Good bodies

This week I finally read The Good Bodyby Eve Ensler. At the time she wrote the book, Eve was 45 and hating her round belly. She then traveled around the world to interview women about their bodies. The book had been on my wishlistsince early 2006. My wishlist has been near depleted multiple times since then but somehow nobody ever got that book for me. Maybe the time wasn’t right.

I am almost 36 now and can no longer deny or hide that my body is changing. Eating a little less for three days used to give me a flat belly but that’s no longer enough. While I have had stray gray hairs since I was 23, the growing gray colony on my head is now undeniable. Those are the main two things that are different: A rounder belly and grayer hair.

Of course, my body has never been exactly the way I wanted it to be. I have always been at war with one body part or the other–mostly my belly and my hair. Could that be why those two parts are “aging” faster than the rest of my body? Are they trying to force me into accepting them by becoming ever more unacceptable? Maybe.

It’s fucking hard being a woman in this culture of unattainable beauty standards. And the lack of compassion from both men and women about just how hard it is drives me nuts. Not too long ago I had a conversation with one of my lovers about my boobs. I had overheard another woman say that her partner’s two favorite things were bacon and her boobs. Hearing that had given me a little sting because none of my partners had ever referred to my boobs that way. So I asked my lover, “How come my boobs aren’t your favorite thing in the world?” And at first he said things like “I don’t know, I’m not a boob man.” And I kept pushing and pushing and asking “What is wrong with my boobs?” And finally he caved and said “Okay. They’re a little saggy.”

BAM.

Now granted, I could have approached the issue in a more direct way. I obviously didn’t really want to know what was wrong with my boobs. I wanted some reassurance that my boobs are awesome. I wanted to hear something like “Vera, I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t want to be all over your boobs. They are spectacular.” And it’s true: My boobs are a little saggy. This is actually not (or at least not yet) because I’m getting older or because I haven’t been wearing a bra: They have been that way since I was 16. It’s because they are quite big and quite heavy.

So while my lover was being honest, I also felt very hurt. It was the stereotypical “Do these pants make me look fat?” moment that didn’t go so well. There is a lot of judgment and ridicule in our society of women who ask those kinds of questions and have those kinds of insecurities. Men want us to not be so sensitive and to just get over it. And of course they also want us to be beautiful. Women want us to be confident and feminist and to feel sexy and beautiful from the inside. I just want some compassion for how hard it is to find a balance between beauty on the inside and beauty on the outside.

I have brought up my own body issues with my therapist a few times, who is also a woman in her 30′s. And I was afraid that she was going to judge me as superficial, as unevolved, as unenlightened. I was afraid that she expected me to be “better than” to worry about what my body looks like. But she said “Yeah, that’s what it’s like to be a woman. Many of us are afraid to lose our youth and our physical beauty.”

I just want some acknowledgment of that in our society. It’s not fair that gray hair on men means something positive, but not on women. The Good Body talks about how Isabella Rosselini’s modeling career was over at age 40. She tried to speak up, tried to make a stand for the beauty of aging women but she was silenced again and again.

I have heard it all before, “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, “If you feel good on the inside, you are beautiful on the outside”, “People are attractive at any age.” They all sound very nice in theory but are not really reflective of what it’s like to be a woman, even in the progressive Bay Area. It’s like saying that Blacks and Whites receive equal treatment in America. It would be oh so nice if it were true, but it’s not the world we live in. Not yet.

A 74-year-old Masai woman named Leah is quoted in the The Good Body as having said: “I love my body. [...] My legs are long. [...] My breasts, well look at them, they’re mine, my breasts [are] so long.”

I’m totally going to steal that: Look at how long my legs are! Look at how long my boobs are!

Oh shit!

