat because my hair under it was epically greasy, and a red plaid shirt, and my period was making me feel like everything about me was gross, and this young, well-dressed guy came in and I sort of half turned, in case he was holding a weapon with which to murder me, but then it turned out he was normal and clean-cut, so I tried to smile instead, but it felt forced and awkward, like my mouth was twisty, and I said, “Hi,” but I hadn’t spoken in a long time, and my voice came out all low and croaky and weird and he didn’t respond, he just kind of raised his eyebrows at me, like, “Um….Oookay.”

And I went back to shoving my dirty underwear into the hole, hoping my pants weren’t sliding down as I bent over.

God, I can’t trust myself at all. Who IS that girl in the green hobo cap? Why is her voice so strangled and strange? Why is she so awkward that other building residents think SHE might be the one with the weapon?

I think of myself as incredibly inconsistent. I never know what’s gonna come out that day. Could be charming. Could be terrifying. Could be clever and cute. Might be The Girl Who Always Almost Forgets The Date of Her Own Birth. You know when you call the doctor to get a prescription renewed and they’re like, “Date of birth?”

It’s like “Hi, I’m just calling to–” “Date of birth?” “Oh! Um– yeah…three,six,eight-six.” For a second my heart speeds up. I think “I forget. Wait. What–Oh, right, I remember.”

That girl lives inside me. All the time. She might come out at any moment.

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There’s nothing like a huge snowstorm and a power outage to remind you how much you need electricity for everything. And how hard it is to feel bad about your appearance by candlelight. Which, naturally, leaves one feeling contradicted. One being me.

I performed a Bar Mitzvah service yesterday morning, at my job in NJ. It started snowing hard in the middle of it. Everyone was turning to look out the window. The kid handled it really well. He was like, “God likes me.” And by the time I got to my parents’ house in the afternoon, the car was beeping like crazy as I nearly slid off the road. Not helpful, car, I notice that I’m sliding off the road.

“OK,” I thought, as I slid. “This might be the end.” I think I’m actually very good in near-death moments. Even though I’m, in general, terrified of dying.

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I’ve decided. I want to be old, sloppy, and look ridiculous in a bikini. I want to have a stain on my shirt that looks suspiciously like ketchup. I want to keep all the weight I’ve gained over the years. I want to prove that that is the look of success.

I heard they dressed some of the Occupy Wallstreet protestors up in suits and cut their hair, and then suddenly people took them a lot more seriously. I want to be the opposite. Except for the hair cutting– that’s fine. I want to go the other direction. And be taken seriously.

When I get old, or even considerably older, I want to look my age. I want to wear big, comfortable clothes. I want to never wear anything I don’t feel like wearing. I want to forget to look in the mirror, even when there’s something in my teeth. I don’t want this to make me quirky or eccentric or gross. I want it to be the way life works.

I want to be better at everything when I’m old. Better at knowing what really matters. Better at appreciating myself. Better at being nonjudgmental. Better at doing the things I love and being around the people I want to be around.

And at the same time, I’m scared of being old, sloppy, and ridiculous looking in a bikini. I’m scared of weight. People talk about baby weight “After my third kid, there’s no WAY I was losing that weight.” Oh shit, I think. Should I have kids?

I keep getting the impression that getting older successfully means looking like you’re not getting much older. Which usually means fighting a desperate, constant, losing battle against biology. From a distance, it looks a lot like having a terminal illness. And in a way, I guess it is. You fight every day, putting yourself through painful procedures and grueling exercise regimens, and then, eventually, the things you’ve been staving off overwhelm your body. And that is that.

I don’t want to waste my time.

A reader sent me this little clip. (I could probably embed the video so it looks better, but for some reason I forget how and I don’t have enough time to figure it out.) In it, the peppy announcer is praising Jennifer Love Hewitt for getting back on track. As in, losing weight, and keeping a young-looking body. “She’s back from the dead!”

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This is a guest post from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous. Here are a few things about her that she’s comfortable with me sharing: she is 27, lives on the Jersey Shore, works in the mental health field, and recovered from an eating disorder (she’s co-authoring a book about it). Here’s what I want to say about her: she is really, really cool. We’ve been having an email correspondence for a while, and I asked her to write something for the blog. Here is what she wrote:

I recall a conversation that I overheard when I was six or seven years old.  My aunts, my dad’s sisters, were talking. They all would have been in their 30s or early 40s at the time.  They were are all relatively successful (and relatively thin).  So, I hope, at this point, that you are assuming that these women were discussing politics or their families or the meaning of life or anything other than what they WERE talking about: diets.

