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This is gonna be uncomfortable.
Let's do it together. I'm the worst at healthy-body-image talks. I like to consider myself an educator: Spending most of my months in a classroom or in a position of guidance, I want to be the kind of person other people feel comfortable confiding in. Problem is, I'm good at certain types of advice. I've worked hard to become vocal. As a child, I struggled to be heard and, as part of my 'freedom-initiative,' I moved to NYC and found a voice of my own. Now I have a tendency to speak my mind, sometimes too quickly. I want to teach my students that their voices matter and, like my mother always said "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." The tapes that play in our heads are almost as loud as other people's voices. Almost. But I'm convinced we can learn to drown them out. I think being heard is invaluable (and as a person born half deaf, I know). So I hope to help meld a generation of students who are proud of who they are and unafraid to grow. As long as that growth is vertical. Progressive. Not horizontal. I'm really terrible at those conversations. My closest friends know that I don't do food well. I attempt to promote healthy-eating. I like kale. I really like cupcakes (non-sequitor) but working so closely with students really affects your perspective. Especially when you're surrounded by adolescents who all have very different body images. Or babysitting young girls. Listening to them talk about their bodies puts the vernacular into a new perspective. I can't make comments about food or diet restrictions and even exercise becomes somewhat taboo, when tinier ears are involved. I don't want to taint those tiny ears. I think that's where the problem begins: We don't know something is wrong with us until we hear it somewhere. Like profanities. Secrets. Reprimands. The tapes that play in our heads are almost as loud as other people's voices. Almost. But I'm convinced we can learn to drown them out. The other day, I was talking about eating disorders with one of of my students. Because every teenager knows another teenage with an eating disorder, or knows the struggle on a personal level. And the thing I've come to find is that no one really ever knows what to say. But we all keep trying to say the right thing. Or, better yet, the not-wrong-thing. Which is easier than the right thing but not by much. I like to think I have the words. I used to read dictionaries and paint synonyms on my tongue, when I learned I could not draw. But I don't always. Especially not when the words are ones I haven't really learned how to tell myself yet. But I'm trying. To say the not-wrong-thing until maybe it sounds right. And maybe that's enough. Maybe doing everything right doesn't always have to be the goal. I just might keep my clavicle envy, somewhere in arms reach. But there's probably a cupcake not too far away. The tapes that play in our heads are almost as loud as other people's voices. Almost. But I'm convinced we can learn to drown them out.
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 I'm making bouquets for a wedding. Origami roses, individually folded, doubly taped, paper-scented. Bouquets, signs, posters, post-cards, programs, bows, flower petals for the flower girl. I've got this. But I more-than-secretly love arts and crafts. I'm probably enjoying all of the hullabaloo more than I let on: It's the romanticism of it all. And the age-old J. Lo aspirations. But all this wedding prep is also completely horrifying for the 21 year old body that I inhabit.
See, there comes a time where the brain and body collide. I have always been eager to age. As a child, I took on adultish responsibilities with what I hope was grace but was certainly confidence. I have always been rather self-sufficient. I have always had an old-soul. And I, like the gender line I hopscotch on, dream about getting married and the life that will follow. But I am only 21. and, as a brand-new twenty-sometthing, I've decided I would like to slow down time, as much as possible. This whole wedding-thing seems counterintuitive. Not only that but the idea of marriage has become somewhat painful for me. I fear endings. I lost the notion that love conquers all somewhere between my first tooth falling out in an apple and my mother crying (these events go unrelated). I want to tell you that making paper flowers is a metaphor for the way that love is fragile and easily crumpled. But that feels too jaded, even for me. So instead, I will tell you that-if this were my wedding- I would write love notes on the inside of every petal. Secret vows, unending promises, inside jokes. I would fill the flower girl's basket with heart-shaped candy, so that every last moment could be sweet, and I would embrace the impermanence. Because nothing truly gets to last forever. But I would be willing to bet on a happy now. Plus, paper flowers are more permanent than actual flowers. Paper may crumple, but it doesn't wilt. It also covers rock. And welcomes scribbles. But, wedding decorator that I've become, I've never actually been to a wedding. Given my current thoughts on weddings, too, I'm completely petrified. For reasons I won't tell the internet, I'm awaiting this wedding with baited breath, unsure if I will laugh or cry, when the bride walks down the aisle. Either, I've decided can be masked as joy, however. And I'm a big fan of masks, in moments like that. In the Jewish religion, once you write the Lord's name on paper, that paper has become holy and can never be destroyed. I used to follow that religiously (pun intended) bothering myself with hyphenated three-letter words, but then I stopped. My feelings didn't change so much as the idea that holding onto scraps of paper protected them, If that were true, my pack-rat tendencies would make me chief-paper-protector. if that were true, all of the notes my mom ever put in my elementary school lunch box, that now hide at the bottom of the Cinderella jewelry box she gave me when I became a big sister, would be the bible. And maybe to me they are. In the age of the Kindle, I hold tight to my library card, because paper is our most powerful resource. Our pens