Ugliness As Self Reclamation

When I am having a bad day, a fat day, a day on which I feel as if everyone is staring at me and judging my body, as if I am public property, I put on a baggy tshirt and my oldest, comfiest jeans. Sometimes, when I feel like my life is out of my own control, I shave my head or add piercings. I don’t always get positive comments (everything from “you look like a prepubescent boy” to “this is the last piercing right?”), but somehow it always manages to make me feel better.

Beauty is almost always performative for me. I don’t care what I look like more often than not. Oh sure, I don’t like having my hair sticking straight up or getting my skirt stuck in my leggings so that everyone can see my undies, but past a basic level of presentability I don’t care. Beauty has always been about how others see me. I put on a dress and wonder what others see when they look at me. I cut my hair short and thrive on the comments about how adorable I am. But when left to my own devices, I just spend twenty minutes poking at the fat around my waist and ignore anything else.

There is something liberating about hiding my body.

I feel like I’ve stolen away to somewhere that belongs to me, even if that place is just an oversized sweatshirt. I feel like I’m at once invisible and also throwing the finger up at anyone who demanded anything from me. No, I won’t grow my hair to anything like feminine, and I won’t put on my skirts and dresses today, and I will never wear makeup, and I will be comfortable. Because this body is mine not yours, and because I get to do as I choose with it. I get to mark it in every way, permanent or not, that I choose, whether or not someone else sees it as ugly or trashy or bad.

Being ugly is reclaiming myself.

Oh sure, I’m not conventionally unattractive. I’m white and thin and symmetrical enough that I’ve never gotten the crap that lots of people do. It’s a privilege to be able to slip into an unfeminine obscurity. But hell does it feel good to remind people that I don’t owe them the performance, the work of adjusting my posture and sucking in my stomach, of keeping on the leggings that pull everything in just a little too much.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I left scars on myself was so that people would have to look away, so that I would have an excuse to cover. Even when I am living in the distortion of depression, I know that what I want is to say that this is mine, this body, the way it looks or doesn’t look. Some people find it empowering to be beautiful. They dress up and feel confident. When I leave the house in sweats and a ratty old t-shirt, I feel untouchable. I have made it clear that I give exactly 0 fucks about the people around me and what they think of me, I have chosen to keep my concerns about my size and acceptability out of the public sphere by simply covering them and keeping them private.

Even for people who enjoy fashion and beauty, attractiveness is something that society demands. It’s a way for the world to exert power over you and your body by saying that there are better and worse ways to be. I love feeling as if I’m actively choosing to do something that I’ve been told not to. It’s a juvenile impulse, but one that all of us need at times in our lives, especially when the rules around us are harmful and arbitrary. It’s the land where farms are barren of fucks to grow, where we do things because we want to instead of because we feel some pressure to adjust the most basic parts of ourselves to a larger standard.

It feels good to recognize that I feel like I belong to myself alone when I choose to dress down or let the world see my ugly side. It feels so good not to care.

Cross Cultural Eating Disorders

It’s commonly held knowledge that eating disorders are a Western phenomenon. They came about because of beauty standards, small models, and photoshopping. They’re on the rise! Panic! It’s an epidemic!

Only this isn’t necessarily supported by a hard look at the data. One of the problems with assessing whether or not eating disorders exist in other cultures is that the diagnostics for the disorders were developed in the US and Western Europe, leading to a focus on the presentations that we tend to see in those places. As an example, one of the diagnostic criteria for anorexia is “Intense fear of gaining weight or becoming fat, even though you’re underweight.” While this is the motivation for many people to refuse food, it is not true of everyone who displays many of the symptoms of anorexia, and may simply have different motivation.

There are a few different sources of data that contradict the idea that eating disorders are culturally bound or that they are caused by Western beauty ideals. We can look at history or we can look to minorities or other countries that may not have been wholly influenced by Western concepts.

Historically, we have strong evidence that people have been choosing to starve themselves for hundreds of years. The book Fasting Saints and Anorexic Girls traces the history of self starvation from the earliest records through to the first recognition of eating disorders as psychiatric conditions. While the book suggests that these are distinct phenomena because in the past few people have practiced self starvation due to a fear of fatness, behaviorally it shows many parallels.