I was just singing a little song to myself, and then I imagined myself singing that song to a lover, and that felt pretty good, and then I thought about how grateful I am that I finally have enough confidence to sing a song to someone, and then I imagined myself singing a song to my teenage child, and that didn’t feel so good because I imagined my teenage child getting embarrassed and scornful and wanting me to stop, and then I thought well, maybe I was right in holding back my song all these years, but then I thought wait. If the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s probably just because the teenager doesn’t like herself very much. That’s why it’s so easy to sing songs to children because they like themselves and so they like your song. So if the teenager doesn’t like my song, that’s her problem, not mine. And then I thought about all those times teenagers are dicks to their parents and how that says a lot more about how the teenagers feel about themselves than it says about the parents. And then I thought about all those times my parents were dicks to me and how that said a lot more about how they felt about themselves than it said about me, and then I was like shit. That’s awesome. I’m going to sing as much as I want!

The cruel Midwest

I have a friend who shaves his head, is really tall and wears long skirts and platform boots to work. I also have a friend who has dreads past his butt and wears elaborate hoop earrings. Aside from their eccentric appearance, what these two friends have in common is that they are, at least in my experience, very comfortable with who they are. This is in contrast to many other freaks I know who have a certain insecurity about their freakish nature, who feel like outcasts. It just so happens that both of these confident friends grew up in small Midwestern towns, and the other day I talked about this to another freak from Oklahoma. He explained to me that when you grow up in an environment that is very hostile to freakishness, you develop a certain shell to the point that you don’t care anymore. The hostility just rolls right off of you. Then, when you come to a place like San Francisco which embraces freaks, you tend to feel very comfortable, like, “Oh hey, finally. There is all these other me’s running around here.” And I was like, well, I’m a freak from a small (not Midwestern but German) town, so why didn’t this happen to me? How did I grow up to be a freak with so much insecurity?

And I have two possible theories for this:

1) I didn’t get enough hostility and didn’t feel quite lonely enough as a youngster to develop the shell my friend spoke of: I always had friends and I never went through a period of being completely shunned by everyone in town due to my appearance. So maybe I just didn’t grow up in a black-and-white enough world to really feel the contrast when moving to San Francisco.

2) I was actually rejected by the freaks in my town, not by the “normal” people: There was a period as a teenager when I started dressing in a more freakish way but it was in line with a trend that many other teenagers were also embracing. And I ended up not getting along and feeling very intimidated by many of the very kids that dressed like me and liked the same music as me. Also, I don’t know if that actually counts as being a freak or if I was simply trying to fit in with the cool kids.

So maybe what happened to me is that I wasn’t actually a real freak and as a result I have felt insecure around people I perceive as real freaks. Maybe by the time I became a real freak, i.e. embodied my very own brand of eccentric, which was during my year as an exchange student in 1993/4, I had developed too much insecurity and not enough chip-off-my-shoulder confidence to feel comfortable among my own.

It wasn’t until I entered the darker communities in the Bay Area about five years ago that I felt truly embraced by a subculture that felt like my own. And now this comfort is expanding outwards to other communities. I think the reason it has been such a difficult and serpentine journey for me is that I felt rejected by my own subculture in Germany and instead of dealing with it, I ran away to America. At first America seemed like heaven with its kneesock-wearing thrift store whores, but my internal conflict soon caught up with me. Am I really a freak? Do freaks really like me? Yes and yes, I think.

The sad girl

About two years ago, Kean and I and a photographer friend ventured out to Black Sand Beach in Marin County to take a sexy photoshoot with me as the subject. The theme was playful and animalistic – I wanted to feel like a sexy dark creature who lives in a cave and needs to be tamed before you can touch her.

The thing is that I often have a hard time feeling sexy and playful on camera. I am not a natural at modeling, but I do like to try. Sometimes the results are pleasing. That day they were not, even if I had felt excited about the shoot all day and was happy to have Kean with me as my “fluffer”. I felt bad for my photographer friend because she had been excited about the shoot too and had made a lot of effort to make me feel sexy and playful. But I don’t think I look sexy or playful in the photos. There are a handful that I think are okay, and there are many in which I really don’t like my face.

