Category Archives: Beauty

September 18, 2012 · 6:04 am

It used to be just a body.

My mother should have punched me square in the face on the day Rihanna released her “Rude Boy” single.

Seriously now. She should have pulled over to the side of the road, parked the car and socked me good the moment the song started pouring through the stereo speakers.

“Come here, rude boy, boy; can you get it up?

Come here rude boy, boy; is you big enough?”

“These lyrics are absolutely disgusting,” she whined.

And me? I proceeded to defend Rihanna as if she were my best friend. As if we’d pledged blood to each other one summer night.  I slipped on “feminist” like a fitted leather jacket and proceeded to rattle out all the reasons why Rihanna was fist pumping and rallying against the decades owned by rappers and male songwriters who objectified women and made us sound as sturdy and oiled as the Camaro that only comes out after 11PM.

“She is a voice for the women. She was sticking it to the men,” I raved.

Woof…. I repeat, Woof. You can come over here to little New Haven, CT, and sock me if you would like. I’d welcome your fist. Truly.

I have not grown up yet.

I truly believe that. I am still in the muds of this growing up thang and it is reckless & daunting & always reminding me that just when I think I’ve learned an inch of it, down in the distance lies another mile.

& so early I wake to learn how to speak. How to dance. How to live. How to live more fully than the living in the last sentence. & live more fully again, but with a breathless rhythm this time around. & I am learning what it means to value myself. The beauty of me. The body I’ve been given. In a way I never knew how to before.

I told a clutter of girls about my 9th grade hooker existence the other night. About how I think God clearly wasn’t grinning as I paraded around like a prostitute with a Lisa Frank binder forgetting the 50 states one-by-one to make everything one step easier for the boys. No brains, just body. Bye bye Alabama. So long Missouri.

& it continued that way for a very long while. I just got classier in holding it all together but, to me, it was still just a body. Something I should own. Make use of. Value it for the loopholes it could give me in a world that is already so drunk with sex appeal.

 

It used to be just a body.

Limbs & Legs & Leverage. And it was said to be no big deal to be abandoned in a bed with flannel sheets. & it was said to be ”social norm” for a girl to grow up and be everything Rihanna sang out that afternoon on the radio. She should learn to swallow the words whole at college parties or when it blasted through her ear buds at the 45-minute mark of the workout.

It was said that those were the things she wanted to be… the things she ought to be if ever, oh, ever she wanted the latching of Pretty & Desirable & Good.

& what’s a girl to do in the moment when the whole world sings crudely but daily– with some kind of harmony– about her body & only her body? Her brains were never thick in those songs. Her dreams were never powerful. But her hips never lied & her junk was in the trunk & always she wanted to get dirty in those songs.

Enough of it would make the girl start to believe it after a while… that she is just a “the captain,” just expected to “ride it good.” Someone labeled as the “wild one” “saddled up” and “just begun.” Begun like a workday. Wrecked like a war zone.

Crying only when emotions got involved… only when feelings became entangled… but making sure, really sure, that they never did. It would just be a body & all that body could offer in exchange for the things her heart could not.

 

& it took you years.

Or it’s taken you years. Or it might take you y.e.a.r.s. to admit that it– all the parts of it– hurt you more than you could care to admit. That tears came, only & only, because he was lying beside a body all this time.

A body, a body, but he didn’t see the soul. No trace of the girl you ever wanted to be. With the brighter eyes. The brighter eyes.

& maybe it took you. Or it’s taking you. Or it’s gonna take you years & teeny, tiny lifetimes to see that you are so much more than just a body tethered to song lyrics—heartless & crude to the Beloved parts of you– that got away from the truth: Yes, yes, you were just a fragile creature all along. Made to be valued. Designed to worthy. Brewed & brewed & brewed to be so much more than a body stapled & tired with an image of beauty that only ran ankle-deep when the whole wide world should have flooded out– tsunami-style– over the worth & weight of you.

You were just a fragile creature all this time. You came here looking for love.

It should have stayed that way. It should have stayed that way.

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June 20, 2012 · 8:21 pm

Peace with Reeses Pieces

Fallen peanut butter soldiers, armored in chocolate with sugar as ammo, fell clumsily onto the table top. Wounded in transport, their exteriors were thickly coated in a residue of vanilla ice cream.

