Facing the Furious Girl in the Mirror

A few days ago, I read Alice Walker's essay "Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self" for my creative writing class. She writes so candidly about her relationship with the scar on her eye-- how she hated it and how she learned to love it. As a corresponding exercise, we were asked to write a short piece about a part of our bodies we hate. It was meant to be an exercise in voice; what voice would you use when describing this part of your body? Humorous? Wry? Angry?

As soon as I put pen to paper, it became clear that anger would be my medium. I was determined to write truthfully, and so I didn't shy away from the hate I was putting on the page.

This is what I wrote:

It pools beneath my belly button and spreads, thick and languid, out toward my hips. It shivers at the slightest motion, hanging in excess from an invisible string about my waist, above which everything is fine.

“What a shame,” I think as I stand back from the mirror, taking my reflection out of focus. I can’t stand to see it close up any longer, the way it swells and rolls, the way it creases pink and white when I bend or sit. Disgusting.

“What a shame.”

When I didn’t go to the gym on Tuesday, when I wanted grits for breakfast in stead of granola, when I didn’t stay hungry long enough; all that is in there, pliable and fixed about me every jiggling step I take. Arrogant and stubborn, it displaces as I pull and pinch it. I plead with both my imagination and my reflection to show me what I would look like without it. How beautiful would I be? How sexy, perfect, proud, confident, commanding, alluring, free would I be without all this goddamn fat?

Fat!

The word is a heavy smack across my face, across my belly, which quivers in response, finally ashamed.

We both are, my stomach fat and I.

We are both ashamed and sorry for existing, hoping the furious girl in the mirror will abandon her hideous daydream of finally just taking a knife and hacking it all off.

To read it again was painful. To revise it, even worse. How could I have so much hate for myself, a part of my body, something I bring with me everywhere, all the time?

And then I realized, the only reason this felt wrong to me was because I had finally written it down. I was forcing myself to acknowledge the hate.

Every day, we live life HATING pieces of ourselves. Our thighs. Our nose. Our ass. Our stomach fat. But this is acceptable to us because our society supports it. In fact, it encourages it. If we didn't hate ourselves, we wouldn't want to pay lots of money to change ourselves.

So I encourage everybody to write down what they hate about themselves and experience how irrational and wrong it feels.

More than that, I encourage everybody to write down what they LOVE about themselves. And I'm not talking about what others might find sexy. It's your body-- it comes with you everywhere, so you might as well love it.

For instance:

I love my fingers.

-E