Here is one photo that is one of the better ones, one that I can actually stand. The lighting is good and flatters my face. In a lot of the other ones, I look more like a middle-aged lady trying a little too hard to be sexy.

I learned from my mother to call people “ugly” because she called people that sometimes, people on TV or people we knew. I haven’t called anybody besides myself ugly in a long time because it doesn’t feel good. Kean has helped me with that because I have never heard him refer to anybody as ugly. But that’s what I think when I look at some of these photos.

This is one of the photos that make me cringe. It probably didn’t help that I had just shaved off most of my hair. Part of my head was covered in “hedgehog hair”, which I had never thought particularly attractive. I have been known to call myself “ugly” in some of these photos, though I am reconsidering that now. I have also called past versions of myself “ugly.” When I was camping with Kean and Jeremy recently, I told an anecdote from when I was 13 and hanging out with my beautiful friend that all the boys liked. I explained “I was kind of ugly back then.” That’s when Jeremy said “When were you ever ugly?” The truth contained in that question really hit me, and I started crying for having been so mean to myself for so long.

This week I started participating in the Inner Mean Girl cleanse to help me not be so hard on myself. I have been working on this for years now but I could still use more help.

It took a lot of courage for me the other day to show Jeremy all the photos that were taken that day on Black Sand Beach. I told him that I don’t like them and asked him to please be kind. He said “Why are not smiling in them? You don’t look like you’re having fun.” That stung but I can accept it. A photo came up that I find particularly cringe-worthy, and I said “That’s just ugly!” And Jeremy said “I think you just look sad.”

I have considered deleting most or all of the photos from the set so that I won’t ever have to be embarrassed again by my failed effort to appear sexy and playful. But I think it’s healthy for me to keep them and even share them. So, to paraphrase this post: Here are two photos of me from two years ago in which I am feeling insecure and looking sad.

Just wrote a heartfelt email

It’s to a really cool and nice guy I used to know back in Germany who was a few years older than me and sometimes talked to me on the school bus. Here is the translation of the email I sent him:

I have been wanting to thank you because you helped me out a lot in school back then. I don’t even remember which graduating year you were, but it was probably in 1992 or 1993. You were probably in 13th grade and I in 10th or 11th? I had really low self-esteem back then and felt out of place constantly. I just felt really uncomfortable in my skin and didn’t feel very connected to or appreciated by other people at school.

But I remember that you would sometimes sit next to me on the bus and talk to me as if I was a perfectly normal and respectable person. I didn’t take something like that for granted back then, and it meant a lot to me. You were popular and respected by just about everybody, and unlike other people, you didn’t feel too cool to talk to me. I am starting to cry now – things sure were difficult for me during those times.

I realize now that the reason people didn’t respect me enough back then was that I didn’t respect myself enough. And that’s why I want to thank you – I felt like you respected me even when I couldn’t respect myself. I thought “If Markus Peter talks to me, I can’t be that bad.” It gave me hope.

It feels so good to write emails like that. I can’t recommend it enough.

Bodies

Last night I danced with the mushroom goddess at Death Guild, and I was reminded of something I too often forget: I am a beautiful and amazing person, and I have absolutely no reason to ever feel self-conscious.*

Death Guild is a fascinating and glamorous place where I feel well-liked and accepted; yet it is also fraught with complex emotions for me, many of which contain a level of discomfort and yes, self-consciousness.

Is my dancing automated?
Do I look uncomfortable while dancing?
Am I too serious?
Why do I always have such deep conversations with people; why can’t I just flirt for once?
Is that girl trying to steal Kean?
Do I have to talk to that person?
Should I introduce my lovers to each other?

These are some of the things whirling around in my head on any given Death Guild night. These questions came up last night, but the uncomfortable feelings associated with them were largely absent because I recognized the truth: I have no reason to doubt any of what I’m doing, thinking or feeling. I must dance with the mushroom goddess at least once a month, so that I have a regular refresher of the truth.