“Audrey, you are making a mess. Keep the Reese’s Pieces in the bowl.”

“But I was only trying to get them to your bowl,” she replied, a somber look etched upon her face. “They forgot to put the candies in your ice cream.”

I often forget she is only four, that I am her babysitter instead of her best friend. No four-year old can easily shoulder the concept of anyone– young or old– turning down candy. Skipping out on chocolate-coated morsels to dodge demons of saturated fat and Sucralose. Opting for frozen yogurt. Cutting one’s self off at the knees because thin tastes good and skinny even better.

Millions of us are lost somewhere, amidst a slew of numbers on a scale and inches in a waist line. We are pumping conversations, held over skinny lattes, with words like: love handles, nose jobs, Botox, diets. All to attempt gripping a single word, hoping to hear it pounce from the tongues of others: Beautiful.

We begin to wonder (or at least I have): Who is our beauty for? What purpose does our beauty serve? What is up with this word being so exclusive?

Somewhere, yes, somewhere we became slaves to three syllables. Nine letters.

B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.

I’ve struggled to declare that word to a mirror. “You are beautiful,” “You look awesome today,” “You are powerful and wonderful beyond measure.” Easy to type. Surprisingly, not so easy to say.

When we stand face to face with ourselves, sometimes questioning if a stranger has come to be a stand-in for our own reflection, we realize how hard it is to lie to ourselves.

We can lie to the world pretty simply. Gorgeous Liars and Pretty Hiders. Hiding behind our Smiles and Make Up. Our Salads and Diets and No Carb Challenges.

But face to face with me, and only me, a dialogue was forced. That tired girl in the mirror had something to say. And let me tell you, I very rarely allow her to speak.

“You make me feel worthless sometimes,” she told me. “You deprive me all the time. Would it kill you to let me have something sweet? Delectable? Something that takes my taste buds out of comatose?”

“Stop summing me up through single body parts: thighs, butt, arms, nose, teeth. You make me feel like I am only worth one word. One Breath. If that. You criticize me but you are the one who gave me the cookies and the chewy bears. It was you. So why am I your verbal punching bag? You poke and prod me and you detach yourself from me. I am trying, can’t you see? I am trying to be loveable enough for you. But you cannot love me, you won’t even try.”

The girl in the mirror is right. So right. I cannot love her without trying first.

“You are beautiful,” I reply back. Timid and shy, speaking as though I am making an offer, a peace pact, that I already believe she will decline.

But the words carry weight and promise of things to come.

To find peace in pieces of cake. Find peace in piecing together a new love constitution with my body. Find peace in the Reese’s Pieces that others drop into my bowl. Tap, tap, tap, against the ceramic of the ice cream dishes. The resounding sound of Love.

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September 25, 2011 · 7:37 pm

Mirror, mirror on the wall, I cannot walk but I can crawl…

This blog lets me down on a daily basis.

She lets me down in the same way that not-so-BFFish friend from the ninth grade, who promised to set me up with the cute boy at the all guys high school but then decided to date him herself, let me down.

Every day I come to this blog disappointed. She will never be what I want her to be.

I get it. I understand.

I’d need to attend Hogwarts or some ridiculous magic school where boys prance around with lightning bolts on their heads to gather up the spells necessary to morph this blog into what I really wish it could be: a table and two chairs. The backseat of a car. A window seat for two. A place where we could sit & talk and really learn one another beyond screens and Twitter handles.

If that were the case, then today, my blog would be a stage. And I would stand triumphantly upon my blog-like stage, tap the microphone twice and welcome all of you into the Season of Body Hating. Yes, you read that right (and if this blog were a stage then you would have heard it right), we have entered the Season of Body Hating.

Are there any newcomers to the crowd? Anyone who just realized their thighs touch or that their nose is too big? Welcome, welcome. We will be sure to set you up with a seasoned Body Hater at the end of this meeting.

You might think me strange, as Body Hating Season is normally believed to be the love child of Spring Break’s too tiny bikinis and Summer’s realization that yes, we’ve got a great deal of “Love” to “Handle” before we hit the waves and feel comfortable enough to do all that Baywatch slow-mo running.