One particular group of individuals that have similar behaviors to modern patients with eating disorders are religious fasters. These tended to be young women who had little control over their lives in many ways and who chose to abstain from food for extreme periods of time in order to be morally better by ignoring their bodies and focusing on their spirits.

The book includes some quotes from people who chose to restrict their food intake in times past, and concerns about morality, space, selfhood, and perfection come up again and again, just as they do in current conversations about eating disorders. Many of the experiences are couched in religious terms, but the underlying fears (“I am not good enough”, “there is something wrong with my body”, “I need to be better”, “I don’t want this life”) could just as easily be pulled from a study of eating disordered patients today.

Individuals throughout history have chosen to abstain from food, often falling into something like depression and priding themselves on their ability to go without for long periods of time. Their motivations have changed as their social milieu has changed, going from religious, to entertainment, to aesthetic. However many of the sentiments that these individuals express ring similar across time and space.

“It’s like I never knew what self-respect was all about until now. The thinner I get, the better I feel . . . I’m proud of my stoic, Spartan existence. It reminds me of the lives of the saints and martyrs I used to read about when I was a child . . . This has become the most important thing I’ve ever done.” This kind of quote could easily be from a religious faster or a modern individual with anorexia.

Over at Science of Eating Disorders, Tetyana posits “Religious and spiritual reasons are not the only factors that could be contributing to AN in non-Western countries (or Western countries before the ‘thin ideal’). Personally, it would seem to be, that anorexics in those times, would just attribute their desire for weight loss to those reasons much like today it is often attributes to a fear of being fat. But, both of those could just be post hoc rationalizations on the part of the sufferer, to make sense of their otherwise perplexing desire to restrict their intake and lose weight. That’s my feeling.”

I’ve written elsewhere about how restricting food made me feel powerful, godly. I often imagined that my body was not subject to the same requirements that others were. Only the weak needed food, but I decided my morality, my meaning, and my body for myself.

“Comparable to the ascetic practices in the history of Christianity are the fasting practices in the Chinese Daoist tradition (Eskildsen, 1998). These practices sought to transform the body as a means of gaining immortality…  The history of Chinese thought thus suggests that, in certain traditions at least, the emaciated body has been highly valued and pursued in a manner highly reminiscent of Western observances.”

But in addition to historical examples, we can also look at current cases of eating disorders in non-Western countries. It’s a common trope that these are rare, and when they do appear they are evidence of growing Western influence in the country. The problem with that assumption is that many individuals who might be diagnosed with an eating disorder but lack fatphobia are not given the diagnosis. The unthinking assertion that the rise of eating disorders correlates to increased Western influence doesn’t look at the lived experiences of individuals in non-Western countries.

Again, from Science of Eating Disorders:

“For example, one study found that in British Asian girls, dietary restraint was correlated with traditional (rather than Western) values (Hill & Bhatti, 1995). This finding was supported in a study by Mumford and colleagues (1991) who essentially found the same correlation. On a Caribbean Island, with little Western media, Hoek et al (1998) found that the prevalence of AN was comparable to Western countries and a study by Apter et al (1994) showed that a group of village Muslim women (with minimal exposure to Western values) had eating pathology scores that were indistinguishable from patients with AN.”

Many of the patients quoted in this article don’t talk about a strong desire for thinness or weight loss, but point to their bodies as the site for other struggles in their lives, particularly around control and selfhood.

“… food restriction arose from a sense of powerlessness in the family context, it is possible that the patient experienced her emaciation as egosyntonic, with her low body weight consonant with the goal of not wanting “to ‘give in’ to her family, especially her mother, who forced her to eat even when she was not in a mood to.”

Again, these individuals exhibit many of the same behaviors as individuals diagnosed with eating disorders in the Western world, but don’t show the obsession with thinness or fatphobia that we assume is an essential part of an eating disorder.

An eating disorder is a coping mechanism that allows an individual to survive extremely difficult situations or feelings. Physically, it has effects that make it easier to live through strong emotions: it numbs out painful things, it leaves you sleepy and sedated, and it also provides a kind of high that makes you feel accomplished and safe. These are biological results. They are the same no matter where you are or when you’re living. And they are effective at helping someone survive a difficult situation no matter what kind of difficult situation that is: it could be not living up to religious expectations or not fitting into a beauty ideal.