At one point I noticed that one of my lovers was secretly watching me dance, and he didn’t seem to feel self-conscious about it either. I enjoyed that a lot.

A friend asked me what I would do if I had magical powers. I replied that one of the first things I would do is make modifications to my own body, such as grow wings, grow claws and grow horns.

The same friend had recently confessed to me that he liked the smell of armpits, which I do as well. I asked him if he wanted to lick my armpit, and he did, and then he did. I am not ready to die yet because I haven’t given and received enough armpit licking yet.

Kean wrote on my leg “Mein Psychopatchen.” It means “my little psychopath.”

Before we left that night, we had dyed each other’s hair black. Mine was already black, but my roots needed to be redone. Kean’s hair looks amazing right now. A couple of days ago I had given him a new “for Germany” haircut, as requested by him. Sometimes I can’t believe how delicious he is.

Also on the subject of shared grooming: When we got home, I was more tired than Kean was, so he took off all my make-up with some cleansing cloths while I was already starting to fall asleep. I love it when he does that.

I feel like this post is going to inspire a lot of judgments in people reading it. Go ahead, judge me. And then look in the mirror, please. I am doing the best I can, just like you.

I am second-guessing myself on whether to post all of these very personal truths that hold a lot of meaning for me right now. And I know that in the future I am going to love reading this post because of its honesty and shamelessness.**

*If you find yourself tempted to say “Well, duh, of course you are”, don’t. I know that you sometimes forget too.

**I mean, yes, there is shame but not enough for me not to post it.

The Plain Jane experiment

Yep, I wore this to Death Guild
Originally uploaded by Verabug

For a while I had been wanting to wear something radically different to Death Guild. I wanted to see what it was like to not conform to the black uniform.

Last night I noticed that I was feeling uninspired about my Death Guild outfit. I had no ideas and couldn’t get excited about anything. So I decided that that was going to be the night I wore blue jeans and no make-up to Death Guild.

I feel a little bit like a cheater because
1) I went to Death Guild with my hot boyfriend. So already I had an implied approval, despite my outfit.
2) I have a lot of friends that go to Death Guild. So I was never the plain green girl that nobody talks to.

In a way the experiment might have been more interesting if I had gone dressed like this to a goth club where I don’t know anybody. But in another way, the fact that I knew people made it especially interesting because how were they going to react to my different look?

So this is what happened. I was nervous and told Kean that if I ever needed some support, I would come grab him. (I never made use of this privilege.) I brought some black boots and a black hoodie that I left in the car, just in case they didn’t let me in.

They did let me in. I don’t know if it’s because they recognized my face and/or Kean, or because there actually is no dress code.

The first thing I noticed was that people I didn’t know, especially the highly made-up ones, avoided eye contact with me. Maybe I was projecting but I could have sworn that that black-haired, eye-linered stranger would have shared a glance and a smile with me, had I worn one of my typical dark princess outfits, but he didn’t even look at my green-hoodied self.

Kean went off somewhere, and I stood next to the dance floor by myself, taking in the scene. A blond guy approached me and said “Didn’t they tell you that people wear black here?”

“Oh, I know. I am doing a social experiment,” I said. Again, I felt like I was cheating because this automatically put me higher on the social ladder. I wasn’t ignorant of the system; I was challenging it.

The blond guy actually seemed a lot like the character I was pretending to be. I’m pretty sure it was his first time at Death Guild. Maybe he thought I was a kindred spirit.

Next I ran into my friend Michael. It was his first time at Death Guild as well. He didn’t even say anything about my outfit. It probably made no difference to him what I was wearing.

Then I talked to a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. She used to be one of the most eye-catching people at Death Guild, with a colorful double mohawk. Lately she has sometimes been spotted wearing a hoodie and a baseball cap. Tonight she looked a little on the plain side as well, but at least she was wearing black. She said she had been dressing down because she just didn’t have time to put a lot of energy into her outfits lately. Out of all my friends, it was interesting that she was the one who had experience dressing down, when she has also been one of the most outrageous-looking Death Guilders.