BUT, BUT, I’ve had my ears open for the last few weeks, enough to know that plenty of us are growling at the mirror. Hating the fit of our jeans. We are Wanting to lose the weight. Needing to the lose the weight. Only to tumble & tear under the pressure of Want & Need while turning to the nachos to make this feeling of inadequacy Just Go Away.

We are Body Haters. And maybe you are like me, falling into the “I’d rather not hate anyone one, let’s braid flowers into our hair and love up on one another in a Woodstock fashion” category, but I will admit that there are some types of people that I strongly dislike… the kind who cut others down. The kind that belittle for no reason. The Negative & the Naysayers.  You know them. You surely know them. I give you full permission to say them in a really dramatic way; slather repulsion and a tone of annoyance all over that “them.”

But while we are on the topic of “them” though, let’s take a short field trip.

Unplug your laptop from the wall and bring it to a place where you can sit before a mirror and ask yourself a question.  I am willing to believe you might have never asked this question before: What have your thighs done wrong? What has your stomach done wrong? What have your arms done wrong?

They’ve never teased. Never taunted. Never told you that were not good enough.  They’ve just been there, as parts of you & I, and yet they never get praise. Only our Buckets Full of Negativity, our Self-Loathing, our Frustration.

You. Me. We’ve been the bullies this whole time. We’ve been the naysayers and the negative ones, tearing ourselves down in the mirror. Leg by Leg. Calorie by Calorie.

We’ve been the ones to cut ourselves at the knees and take to crawling. We’ve belittled our inner thighs. Trash talked our body fat. We’ve called ourselves Fat, Ugly, Disgusting, Pathetic before we ever thought to give ourselves a sentence of love. Or even just a word. Heck, a letter. A Single Stroke of Ink on a page that affirms the fact that we love the person reflected before us each day.

I don’t know what you’ve realized lately, but I am finding that it makes living hard. It makes day to day life hard when the one who never wronged us, sitting in the mirror, takes all the blame for something that sits within us. An Ugliness perched within our own hearts that comes out in all sorts of Fat Talk & Ridicule.

If it is not our love handles then it will be our butt, if its not our butt then it will be our shoulders… some kind of “Imperfect” will always rub against our skin if we keep it this way. If we keep ourselves in the role of bullying our bodies instead of ever declaring, enough to truly believe it, that we deserve more.

We Need More. More than 100 calories that never satisfied us anyway. More than an hour long boot camp session that will hopefully leave us smaller in this world.

We need more. We need more.

To Be Continued…

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September 13, 2011 · 9:29 am

We can plant a box in the middle of town and, on days when we are feeling lovely, we could pour the loveliness in.

Thought I was writing this letter for a girl in Starbucks after I could not help but eavesdrop on her phone conversation… She walked out and I just sat there, staring at the words I wrote to her. The letters jumped from the page.

Turns out I was writing it not just for her but for me, my best friend and a slew of other young women just trying to find their place in this life.

If that’s you today, then this letter is yours. 

I’m sorry but I could not help but sit within your phone conversation.

I’ll admit it right now. Up Front. I totally sat somewhere between the iced coffee in front of you and the mess of paperwork surrounding you.

Somewhere between the iPhone to your ear and the Words that Seemed to Shatter Against the Starbucks Window you sat beside.

I stayed and lingered for a while. Hanging off the words you said to someone who should have been better to you.

“You know… I am doing OK.”

A Great Pause.

“It’s just tough… I am going to have to prove myself… I just need to be relevant in some way. The way I was in LA… It’s been hard to be nothing at the end of the day.”

And gosh, I don’t know you, so I guess this is where I wanted the most to break into the conversation and awkwardly make some comment about how much I adore your blouse. The green really fits you.

I don’t really care about the green blouse, I just have a tough time blurting out to strangers that I think the world is better because of them.

And all I really want to say, beyond silk and satin compliments, is that I am in your shoes. That a million of us are in your shoes today. Wanting to feel adequate. Loved. Wondering if we should start jumping on tables and yelling in the middle of the Fresh Produce aisles of Target just so people know we are here. That we exist. That we matter.

