Eat the Damn Cake

The great thing about being a writer is that you can be dorky and awkward and clumsy and prone to small but frequent accidents involving ketchup, and none of that matters. What matters is your words. And you write them alone, or potentially in a coffee shop, and the pressure you feel comes from yourself, and not from the world. You don’t have to be cool. You can take twenty minutes on a single witty sentence, and then when someone reads it later, in one second, they might laugh and say, “Damn, she’s clever.”

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The great thing about being a writer is that it doesn’t matter what you look like. What matters is how your mind works. What matters is your sentence structure, and your ability to recreate authentic sounding dialogue on the page. What matters is your mastery of tiny, meaningful observations.

You might not be worldly, but you understand the world around you intimately—deeply. You might not be the life of the party, but you can write a totally convincing party scene.

The great thing about being a writer is that you can be your regular, unimpressive, bad-haired self. And that’s fine.

Except it’s not fine.

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Kate Torgovnick, the fantastic mastermind behind Kate-Book.com (yes, there’s a site for people with my name, because we rule the world), sent me this piece yesterday. It’s about Kates and plastic surgery. Some of the more prominent Kates in our ranks—Kate Winslet, Kate Walsh, and Cate Blanchett (I guess she counts)—are speaking out against it. Kate T joined them, writing:

“I almost see it as if women, as a group, are on strike, trying to push back against the unreasonable beauty ideals that are driving us all freaking insane. Which kind of makes the woman who gets plastic surgery the scab who crosses the picket line. I understand why she does it. But ouch.”

And she sent the piece to me because I write about body image, so I’m probably against plastic surgery, too.

Except it’s a little bit more complicated, because of the two nose jobs.

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It’s taken me a long time to find my perfect dress. Two decades or more. I was probably around five when I started looking. The journey has been strenuous. At times, I’ve almost given up hope. At times, I’ve become so jaded I stopped believing. Sometimes, I took a detour off the winding path and sat at a greasy table in a rest stop cafeteria, eating limp fries and grinding out a sarcastic laugh or two at the thought of my lost innocence. There’s no such thing as a perfect dress. That’s a lie they tell you, to keep you going. That’s a lie they tell you, to keep you complacent. Wake up, little girl. The world is full of lies.

I started out very daring. I didn’t have a perfect dress, but I had a hot pink shiny plastic belt that I wore with everything for years—ages 6- 12 or so. My favorite outfit was tights, a giant green shirt with a picture of a fish on it that I’d won in a fishing competition, and my pink belt. I made clunky yellow  geometric clip on earrings from a kit and wore them, too. I was stylin’.

I wore a too-small shirt with a kitten on it with tights and boots.

I wore overalls. Like my friend Emily is modeling for us, here, in the above picture. Actually, I wore overalls mostly because she was really cool.

Then, in my teens, I became a hippie. Not philosophically (although I was relatively passionate about saving both the whales and the trees, so maybe there was a little of that, too), but for fashion’s sake. I wore flowy green embroidered pants and tunics. I braided my ridiculously long hair. My dresses were loose and multi-colored and they came from a store in Princeton called Madalay, which felt at the time a little like the promised land, and an Indian place in New Hope.

I spent my freshman year of college in enormous red sweatpants and a skin-tight purple shirt that read “Homeschoolers Learn Everywhere.” Because I wanted to make friends.

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Sometimes I think we get too specific about beauty. We think we know exactly what it’s made of.

I can look at my face in the mirror and describe to you at great length exactly what would have to change in order for me to be gorgeous. I am mathematical in my precision. The same with my body. A couple inches added to the length of my calves, a tightening of the skin on my back, a slight adjustment to the shape of my breasts. I am surgical in my attention.

And then I remember that once, I didn’t think of beauty as a string of measurements and numbers and proportions. I didn’t have to think of it, really, because it was obvious that I was it. So, the day before my 26th birthday, I want to pause and remind myself of another side of beauty.

Here are some reasons why I was a gorgeous little girl:

I was smart. I could figure things out.

I had brown hair. Which I thought was the best color.