And so I am continually dismayed at ridiculous articles like this that seem to think eating disorders are not only limited to the West, but also limited to young, naive, shallow teen girls who can’t figure out how to do basic things like feed themselves. Diagnosis, demographics, and etiology are complex and confusing. If you don’t know a little something about mental health, don’t write about it.

Beautiful Asexuality

I don’t think I’m beautiful. This is not a ploy for attention or compliments it’s just a fact. I don’t like my body and I don’t like the way I look. I don’t much like my face and I’m consistently dissatisfied with my hair. Nothing ever quite seems right.

Oftentimes one of the ways that we gauge our own beauty is by whether or not others find us sexually attractive: can we “get” a partner? Obviously there is more to feeling beautiful than external affirmation, but traditionally we use sexuality as a way to understand beauty. And for me? That attention is more often than not unwanted. I crave the reassurance, I crave someone to tell me that my body is acceptable, but I cannot accept the sexualized truth that I am wanted because I will always feel like an object when someone reminds me of that. Oddly enough even my friends who are not sexually attracted to women still choose to express any compliments of my body in a sexualized form.

So how does someone who refuses to accept sexual compliments find beauty in themselves? How does someone who feels bifurcated from their body come to feel at home, appreciate the lines and curves of their collarbone, fall in love with the feeling of running? How can an asexual identity help someone who has felt impinged upon to feel beautiful?

When I look at my body, I often compare it to magazines, to models, to movie stars, really to any image of femininity that I can find. More often than not these images are sexualized. My body doesn’t look quite so alluring, it doesn’t look quite so sexual, it doesn’t look quite as curvy as those images. I can’t imagine myself plastered on a billboard. I can’t imagine people looking at me and liking it, or touching me and enjoying it (especially with the scars that I have).

I wonder if I can see it differently though. I wonder if I can look at my body without the lens of desire or sex coloring everything I see. I wonder if I can look at it with an aesthetic eye, with an emotional eye. When I look at a picture of someone smiling, I see beauty there, especially if it’s one of those real deep down smiles that reaches far back into the eyes. I see it when I watch my new kitten romping around on the floor, or when I see my boyfriend try a bite of a new and delicious food. There’s something intensely appealing about watching these things, something that I feel drawn to. I have no other word for it than beauty.

I think about the photographs that I love, about the colors that I’m drawn to, about the fact that I like lines that have a nice beautiful curve in them, or about the fact that I can see certain images and simply want to stare at them for hours and hours, not because of any meaning or desire but simply because they’re transfixing. Sometimes I have to stop and stare at a particular face simply because the eyes are too interesting or because the cheekbones are just so or because the hair is too cute. None of these things are sexualized, they are simply moments of seeing how the world fits together and wondering at it.

I want to shift my focus away from attractiveness and sex and spend some time thinking about my relationship to the world and to vision as a new way to perceive myself. Sometimes I stare at the tendons on the back of my hand and wiggle my fingers, watching the funny interplay of skin and flesh. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and my hair has turned itself into a mini mohawk all by its lonesome and I love it. Sometimes I feel the way my lips turn up at the edges and I can’t stop it when something tickles my fancy and I know my eyes are crinkling in the special deep smile way.

I want to sit with myself and a mirror and watch the ways my face moves when I’m happy. I want to watch my toes wiggle and see the muscles flex in my calves. I want to see the line my hip makes when I lie on my side and how my little kitty can play on it for hours. I want to feel the sharpness of my nails and revel in the textures I contain. I want to look at myself as I would anything else in the world, as lines and textures and colors and shapes, and see if the patterns I make draw me in as the rest of the world does.

I think of the desire that I feel for others, the way I could trace someone’s back for hours just because it moves the right way. I wonder if I can desire myself that way: as good, as beautiful, as pleasing. I wonder if we should all spend more time seeing ourselves that way. I wonder if it could heal some people.