You know, if I were a psychologist I might attest that it all traced back to our Little Girl Days…Beside toys & dolls with frilled dresses, we became Girls Who Cared Too Much. Lived Too Little. Tried Too Hard to Win Too Little of Love than the Great Love We Truly Deserved.

If I were a sociologist I would say it stems back the Mean Girls. To the cold shuns of lockers closing & twisted teeth, neon metal filling their mouths, who slur secrets to one another about the way we dress and the hairs on our heads. That’s when we became Slaves, Shackled to What the World Thinks of Us.

And if I were an anthropologist I would say this goes all the way back to Eve…. Even in her fig leaf ensembles, I am so certain if she had been handed a resume, an LSAT study book, a pair of tweezers and a beauty magazine she would have found ways to sit by the water when Adam wasn’t looking, stare into her reflection and whisper out loud, “Be more, Eve. Be more.”

But strip from me the “psych” & “soc” & “anthro” and I am just some Ologist who is dying to tell you that you don’t have to be alone in this. That we can figure out this mess together. Day by day. Even minute by minute if it takes us that long. But we don’t have to go it alone.

I say we, and not you, because already—even if you don’t believe it—I’m determined to not leave you alone in this.

We can get an army going, for I know there are a lot of pretty girls this side of the town who would gather alongside us.

We could plant a box in the middle of town and, on days when we are feeling lovely, we could pour the loveliness in. When you are feeling beautiful, you go ahead and pour into it too. Pass that love to the box for a girl who’s feeling less Lovely & needs a lift the next day. We could seesaw love… back and forth to one another. It could be a beautiful, radical thing that would keep us away from coffee shops that leave us spilling self-worth out from the seams of phone conversations.

We could laugh about this one day over too many glasses of wine. We could cock our heads back and snicker for several hours over the silliness that’s now stitched to the days we called ourselves Worthless. Not Good Enough. Inadequate. Irrelevant.

Snicker, snicker, snicker, I think I’d like to laugh about this one day, to reach a point where I could stand before a mirror and laugh until my head falls off, saying to the girl with brown hair looking back, “How did I ever abandon you? Cut you down? Push you into boxes far too small? 

I love you, and I adore you. I love you, and I adore you.

You are my best friend and I won’t forget to remember that… you are my best friend and I wont remember to forget that.”

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June 30, 2011 · 7:27 am

Never Beautiful Enough: Featured on the Good Women Project Today

The following piece is featured today on Good Women Project to finish out a powerful month of Bodies and Beauty pieces. The site tackles hard to talk about issues of identity, sex, and relationships in a spiritual light like I’ve never seen before and I beyond excited to be talking about body image on the site today. Be sure to check all the other great pieces and to follow @goodwomenproj today. Enjoy and have a happy and safe 4th of July!

I ask him to tell me the story nearly every time his voice picks up on the other line.

I am like a breathy child in need of his bedtime tale; for the way he unravels the deeper story, like a chocolate wrapped tight in tinfoil, is just too good, far too sweet, to hear only once. Or Twice.

He tells me of the orphanage in the Honduras where he spent a summer. Building and expanding the grounds. The Little Girls scampered and played, the crowns of their heads kissed endlessly by the Sun, as he and the other workers toiled in the distance, mixing concrete and sweat with buckets of compassion to give these girls more room to play.

As the fireflies came out to light up the dusk, he and working men would wipe their brows and walk back closer to the school to be fed by the laughter and joy of the Little Girls. Little Girls with no arms. No Legs. Limbless. Untouchable in their own society. Girls who would be categorized as “incomplete” in our very own society.

“But they were the happiest children I have ever seen, ” he told me. “No one taught them that they were missing something and so they were missing nothing at all.”

It’s as if you can hear the tune of “Jesus loves the little children,” rising up, stomping its feet, to tell the world of nonbelievers it is a song coming to life as he tells me about those Beautiful Little Ones. Over & Over Again.

Missing arms & legs, and yet missing nothing at all.

The story always leaves me sitting before a full length mirror wondering what happened. What happened in my own life to leave me believing that even with arms that swing and feet that dance, I am missing something? That I am not good enough?