My friend William looked right past me and didn’t even see me. I demanded his attention by waving my hand in front of his face, and his eyes went wide and he looked me up and down. “You look different!” he said.

To my surprise Kristen was wearing blue jeans as well. She hadn’t had time to change. She was also the first person to tell me “You’re still hot.”

I ran into Nightshade at the bar, and he said that not wearing black at an all-black event is kind of like going to a potluck dinner without bringing any food and then drinking everybody’s beer. I like that analogy. I guess I was feeling a little rude with my green hoodie.

The bartender called me “green girl.”

Several of my friends didn’t recognize me, and I had to catch their attention. But once I had their attention, my outfit didn’t matter anymore, and our connection was the same.

I got introduced to a girl that previously I had only known via hearsay and through MySpace messages. I said “It’s me, Vera.” Then I felt the need to explain to her that I didn’t look like this all the time, that I was just doing a social experiment tonight. That conversation ended up really awkward.

Once I settled in on the bench upstairs with a drink and some friends, I totally forgot about my experiment. It was just me and my friends, socializing, hanging out, like always. But when I got up on the dance floor for the first time, I felt very strange again.

At some point I noticed that I was still doing my Death Guild stride, which is quite effective when wearing a billowing skirt over platform boots and dramatic make-up. It showed me that I have a certain level of confidence and awareness of my attractiveness, no matter what I am wearing. Of course I didn’t catch as many people’s attention with my green hoodie, but the feeling I had inside as I strode was the same.

In sum, I would say that what I learned is this:

My Death Guild friends might not have become my friends if I dressed like this all the time. This is a little bit saddening. But it’s also understandable because after all, wardrobe is a common ground on which people can relate to each other. We have a common interest: We like to wear black; we like big boots. We have other things in common as well, but we might never have found those out if our outer appearances hadn’t connected us in the first place.

My friends will still like and appreciate me, no matter what I am wearing. This became very obvious over the course of the evening, and it was very comforting. The connection is already established, and it would take a lot more than a boring outfit to break it.

I had a very fun and interesting evening, but I am really looking forward to wearing something dark and dramatic again next time. It just makes me feel like more of an active participant in the event. I prefer being a doer to being a spectator. I also prefer attracting attention to avoiding attention. This is nothing new, but it has been nice to see what the alternative is like.

Primal longing

On Tuesday night at Burning Man I had a soul-splitting experience. I tried to explain what happened to the guy who squatted next to me and listened to me babble on for a while, but I don’t think he quite got it, or maybe I didn’t articulate it well. So I’ll try it again here. I think what happened can be summed up with one sentence: I have issues.

So it was Tuesday night and I was at the False Profit party. I had been dancing with the mushroom goddess for a while and was having a grand old time. I felt like I was on top of the world, like anything could happen, like I could summon up all kinds of energies to experience anything I wanted. That’s when I saw a shadowy creature with a hood. I recognized him, not right away but eventually with alarming clarity. It was him. Let’s call him Shan even though that is definitely not his name. I had seen him at San Francisco parties for the last two years, and I was so attracted to him I was rendered speechless and motionless in his presence. I may have been introduced to him once or twice but we never acknowledged that we knew each other. I always looked away when I saw him because I felt so self-conscious around him. He made me feel deeply inferior. Yet, because I was so attracted to him, I imagined that he was also attracted to me. But considering how inferior I feel to him, how could he be attracted to someone that inferior? He couldn’t. And that’s okay, and I had accepted this over two years ago. The way I see him, and I realize I am projecting a lot of greatness onto him that’s probably grossly unwarranted, is that he is very spiritual and lives purely from his soul. He is guided by his intuition and by his body. He never has to do small talk with people. His presence is so otherworldly and regal that people don’t dare bother him with “How is it going”‘s or “What have you been up to”‘s. He also doesn’t have to pay bills. Neither does he shit because he is not really human.