I did not hear the entire conversation, but I heard enough.  What I remember is that my favorite aunt (favorite because she lived next door and I saw her most often) described her food intake for a day, at least for a “good” day.  She said that she drank 16 ounces of skim milk for breakfast, ate a dressingless garden salad for lunch, and then allowed herself to have a “normal dinner” at night with her boyfriend.  I wish I did not remember these things.  I shouldn’t, I guess, considering that my memories of second grade are few and far between.  But I do.  And I also remember asking this aunt, who probably didn’t realize that I was listening to the conversation at all, “Aren’t you hungry?  I mean, eating like that?” And I remember her reply, just as clearly as I remember picking up batteries from a local pharmacy yesterday.  She said, looking sadder and more serious than I had ever seen her, “Yes, ALL the time.”

It’s hard to explain how I felt, hearing this as a little girl.

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A teenage reader named Maggie left a great comment on one of these posts the other day. She was talking about how feeling bad about the way she looks is confusing, because she is growing up in a great environment where people aren’t focusing on appearances. Her attempt to lose weight disgusted her, but then she felt terrible about gaining the weight back. Why? How can those things go together?

Yup. Exactly.

My mom is surprised that I write about this stuff. Why would I? I was always told I was pretty as a kid. But, more importantly, I grew up in a world that wasn’t about looks. It was about learning, and developing a fulfilling skillset, and figuring out what about the world needed fixing, and then trying to help with that. I grew up reading stacks of books and playing in the forest out back and building forts with my brothers and my friends.

So why am I writing about my nose so much?

My mom is confused. I’m confused. I’m embarrassed. Maybe I should concentrate on the stuff that matters.

It’s embarrassing to be the girl who admits to feeling insecure about something that really smart girls shouldn’t be thinking about. If I was smarter, I would have already figured out that this stuff doesn’t really matter. That’s the message. It’s a lot like the message about confidence.

When Deborah Rhode wrote a piece about how damaging high heels can be in the New York Times, she received enraged responses. “This is NOT what we should be talking about!! There are real issues that women face every day! Fashion is not one of them.”

Sometimes when I tell people I write about beauty, I feel like I need a disclaimer. And then I can’t think of one.

So it’s like, “What’s your blog about?”

“Um, like, body image and beauty and…you know…life.”

“Oh. Cool! That sounds…cool.”

“Yeah, thanks. It’s pretty fun.”

“Yeah, I can see how that would be pretty fun.” *PAUSE* “So, like, does anyone pay you to do that or anything?”

I don’t know why I compare myself to other women. I don’t know why I’m affected by the eternal implied Beauty Standard. I don’t know why I look at my face so critically in the mirror and wonder why it isn’t different and fantasize for a second that if it was a little different, everything would be  so much better.  I don’t know why I categorize myself. I don’t know where I’m getting all of the rules.

It feels uncreative to say, “Society. You know, it’s just out there. The media.”

But the thing is– it is just out there. And somehow, gradually and persistently, I’ve picked it up. Like a virus that keeps adding to itself.

It’s in the  face that models always seem to have, even when they have slightly different bodies. It’s in the body type that’s famous. It’s in the constant barrage of weight loss ads and books and articles that I can’t go three steps without running into. It’s in the family photos passed around, where people always point out the “pretty one.” Even when she’s three years old. And the casual way guys approve of girls if they’re hot enough and dismiss them if they aren’t. It’s in the air.

And none of these things are totally consistent.

But they’re all totally real.

A smart girl picks up on it.

It sticks.

I don’t want to have to explain why I think about this. As though, obviously, I shouldn’t. Obviously, women like me should have moved on. We have serious interests. We work hard. We have a life.

But, obviously, how can I not notice?

I just got back from Bear’s business trip. After Miami, we went to London, and then Amsterdam. Every day, he had meetings for most of the day, and I wrote and wandered. It was a little blissful. It was my first time in that part of the world. I’m not well-traveled. Or even close. I felt amazed. I tried not to gawk. I tried not to get hit by a bike. And then another bike, and then another bike. I have this weird phobia about getting hit by a bike that I was forced to overcome, then and there, before I could cross the street.

I was charmed by the different taste of the diet coke, and how the cans were smaller. I was looking for the slight differences everywhere. And everywhere I went, I saw the same images of feminine beauty. The same faces. Sometimes the same models, even, from a Victoria’s Secret campaign. I saw the same body type on the tram stops and billboards. I saw the same thing.

It wasn’t that I expected it to be different.

But a smart girl, any girl, any girl at all can’t help but notice.

(source)

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I was reading this chick lit book on the plane. I secretly like chick lit a lot (as long as the grammar is good). I don’t let myself read it very much. Because I am young, foolish, and married, I like books with “husband” in the title. Which I am the slightest bit proud of, because I feel like it somehow helps balance all the interest in books with “wife” in the title. That’s like the most subtle type of subversion ever. Ever. Lame.

Anyway– I was reading this book with “husband” in the title, and hoping that the main character wasn’t going to go back to the ex-boyfriend, now that he was famous and stuff, and then the best friend popped up, rooting for her at every turn. The main character wrote for a newspaper and the best friend, who was of course drop-dead gorgeous, a successful lawyer, and super upbeat, wrote letters to the editor all the time, about how great her friend’s writing was.

And suddenly I felt bad. A little empty.

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