While those little girls scrounge the dirt for insects and flowers, I scour the shopping malls and my own body for perfection, something I know will never exist. For if it were not my hips then it would be my thighs. And after my freckles, then my stomach.

Perhaps its never that we grow to be perfect but we grow to learn the loveliness behind what’s there in the mirror. What God chose to put there all along. I cannot be certain, I haven’t learned this lesson myself yet. In fact, I’m shooting through the dark, afraid this is the lesson I was meant to learn all along.

I gave up beauty magazines for a year just two months ago. It has been sixty days since my hands slid across a glossy cover and unearthed the secrets to slimmer thighs and better biceps. And yet I am still standing at the fore font of the mud I know I need to sink my feet within; the reason I gave up my own 120-pages of Heaven to begin with. God and I. We still need to converse about my interior and the ways He desires to mold me to be more like His Son.

Like a little child desperate to ignore the request of her parent, I will throw just about any kind of tantrum to keep me fixated on the outside, on the unimportant exterior details that will surely keep me far too busy to ever do any real kind of Soul Fixing.

Just let me fix my split ends, God, and then we can get to my jealousy. Oh please, oh please, let me focus on smooth skin and then in no time we will be chatting about last summer and why I still cannot let you take it from my shoulders.

I know if I plucked away from my day the hour or two spent checking my teeth or scrutinizing the size of my thighs  I would probably have a good chunk of time on my hands. Time to start fixing other things. Relationships. Sins.

I’d rather stick to the mirror.

There I’ll stay. Wrapped up good. Wrapped up tight. Spending tiny eternities fixated on my own body image before I step any closer towards morphing myself into His own image. Until I admit it to myself: I wont be an ounce holier, a bit happier, with more toned shoulders.

“I don’t want to change,” I say under my breath.

“But I cannot leave you this way,” God says back. “You and I both know I  could never leave you this way.

It hurts. It crushes. To clutch the hand of my God as he leads me to the car crashes that line up in my soul. I want to grab the tweezers instead. I want to dart over to Sephora and submerge myself in shelves of glittery eyeshadow before I ever have to deal with what brews inside my own heart, what God could absolutely stand to see changed. The Ugliness that keeps me standing still and far off from the Bigger Plans he has for me.

Because it would be so scary, oh so scary, to see for the first time that I don’t need thirty day plans or diet secrets. That I don’t need more makeup and tinier jeans. That He spun me and made me for greater works that we both will never see to pass until I give up my  body image ammunition and surrender at His Feet.

Because only when I dare to get ugly with my God will He make me more beautiful.

Only when I stop praying for outer beauty will He put me to work with the insides of others.

Only when I turn away from the mirror will I see the beauty there is to be stitched within the world and the real part I was made to play in all of it.

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March 6, 2011 · 2:21 pm

Relearning Loveliness: Not ten pounds lighter. Not two weeks later.

You would think a girl who spent childhood making collages with pass out literature from UNICEF and annual global poverty reports, wouldn’t find her most disturbing discovery at the United Nations in the bathroom of the main headquarters.

I am trying not to stare over as I pump a thick layer of neon soap in the palms of my hands and dip them under the soapy water.

One by one, the women stop and pause in front of the full-length mirror.

Tug at their shirts.

Suck in their stomachs.

Turn at a few different angles.

Leaving a disdained look upon the mirror as they turn away,  disapproval plastered on the mirror like a lipstick kiss.

 

I click clack my heels daily around a monumental place where genocide, malaria, peace, war, girls’ rights and primary education are all the basic words you need  in order to have a substantial conversation over coffee. And yet, I wonder the most about the women who walk around here and all over New York City, and All Over Every City, not satisfied when they greet a full-length mirror.

The women who cringe over fitting rooms and racks of skinny jeans.

Some days I want to study it. Pull up a chair into the center of any fitting room and take field notes. Or hear the story from start to finish as if it were bound and scripted for bedtime purposes. I could curl up on blue carpeting and find some librarian to read the picture book out loud to me.

“Once upon a time, there lived a young girl. And as she grew older the world grew harder. Her thighs were always too big. Her nose to long. Her ankles too fat. Her skin too blemished….”