But back to Tuesday night at Burning Man. I spotted this wondrous creature with the mysterious dark hood, his eyes glinting, and my heart started pounding. “Oh my god,” I thought, “there he is.” As he walked through the dancers, our eyes met and locked for a moment. Something warm and wet started spreading between my legs. I could feel an energy between us, an energy that had been wanting to be set free. But because of my self-consciousness and general stiffness and awkwardness, it had never been able to come out. But now I had the power of the mushroom goddess, and things were different, I thought. Plus, I had gotten a lot more spiritual and organic since I last saw him. We were closer to the same level now, spiritually speaking. He came closer to me on the dance floor, and I knew I was right. Something different was about to happen. But when he walked by me, I looked away again in shyness. This happened several times. I felt like he could actually feel that there was a potential, but I was too awkward to let it happen. That’s when I knew that I was ruining it again. I was not allowing the energy to flow. I was restricting the energy with my own awkwardness and fear. I was my own worst enemy. I was manifesting the opposite of what I wanted because that’s what I was vibrating. I was still vibrating “Do not talk to me. I am not worthy. I am beneath you.”

I lost him in the crowd. Then I saw him again. He was squatting on the ground, playing with a wand. I squatted down next to him. I said “Hi.” He looked at me and looked away and said “Hi.” The magic was gone. I looked at the wand and said “What are you gunna do with that?” He said “I’m gonna light it on fire.” “Right here?” I said. “Yeah, if there is enough room.” He got up, lit the wand on fire and danced with it. It was one of those wands with an invisible string attached to it, so that it looks like the person dancing with it is a wizard. There was a guy watching him who said “Sick sick sick!” Earlier in the night I had heard him yell the same thing at the DJ. I thought he was pretty lame. But I felt like I was pretty lame myself. I hadn’t achieved even close to the level of human being as the object of my desire, Shan. I still had a long way to go.

And that is my issue. This is not the first time that I have perceived somebody as spiritually superior. What does that even mean? To me, I think what it means is that a person is looser, warmer, more open-hearted, more flexible, more intuitive than I am. The truth is that I am loose enough, warm enough, open-hearted enough, flexible enough, and intuitive enough. I am ENOUGH. I don’t need to be more than I am. Thinking that there is something inferior about me is nothing but self-hatred and self-battery. But yet I am faced with this again and again. What I need to do is see myself as perfectly spiritual because that’s the only way I can be on the same level as other perfectly spiritual people. Shan, in my eyes, is perfectly spiritual. And if I see myself as perfectly spiritual, then so am I. But I don’t see myself that way right now. I see myself as still having work to do. But then again, don’t we all? Clearly, Shan still has work to do too. That’s because nobody ever really arrives; we all just keep journeying.

I need to accept that I am just fine the way I am, spiritually and otherwise. Not inferior or superior, just fine. That way other people won’t perceive me as inferior either. And you could say that Shan doesn’t see me as inferior anyway, that it’s all just in my imagination, that I am probably just neutral to him. But I think on some deep, cellular level, he does see me as inferior because that’s how I see myself.

That Tuesday night, all I could do is squat next to the dance floor to, literally, get a different perspective of the situation. That’s when this guy squatted next to me and asked me what was up. He also lived in San Francisco and had a British accent. I spilled everything to him. I didn’t hold back a thing. I kept belittling myself and saying “You must think I’m crazy” or “I must be boring you to death.” But he kept listening. He probably wanted to get laid. He said “I want to see this guy. Can you point him out to me?” We got up and I led him to the area of the dance floor where I had last seen Shan. But he wasn’t anywhere to be found. I started dancing again. The British guy danced too. After a while I stood and looked for Shan again. The British guy walked up next to me. He squeezed his mouth tight, turned his head and left. I knew he had finally had enough of my hopeless infatuation and inferiority complex. And frankly, so had I.