are mightier than our swords. I leave the people I love notes. I send postcards. While I don't think the material things make a person happy, I do think there's something to tangible love. If I can't touch you, it's nice to touch something that made you think of me. Or makes me think of you. One of the bedroom walls is covered in pages of Harry Potter novels. The whole wall: Floor to ceiling. It was a poor man's wallpaper, at first, but it quickly became something I love. The infinite, sprawling, severed storyline that once defined my childhood and now caries a slight blue tint from the gypsy window treatments. I put the wall up with the promise that pulling it down would be easy. And I get the feeling that it will soon be ripped down. I don't really mind: The paper comes from a time different from this one. I put up that wall back in December and I'm pleased to report that I will never go back to the way last December lingered on my tongue. This December will be better. This is an important distinction to make: Nothing is permanent. Not even the way our months feel. Or the way they taste, months later. Maybe, once we tear down J. K Rowling, we can begin to fill the wall with our story. Write each word in permanent marker; cautious to write something so beautiful that we could spend the rest of our lives aspiring to it. Maybe that's the trick to paper: It begins as a tree. As it ages, the tree forms more rings. Rings like promises. Rings like roundabout growing pains. Rings like "I do." When they yell "Timber!" at the tree, I imagine it would scrunch up its face like I do on a roller coaster. When it becomes paper; dyed, flattened, blended, it takes each ring with it. Carrying years of sunshine and falling leaves. The lucky paper becomes fancy novels or New York Times bestsellers. The lucky paper gets seen by more eyes than it ever imagined. The lucky paper gets put up on walls or written in on the margins and shared. Or sent as letters overseas- or even to someone in the next room. It gets loved. Like bouquets. And weddings. And the moments we are awake for. So as the wedding looms closer, my next move is staring me right in the eye and I'm not sure what to do. But I will have to grit my teeth and do something, relishing in the fact that nothing here is permanent but, if we want to, we can keep holding on.
Our culture confuses me. As women, we are taught that thinner is better. Even those "real girls (who) have curves" have strategically placed curves. Curves that are all-too specifically and properly indented and still somehow boyish or drug-induced or starved.
But in life, we find our most vulnerable moments when we are curled up in a ball. We expel our carefully conpiled, calorie counted energies to become something more rotund and something we, actually, fear. We make like a ball. And balls are round. They are bouyant. They come in many colors, shapes, and sizes- they are used metaphorically to show strength ("You've got balls, kid") or opportunity ("The ball is in your court"). In my head, life is a calendar: A mass of sticks and boxes that accumulate to schedule a day, a week, a month, a year (cue the FRIENDS theme song). Those years begin to roll away the second we start to appreciate them, though, and we, taught to buy things a size too small (to fit into), aren't able to keep up. We get stuck in the details. Lost in the parts of yesterday we haven't been able to work out. Our heads feel round, rolling away without us... So why not roll with it? Today's goal is to roll. I'm working towards getting unstuck. Acceptance isn't settling but it's a step closer to better. I'm aiming to be better. Culturally, better is a foreign construct. The architects of our someday-home's, we chisel-our faces, our bodies, into being this unattainable image. So better gets lost in what we should look like. Better gets lost in how we think we should feel. Our thoughts make us stuck, with ever repeated motion, because we don't think once and move on--we look back, we analyze, we ask ourselves what we could have done better. I'm giving myself the gift of nothing. There is nothing I could have done better. Except for this next moment. Better catch up, before it's gone. "I go to seek a great perhaps."
When I was a child, I thought the future was pure magic. I tossed pennies into wishing wells, made pro/con lists about how to get from the Point A to the Point B that I so desperately desired. I wrote myself letters, dated to someone else; to an older and wiser version of myself, who wouldn't make the same mistakes I did. If only I knew then that the mistakes would just get messier. When I was a child, I was always afraid that I would die before the listy-lettered-penny-tossed future would come into fruition. By seven, I made more wills than I knew (there were only two William's in my elementary school). I don't know if I'll ever be able to understand why I was so convinced my death was eminent. But I was always afraid. In those wills, I gave away my Beanie Babies. I saved my butterfly (because she was the prettiest) and the seal who shared my birthday. I probably left those for my mommy. And that's a big deal. Now, when I worry that I'm probably dying, I wonder how I'll be remembered. As a seven year old, with an extensive Beanie Baby collection, thoughts like that don't quite phase you. 21, and determined to build collections of poetry or students or hats I can imagine it. I've been to wakes. They're lonely. I hope death isn't that lonely. I realize that this is all a shot in the void (much like anyone reading these words, anyway). So instead of worrying about the things that will come: Death, loss, what's left of tomorrow...I am off to seek a great perhaps. Perhaps it will be broken heels and bad haircuts. Perhaps it will be love. Perhaps it will be smudged nail polish Or ink stains. Perhaps it will be perfume and promises. Perhaps it will be second-chances Perhaps butterflies and daisies Perhaps caverns and taverns. Perhaps it will be you. |
This is Me:My name's Melissa. I'm the girl with her hands in her journal. Married to my best friend and planning a lifetime of adventure! Archives
January 2022
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