I don’t know what the pictures might look like.

Maybe watercolor paintings of sad girls in princess dresses. With pocket-sized mirrors. Maybe Eric Carle would do the illustrations.

If I had two extra hours to my every day, I would surely dedicate the 120 minutes to tracking down a scholar who could point out to me just where women started missing parts and cutting themselves off at the knees. Where it began… Where he believes it might end…

Where we learned verbs like “comparing,” “despising,” and “sizing.”  And started using our adjectives to belittle our bodies and devalue our worth.

Then perhaps that same scholar could take me on a walking tour, as if we were catching a new exhibit at the MOMA on a Friday night. Here is the woman who turns to peanut butter and wine, he would show me. And down the line you will find the young girl who rummages through clothes racks to look for self worth, only in even numbers, less than 6. Size 0. Size 2. Size 4.

I really wouldn’t need a pamphlet or a tour guide.

I wouldn’t need to plug a set of headphones into a wall to hear a young woman’s story to know “why.”

The thing about most of us is that we understand why she isn’t eating and she is eating so much. Because we all grew up together in a space that taught us every aspect of being Thin, Pretty, & Desirable for any and every occasion.

We never grew up reading beauty magazines with glossy spreads teaching us the goodness of our birthmarks and the sweetness to our gap teeth. From time to time we would find the declaration of love, but really we were just reading up on how to fix this part of ourselves, or lessen that part.

How to be smaller in the world. Take up less space. Be quiet and play pretty.

And though we grew up with a rare right to preserve and protect our bodies, we struggle to find much value in them. Little time to value the Birthmarks, the Curves. The Freckled Elbows. The Grey Hairs on Heads.

I always wondered, while flipping through the pages of different monthly issues with all the same issues on the front cover, how will I ever learn to love something that constantly needs changing? How I could ever learn to adore a body when it needed altering always. Hemming always. Trimming always.

Where there was always an end goal that a scale would define.

Where I would always be a traveller, a nomad, looking for that point of peace in the mirror.

Geneen Roth, one of my favorite authors, first planted the words of poet Galway Kinnell into her book and I read them, suddenly wishing this single verse could have been my lullaby growing up.

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.”

Loveliness… It could be a new favorite word. A great new leather jacket of Loveliness to wear around. And zip our hearts inward tightly.

Roth goes on to write about wings. And how we have all been given wings. And how we learn to fly, from wings.

And it’s a pretty thought.

A better ending to the picture book story with a very grim beginning, with watercolor girls fading as if they and their pages were left out in the rain. The thought of us all flying. Soaring. Above it all.

The thought of us all running into a conference room breathless, clutching lined paper and digital cameras. Throwing a pile of colored crumpled sketches and black and white photographs into the center of a table that I decided would be round.

And the thought of sifting and sorting for the very best stories of love. The very best images of self worth.  The most wonderful ballads of acceptance and pacts with our bodies.

And we would send that collection off to the printing press. Binding some new magazine. Some new spread. Some better way to relearn our loveliness right where we are. Not ten pounds lighter. Not two weeks later.

Relearning loveliness. Just as we are.

 

 

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September 21, 2010 · 4:45 am

Making Peace with Reese’s Pieces: A beauty message and a promise.

via weheartit.com

Fallen peanut butter soldiers, armored in chocolate with sugar as ammo, fell clumsily onto the table top. Wounded in transport, their exteriors were thickly coated in a residue of vanilla ice cream.

“Audrey, you are making a mess. Keep the Reese’s Pieces in the bowl.”

“But I was only trying to get them to your bowl,” she replied, a somber look etched upon her face. “They forgot to put the candies in your ice cream.”

I often forget she is only four, that I am her babysitter instead of her best friend. No four-year old easily understands the concept of anyone, young or old, turning down candy. Skipping out on chocolate-coated morsels to dodge demons of saturated fat and Sucralose. Opting for frozen yogurt. Cutting one’s self off at the knees because thin tastes good and skinny even better.

Millions of us are lost somewhere, amidst a slew of numbers on a scale and inches in a waist line. We are pumping conversations, held over skinny lattes, with words like: love handles, nose jobs, Botox, diets. All to attempt gripping a single word, hoping to hear it pounce from the tongues of others: Beautiful.