Random Writing

These bits of writing aren’t exactly about anything or for anything, but they’ve been floating in my head and I need to get them out. Here they are. A bit of what it’s like with anxiety and depression.

 

It’s hard when you have a bad day when you’re depressed. When other people have a bad day, they go home and they rant about the things that went wrong. But when I go home on the verge of tears and someone asks what happened, and if I want to talk, I have no words. Nothing happened. I woke up, a little tired as usual, I went in to work, did my usual things, had a therapy appointment, came home and took a nap. I purged. I had dinner. I went back to bed. That’s it. Nothing happened. But that doesn’t stop the weepiness from showing, that doesn’t stop the tightness in my chest, that doesn’t stop my hands from bunching into tight little fists whenever I stop moving. It doesn’t stop my thoughts from whirling around and around. It doesn’t make sense.

Last night, when I got home, I did all the appropriate Self Care actions. I let myself rest, I put on fuzzy pajamas, I watched a TV show I like. I finished an episode and something hit me all at once. The air went out of me, and it felt as though something was being pulled from my chest: my heart or my soul or some other unnamed bit. When it pulls, I can feel my jaw and my tongue aching downwards. Tears are pulled from my eyes and onto my chin. I shake and I don’t know why, but no matter how many times my face contorts into some disturbing silent grimace, I can’t still my heart or my mind. I won’t make a sound. No one needs to know because I won’t be able to explain, because it came from nowhere, because there is no reason or purpose except that everything is wrong and my ribcage is empty and my muscles can’t contain all the hatred and fear that’s inside of me. There’s a claustrophobia to it, as if there is not enough space for me, so I scrunch in on myself and hug my legs and rock, hoping that I can expand the world past my toes again. It never works. Somewhere in my mind, I notice that I’m having a panic attack, that there’s ways to deal with this, that I could go find some ice and put it on my face, but me, the me that feels and exists in the here and now has no time for that because breathing is taking all of my time and if I stop then my body might rip itself apart.

It hurts. There’s shooting pains down my chest and across my collarbone, cold like when you chug ice water too fast. My head is stuffed. I know it’s thanks to the mucus filling my sinuses, but it feels like all the thoughts have taken physical form and are now living below my eyes, tramping and stamping and pushing their way outwards. I am not vessel enough for them. They want their own life now.

I don’t know when it will stop. I don’t know if it will stop. If it does, there’s a hollowness to my face, filled to the brim with snot and pain and confusion. My mind has gone numb and I cannot come back. You are all very far away today. I try to smile though. That’s what I’m to do, isn’t it?

 

People are rough. They’ll rub you raw and then walk away with no further thoughts. Some of us blister and callous until the skin grows thick. The sharp edges no longer puncture. But my skin does not grow back. Every day I lose a layer of myself, and I’m down to scraps today. I’m trailing grated skin behind me: you can follow my path back to the party, to the first tear. It couldn’t be avoided. And since the first rip, each word has pulled and pricked and rubbed until I am left losing myself with every movement. How do I grow a new self?

Fiction Free For All

From the day I was born, the right side of my body was broken. I was marked from the womb by an eye that would never see, bright and baneful. The right eye. For most, the left is the sinister side, but my right took that title. I am right handed, and yet my right has always let me down. My arm never throws the way it should. My right ankle gives out unexpectedly. I begin a dance step on the right and my foot falls out from under me. Last year I fell and twisted my right ankle. It has been swollen ever since, leaving me always imbalanced.

 

My right is branded by an eye that exploded into shards when it should have grown into sight.

 

This morning I changed my skin. My symbols are different now. I walked into the tattoo parlor, clutching the paper with two long curves. I pointed to my right hip, the place I began cutting. The place I had tried to rip off the curse of my right side.

 

My right leg still has red scars like little caterpillars crawling up it, but I knew I needed to start at the beginning. They took my picture and pressed it against my skin, leaving a dark imprint. I lay back in the chair and breathed deeply. The needles pressed into my body, a sharp, digging, pulling sensation that left me gritting my teeth. But I had chosen this pain. I had chosen to write over the scars until my skin was fully formed. This pain was the inscription of my own will upon my body. I was writing over the broken right side I had been born with and changing the words I saw there.

