on Body Image--and why I write about it.

It's National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 24-March 2). Because of that, there's some great literature on the internet this week, including this piece by Kate Fridkis which I read on Huff Post Women this morning and inspired me to write what follows...

I write about body image because "How can I know what I think until I see what I say."*

I write about body image because I hardly ever feel beautiful, but know that I am.

I write about body image because beauty is an alienating thing--a terribly lonely thing--belonging not to the the person in possession of it, but to all those with the eyes to behold it.

I write about body image because at the age of nineteen, heartbroken and homesick and absolutely out-of-my-depth, I learned what a calorie was.

And I followed a false god home.

I write about body image because it took five minutes in front of a mirror to reshape how I perceived my own body. Not thin, fat.  Fat, now.

I write about body image because the body is flesh and bones and tangible in a way that everything else is not.

I write about body image because it's easier to think a man doesn't like me because-of-what-I-look-like than to hang in the gray space of the-infinite-uknonwn. But why, why doesn't he like me?

And I'm not good at the gray space.

I write about body image because body-image sometimes seems like a life-raft worth clinging to in the choppy waters of this impossible sea we call life.It isn't.

I write about body image because for many, many years when I would feel too much, I would eat too much, just to sleep, a little. And then, to feel nothing, if only for a moment.

I write about body image because some days it is absolutely unbearable to live in my skin. And I think I cannot endure this sensation a moment longer. And I know it has nothing do with my physical body...yet it feels like it does.

I write about body image because for a long time it was easier to hate my thighs and my hips than admit I really did not like myself. I write about body image because it is the prism through which we, as women, see and talk about the world.

We talk about wanting to look this way or that way, when (I'm convinced), what we really want is love and acceptance and life-alteringly-good-things. (And appearance, for the most part, does not alter one's life--not in the big ways we always imagine it might. This, I know from experience).I write about body image because it is the code by which we discuss things so large they scare us to say aloud.

I say I'm fat when what I really mean is I'm sad. And I berate the size of my thighs because that is easier than admitting I am untethered and adrift and totally lost at this point in my life--that notion is too big and too true and will surely make others uncomfortable, so I make it small...so small that it is about the size of my waist and the color of my hair and the awkward arrangement of moles on the left side of my face.

I write about body image because before I can tell you just-why-it-is-I-really-don't-care-for-a-particular-woman (and sometimes, I really don't) I can say no less than five judgmental and evaluative things about what-she-looks-like. (Think about it, I bet you can do this too).I find this both appalling and fascinating.

I write about body image because it shouldn't be a thing, but it is a thing, and more than that.. it points to THE-THINGS!(all the big and significant things that life is really and actually about and therefore difficult to break down into small, manageable pieces).

I write about body image because my eating disorder wasn't about what I looked like, even if for years I thought that it was. And so body image isn't really about what we look like, even if we continue to cling to the notion that it is.

I write about body image because I'm so much better now and so much happier and I still have a nearly impossible time having my photo taken...and what the hell, you know?

 

 

 

 

*E.M. Forster said this. And he's the coolest. 

 

 

i want...

i want art in the bathroom.

fresh flowers on fridays.

i want to light a birthday candle every morning just for that-smell-right-after-it's-been-blown-out.

i want the popped collar.

i want a lifetime of the-hand-on-the-thigh-in-that-way-that-doesn't-usually-survive-marriage.*

i want to be your two am secret. that little intake of air that rocks behind the lips like a horse at the start of a race.

i want the man who after hearing the whole of my story will ask, unprompted, what parts of your body did you hate the most? and then love them all the more.

i want to go to the beach. right now, i want to go. in the middle of this new york winter.

and i want to wear a bathing suit--a small one. just to attract the attention, just to feel those storied and much-talked-about long and withering glances. i want to lose days to the ocean. for the blue of the water to stain me, to wash me, to wrinkle and make a prune of me, and remind me that i'm deliciously human and capable of floating.

i want to make up for lost time.

and i want and i want and i want.

*inspired  by a phrase written by the inestimable anna  quindlen

...

Come sleep with me: we won't make love. Love will make us. | Julio Cortazar 

what the aftermath of a night of insomnia looks like...

this is such a particular time in my life. strange and a little lonely and such that when sleep finally pulls me under around 4:30 the sheets are wrinkled and i'm on my side of the bed, an open jar of peanut butter on the other. it won't always be like this, and i'm sure i'll miss those kinds of nights when they've morphed and gone altogether.

ROUND THESE PARTS

 

 

there's been a fair amount of food involved, so... there's that. (this neighborhood spoils me with all the fine places to eat. i'm really turning into a foodie snob, and i'm not even trying. oops).

(print gotten from FIRST SNOW on etsy).

and the food haunts:

Seersucker restaurant on Smith Street Smith Canteen coffee shop and Court Street Grocers