We begin to wonder (or at least I have): Who is our beauty for? What purpose does our beauty serve? What is up with this word being so exclusive?

Somewhere, yes, somewhere we became slaves to three syllables. Nine letters.

B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L.

The Beauty Challenge, at first glance, seems like no challenge at all. I giggled at the thought of declaring my beauty in front of a mirror, three times a day, in a fashion similar to the queen in Snow White. “You are beautiful,” “You look awesome today,” “You are powerful and wonderful beyond measure.” Easy to type. Surprisingly, not so easy to say.

When we stand face to face with ourselves, sometimes questioning if a stranger has come to be a stand-in for our own reflection, we realize how hard it is to lie to ourselves.

We can lie to the world pretty simply. Gorgeous Liars and Pretty Hiders. Hiding behind our Smiles and Make Up. Our Salads and Diets and No Carb Challenges.

But face to face with me, and only me, a dialogue was forced. That tired girl in the mirror had something to say. And let me tell you, I very rarely allow her to speak.

“You make me feel worthless sometimes,” she told me. “You deprive me all the time. Would it kill you to let me have something sweet? Delectable? Something that takes my taste buds out of comatose?”

“Stop summing me up through single body parts: thighs, butt, arms, nose, teeth. You make me feel like I am only worth one word. One Breath. If that. You criticize me but you are the one who gave me the cookies and the chewy bears. It was you. So why am I your verbal punching bag? You poke and prod me and you detach yourself from me. I am trying, can’t you see? I am trying to be loveable enough for you. But you cannot love me, you won’t even try.”

The girl in the mirror is right. So right. I cannot love her without trying first.

“You are beautiful,” I reply back. Timid and shy, speaking as though I am making an offering that I already believe she will decline.

The words carry weight and promise of things to come.

Make the promise with me: To give our body good foods but to treat them to a cupcake once in a while as well. To give our bodies plenty of exercise but to acknowledge and supply them with rest when they need it. To own up to and then stop the negativity, the full frontal combat delivered through unkind words.

Let’s find peace in pieces of cake. Find peace in piecing together a new love constitution with our bodies. Find peace in the Reese’s Pieces that others drop into our bowls. Tap, tap, tap, against the ceramic of our ice cream dishes. The resounding sound of Love.

This post can also be found at the Beauty Message Challenge. Every day during the month of September the Beauty Message Challenge is posting inspiring blogs and messages on Facebook and Twitter.  I am honored to be one of thirty bloggers to share my beauty message with the world…


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June 29, 2010 · 10:07 am

Beauty that comes in six shades of red and seven different sizes.

The secret to a life well-lived is beautiful skin. A whittled waistline and “stop him dead in his tracks” pick up lines. The right pair of shoes. A clean diet (one that will try to convince you is not based upon deprivation). Great sex. A slim body and a fat wallet. A swimsuit that fits your shape. Flat abs that take less than 15 minutes a day to maintain. Makeup that feels like it is barely there. And looking better naked.

At least this is what the world tells me as I walk out the door each morning.

My hands detected the worth and weight of beauty magazines at the age of 12 and I was never the same again. I flipped through the glossy pages where pretty girls smiled back at me and home remedies made promises that I don’t think they were ever fully equipped to keep. As I traced the Perfect Lips. Lashes. Long Flowing Hair. I remember thinking to myself, “I never realized I had this much to fix.I never knew I was missing so much.” I never realized I was this broken.

We digest the pages of these magazines and websites as though they are the 300-calorie sandwich with only 217 milligrams of sodium that sits and waits for us on page 112.

We are fed this idea that the key to true satisfaction and real happiness is somewhere amidst a butt-toning workout and a cream that makes cellulite vanish. We stay hungry over the fact that we can chalk life up to being obsessed with outward appearance, to Always Needing to Fix Something. And as a result? We never need to put away the tool belt, fully loaded with 8-minute abs and voluminous mascara.

If we always have some outer glitch to fix- To Make Our Thighs Smaller, Our Love Handles A Little More Lovely- then we never have to stare inward. We can abandon a quest for inner piece in order to make a journey towards a clear complexion. We never need to shred emotional baggage when Jillian Michaels and P90X promise us a different- more visible- kind of shred.