 

This is mine. This is beautiful. This is right. I will protect this space. I am not broken when I choose my own signs.

 

Drabble: Purple

She was sitting on his floor in her underpants and one of his old tshirts, her legs splayed unabashedly in front of her like a child. She was surrounded by mess of angry creation. Oil pastels had split in half under her pressing hands, and when she looked up at him, her hands innocently forward, they were coated in oily color. The page had bled purple on the floor and stood out harsh against her pale skin.

In contrast to the childish scene, her face looked old.

“I wish I could feel the colors” she said as her wrists dripped.

 

Winter

The shape of the world changes when the snow falls, my mother used to say. As we drove through the park near our house she’d call it a fairy world. I could see what she meant, with the snow clinging to each branch, outlining the dead in a delicate white. We used to build new worlds, my mother and I. We would pile snow high into magical forts, or create men and women out of the blankets of white. The shape of the world has changed again, and winter does not seem so beautiful anymore. My mother cannot speak anymore.

 

How Do We Talk About Eating Disorders?

I’m currently working on a post for Teen Skepchick about eating disorders in a cross cultural perspective. At the moment, I’m just in the research stage of this post, so I’m reading a lot about the research that’s been done about cross cultural eating disorders and about the differences in symptoms, causes, and etiology of eating disorders in different cultures.

And I have to say that I am deeply upset by the way we talk about eating disorders. I am particularly upset because I’ve been reading academic articles, pieces by graduate students studying psychology, and other articles that are surveys of the literature on eating disorders. These should be held to the best standards we have. Unfortunately, no matter where I look (except for in very particular blogs written by people with eating disorders, particularly Science of Eating Disorders), I hear the same things over and over and over again:

“When we expose our girls to thin models and beauty ideals they develop eating disorders”

“Girls of African American descent aren’t likely to get an eating disorder because their culture values voluptuous bodies”

“Eating disorders only crop up in other countries as they become infiltrated by Western beauty ideals”

I am SO sick of the conversation around eating disorders being dominated by conversations about models and images of women in the media and the desire to be thinner. It cannot be that difficult for people to understand this, but I’ll say it again: an eating disorder is a mental illness. It is not a diet. It is not even an extreme diet. It is not a desire to lose weight. It is a coping mechanism to deal with difficult things in your life that you can’t cope with otherwise.

There is VERY little evidence that eating disorders are caused by skinny models. What there IS evidence of is that eating disorders are caused by low self-esteem, family disruption, trauma, other mental illnesses (depression, anxiety, OCD, BPD, bipolar, and addiction are common), abuse, or other difficult situations that you need a way out of. It is such a cliche by now that eating disorders aren’t about food, but I cannot stress it enough: eating disorders aren’t about food! They aren’t about looking pretty or beautiful. I have YET to meet someone with an eating disorder who says they just want to be pretty. I hear them say that they’re depressed, that they can’t cope, that they’re lonely, that they don’t feel acceptable when they’ve eaten, that they feel out of control around food, or that they use food to numb out emotions and manage other parts of their lives.

It is not helpful to keep refocusing the conversation on how someone’s body looks and the beauty ideals. This continues to reinforce them as what’s important, and it focuses the issues on the body again, instead of addressing whatever mental stress has occurred. It simplifies the matter to a point that is unhelpful, and makes treatment and self-understanding very difficult because it doesn’t allow us to reach the real etiology of the disease. It even reinforces those negative suggestions that a woman’s worth is in the beauty standards she does or does not strive to live up to.

Instead of these things, it would be far more helpful to talk about the sexism that makes women feel inadequate no matter what they do, or the bad family systems that don’t allow for good communication or healthy emotions, or the abusive relationships that many women are in, or the trauma and depression of daily life, or the failure of our mental health system to provide us with good coping techniques for when we do start to feel over our heads. If we want to talk about cross cultural eating disorders, maybe we should talk about the different family roles that exist, the different expectations of women in different cultures, the common mental illnesses in those cultures, the differences in guilt and shame in different culture (these feelings are huge in eating disorders), and the relationship that these cultures have to food as symbolic, relational, or positive.

