taking back the mirror
My own struggle to body love has been long, confusing, and complex. I remember the moment that it donned on me that my value in (other people’s eyes) rested not only in my intellect, personality, wisdom, and kindness, but also in my image. I was 8 years old. With strong Latin genes, the hair on my legs, lower back, and arms became noticeable before I got my first period. My rite of passage into our troubling definition of womanhood began when my body hair turned from gentle and juvenile peach fuzz to dark-brown, grown-woman-hair. The teasing from the boys started. I went home that day and demanded that I be allowed to use a razor to remove the stains on my body. My mother refused, trying to delay the start of the inevitable journey of body dysmorphia and the resulting contouring, molding, plucking, dying, and shaping I and all of my girlfriends would embark upon soon. Several years passed before I was given access to the almighty razor. The day I was allowed the sweet satisfaction of depilation was the ultimate emancipation from the chains my body had secured around me of embarrassment, difference, and shame. I was finally allowed to shape my body the way I wanted, craft my image the way I saw fit. And my image was to be soft, smooth, and hairless. The ultimate freedom… or so I thought. The hair on my body became a personal foe of mine, my enemy, always trying to outwit my army of razors, wax, bleach, Nair, tweezers, sanding paper, and thread. The life long battle with my body had begun.
As the years passed, parts of my body slowly joined in on the battle against me. When I was 12, I learned the correct form my belly was to take after a growth spurt did away with the baby fat that my body had been holding onto for many years due to chronic illness in my childhood. I was congratulated on my weight loss by every friend and adult that saw me. “How in the world did you lose so much weight?” they would ask me. This was the year I learned that ‘weight’ was another one of those magical numbers that factored in to how good you were at being human. I remember it feeling such a foreign concept to me that the physical mass and weight that my body was occupying, measured in pounds and inches, was of any importance at all. I learned quickly, however, that the lower the number, the better, and the less detectable your mid-section, the better people treated you. My diminishing density resulted in intensifying attention, care, compassion, and jealousy, the most valuable currency in the war against the body. I became skilled in eating as little as possible, just enough to keep the pain and fogginess away, and as grew into my teens, I learned that going to the gym enabled me to reach numbers I couldn’t before. As I grew taller, the numbers on the scale shrank and shrank…much to my satisfaction. Everyone congratulated me on my success and self-discipline.
By the time I was 21 I had it down to a science. I knew the exact position my legs needed to be in to look as small as possible as they appeared to rest on the chair, the shape in which to place my spine for minimum waistline and maximum bust, the perfect tilting of the head as I sat in thought to appear effortlessly pensive and beatific, the exact speed and shape at which to move my hands as I spoke to lull the men who listened and gazed on into believing that I was divine, with just a touch of sex. I was a work of art.
And I was in so much pain. My emotional body hurt... The threads of my confidence felt thinner and thinner as my self-worth was being placed in further and further places from my own body. My relationship to my sexuality suffered, and eventually dissolved into nothing. I didn’t feel pleasure anymore, only satisfaction that I had achieved another goal, another conquest for attention, another coin of jealousy from a girlfriend, another number on the scale. My physical body hurt. I had migraines every single day. I had begun grinding my teeth at night from the stress of treating my body as a means to an end, and the lack of experience being witnessed and loved in my full authentic self. I felt increasingly lonely as a result of treating the women I met as competitors and the men I knew as conquests. My entire being was screaming out for a change, for some part of the true me to be allowed out to see the world, to feel strength, to feel big, to feel pleasure in my life again. I wanted to feel worthy. I wanted to feel like I belonged, to feel welcomed by others. I so desperately wanted authenticity.. to embody it and to witness it all around me. So I ran away to find it.
And what I found was sensation. I found pleasure. I found belonging. I found delight in life and in existence. Wonder. I am in awe, constantly, of the vast array of sensation my body is able to produce. That it gifts me every day.
I had embarked upon my pleasure journey.