I had beautiful things. Like an old wedding dress that a tiny great aunt had once worn and a veil that an aunt had worn. I rocked that outfit. I was a princess in it, and not necessarily a bride. I had dresses covered in flowers. I had shirts with trains. I had a dinosaur costume.

I looked different from my friends. Which was important, because I could distinguish my beauty.

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So it’s the last day of Body Image Warrior Week (creation of the fabulous Sally McGraw of Already Pretty), and I wanted to share my contribution with you. You guys have heard this stuff before. But it doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop saying it 🙂 You can also find this piece on the Huffington Post, and on some awesome BIWW blogs. 

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I write about body image because I love eating cake, but women around me are always dieting.

I write about body image because I have been told it doesn’t matter, but every year, more girls have eating disorders.

I write about body image because everyone cares about beauty, no matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t. And because, really, we are beautiful, no matter how much we tell ourselves we aren’t.

I write about body image because I moved to Manhattan, where suddenly everyone was very thin and very careful about eating and always going to the gym and suddenly it occurred to me that I was not thin enough and not pretty enough and very bad at going to the gym.

I write about body image because I noticed that after I noticed that I was maybe not thin enough, I stopped eating some of my favorite foods. They slipped out of my diet. I said no to dessert. I felt guilty when I gave in and made pasta for dinner. I felt guilty all the time, because all the time, I was cheating. There were all of these rules about what I could and couldn’t eat, and how much of it was OK, and I had somehow memorized them without even being aware of it, and now, when I broke them, I was ashamed.

I write about body image because I got a nose job because my big Jewish nose seemed like the opposite of beauty. Because when I told people that famous, beautiful women never have big Jewish noses, they always said, “What about Barbara Streisand?” and that was a long time ago. No one can think of anyone more recent. And also, because when my boyfriend who became my husband told me over and over that my nose was beautiful, I didn’t really believe him, even though I should have.

(me, being sexy with my nose taped, after my second surgery)

I write about body image because people make fun of people who get cosmetic surgery, even though when I got cosmetic surgery, there was nothing funny about it. I hated my face. I wanted to destroy my old face.

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There are parts of my body that I never encounter. The backs of my knees, for example. We have a civil, but distant relationship.

Yesterday, for the first time in maybe a month, I went to yoga again. I had just read this piece, by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano of The Beheld, for Body Image Warrior Week, and I thought that I would definitely draw myself as a connected entity, with a neck that meets with shoulders (you’ll get that if you read the piece).

But at yoga, twisted into a strange position in my unfortunate spot by the radiator, it occurred to me that I actually don’t know my body all that well.

My body feels unpredictable and slightly dangerous to me. It does things I don’t understand. For example, and this is gonna be about menstrual blood, so all boys stop reading here: at the end of my period, it always stops for a day and then comes rushing back for a day, like it missed me and changed its mind.

My body has been known to play mean tricks on me, which might be why I am wary. One day, suddenly, my hair started falling out. Years ago, in college. Before that, I had such thick hair, it would occasionally flex and snap one of those flimsy ponytail holders, showing off. After that, my hair was wispy and apologetic. It never fully grew back, and when I got to New York City, I went to the doctor, and sat on the table, humiliated and determined, and asked him what my options were.

He looked confused. “Options? There aren’t any, really.” But he gave me a prescription for a Rogain knockoff and he ran blood tests. In the convenience store on the other side of Broadway from me, I had to ask the woman behind the counter for the hair loss treatment. She pulled it off the shelf and gave me a long look. “This is for men,” she said firmly.

“I know!” I said. I paid for it, wishing I could just lie and say it was for my boyfriend or my dad or something. But I am never able to lie and will probably die because of it one day, when the pirate lord who has taken me prisoner stands me up on the plank and asks me for the last time if I was trying to start a mutiny and steer the ship over to that island, with the pretty beach and the palm trees. I was!!! I love pretty beaches! I can’t help it! I WILL DIE FOR YOU, PALM TREES!

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(I don’t know where that came from. Sorry.)

The doctor called me. I was severely anemic.

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