Eating disorders are mental illnesses. They are not an attempt to be skinny. They are not a reaction to the media. They are not the desire to look like a model. They are serious. They are life-threatening. They are painful. They come with depression, constant mental stress, trauma, self-hatred, difficulty with relationships, isolation, loneliness, feelings of guilt and inadequacy, and all sorts of things that ARE NOT simply reactions to the media, but are about how we relate to ourselves and how we relate to others. Can we please start talking about them in terms of the mental situation of the individual suffering, because that is what makes something a mental illness?

Tattoos and Embodiment: The Power of Self-Mutilation, Piercing and Tattoos

There are very few ways that we get control over our physical bodies, particularly our appearance. We don’t get to choose things like height, build, weight (much), skin tone, eye color and shape, facial features…we can barely even control out hair most of the time. And philosophically speaking, people today rarely view their body as really THEM: generally it’s considered more of a house for your soul or your mind, broken away from the real you. And so it seems to me that asserting ownership over our own bodies is something really extremely important.

Particularly for traditionally marginalized groups whose bodies are considered public space, having a way to mark your body as your own, or physically change your body in order to feel more in tune with it or to connect it to your emotions is a powerful action. When you change your body in some physical, permanent way, you are loudly declaring “This is mine. I can do with it what I will. I can change it to suit my desires, and I can brand it as my own”. It’s liberating to see your body changed in some way that you have imagined and then acted out on your flesh. It’s sensual in its own way, and the pain that often comes with it is a visceral reminder that you’re alive, you are embodied, and you are solid. It creates an adrenaline rush of knowing what’s about to come. It can be a powerful emotional experience that connects you very deeply with your body.

In addition, for those people who have powerful negative associations with their bodies, tattooing or piercing over the site of negativity can mean a lot. I have scars from self-harm on my hips and legs, and have plans to tattoo over at least some of them as a metaphorical way of reclaiming that territory. Our bodies go through a great deal that leaves us marked in ways that we can’t undo. Some of this is by choice, some of it isn’t. But the choice to cover or change the marks from the past is a strong statement about who we would like to be in the future.

Many people view tattoos as “rebellious”, “tacky” or “low class”. Many of the reasons they’re viewed that way is because marginalized groups often use them to assert their autonomy or their belonging in a group. They mark someone as different, as particularly themselves, and as a BODY. We don’t like being marked as bodies. We often view it as objectifying. We don’t like to be viewed aesthetically, we prefer to be judged based on our intellect or personality. But the fact  is that a major part of our selves is our body. The inherent recognition of this in the act of bodily mutilation or piercing or tattoos is deep, and you can’t escape it when you’re undergoing the process. You feel more connected to yourself in certain ways. It’s one of the reasons that self-harm can be so grounding.

Tattoos also signify a great deal to others: they can tell about our experiences, our emotions, our aesthetic taste, our interests, our values, and our group membership. They use our own bodies to convey messages of our identity, something which is extremely powerful in integrating your body into our identity. In addition, they can signify things to ourselves. They can remind us of our past, of something we care about, of self-care, of good or bad things we’ve experienced…especially for those people whose voices are rarely heard, using your body as a canvas is one of the loudest ways to get a message across.

Some people say that the body is beautiful and shouldn’t be tampered with. But for those who are in marginalized groups, they haven’t really hard this about their bodies in particular. Their bodies are often viewed as wrong or bad. The few times they do hear these things, their bodies are generally objectified. It can be hugely empowering to make your physical presence different to fit your conception of self. It changes your narrative about self, takes your body away from the societal narrative of beauty, or brands visibly on your body that you have autonomy and are more than a body. Of course these are all comments about tattoos personally chosen: being forced to get a tattoo says the exact opposite of all of this.

It reminds you that you’re a body, but also that your body is yours, and that it has its own needs and desires and some autonomy. It’s not just an object. Its senses are how you navigate and manage the world, and the act of the tattoo reminds you viscerally of your senses and your physical boundary with the world. The constant reminder of that is an act of asserting yourself into space.

Reminding ourselves of our bodies, of the ways we can control and identify with our bodies, and of how we can present our bodies to others as part of our identity is a big deal.

Also I really want the tattoo in the picture, so I felt like I had to write this.