A great friend of mine spent time building a medical clinic near an all girls orphanage in Latin America and I saw the revelation in his eyes as he told me about the beautiful little girls. Little Girls who missed arms & legs & limbs and yet found nothing to miss at all. “But they were the happiest children I had ever seen, ” he told me. “Because they had not been taught that they were missing something.“

We are floundering in a culture that wants to convince us that we are missing something. Constantly Missing. Seven Steps Away From Perfection. Perfect Thighs. Perfect Curves. Perfect Lovers. Perfect Days. What would happen to all those magazines and reality TV shows and billboards if we looked in the mirror and realized we were missing nothing. That it was all there. Sitting abundantly on both our insides and outsides.

That we could stop in our own reflection stand there without an ounce of pressing time itching at our ankles.  To realize the most radiant element on our faces was not half off at WalMart yesterday. To say confidently to our inner selves, “You are not missing things. You are wonderful just the way you are. You are whole.“

Whole in a world that tells us we are empty. Full in a world that tells us we are hungry. Content in a world that tells us we are unsatisfied. Here. Right Here. All Parts Intact. In a world that convinces us that we are missing vital parts. Parts that will fulfill us, happiness that sits on a shelf for $4.99, beauty that comes in six shades of red and seven different sizes.

At some point we decide that we are going to pull away, that we are going to shun our ears from the messages that seek to pierce us and make us feel less than worthy. It is not an easy task. A task that never meets perfection. But little by little we allow ourselves to put down the tool belt, put down the coupons and the washed up images of the “way we used to look” to stop and see that all we ever needed never cost us $19.99 and our own self esteem as a sacrifice.

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May 9, 2010 · 10:17 pm

The Story of a Yellow Sweater

Once in a while I like to get creative and a little fictitious with my writing… Enjoy.

The Story of a Yellow Sweater

You told me you liked my yellow sweater and I thought maybe I could wear it every single day if it would make you smile. I took the cardigan off at the end of the day, folded it neatly in a square on my bed and thought of ways to keep you perfectly in my memory. As Perfect As That Yellow Sweater.

My mother told me from the beginning that we can keep a lot of things in this lifetime. We can keep a room clean. We can keep an eye on someone. We can keep trying. We can keep up with the times. But she also taught me that we cannot keep people, especially if they don’t want to be kept. And we should not let others keep our hearts, “That, my love, is something you are wise to keep for yourself until you know that someone else won’t stomp away with it.“

And I stared at the yellow sweater, creased in all the right places, and I decided that I would give it to you. You could take it. I would never wear it again anyway, in fear that someone else besides you might place me in their thoughts as “the girl in a beautiful yellow sweater.” Our last interaction would be my giving you that sweater. I would ask you to take care of it. I would tell you that one day I would want it back.

And then we would part ways.

We probably wouldn’t talk for a while. I don’t imagine we would call each other on a daily basis or keep a strand of letters pushing back and forth between our mail boxes. You would say its just the way that life works. I would nod my head in agreement but I wouldn’t say anything at all.

It may be a few months or it could stretch out into a couple of years but one day I would call you and ask you if you still had the yellow sweater that I lent you.  I would ask you if you are taking care of it, and I might tell you that I would want it back one day. But not today. Don’t send it back to me today.

Our conversation might be short. Quick. We would hold ourselves from talking about our jobs or how we have changed since the last time we traced each others’ faces. Maybe we would laugh a little but I know it would make me miss you so, and I don’t need to make heartache out of misplaced laughter. I don’t need to make heartache.

And so our dialogue would only last for a few minutes, though we both know we are quite capable of rambling for days. But either way, that yellow sweater would have served its purpose. It would have planted me right where I wanted to be; amidst a pretty tangle of your thoughts and memories. You might think about me for only five minutes, but either way, I would have crossed your mind and indulged in every step of the crossing.

In the most perfect of worlds I would never need to give you my yellow sweater. It could stay hung up in my closet and I could take it out sometimes and wear it when the weather was perched upon gloomy forecasts. In the most perfect of worlds I would never need to lend you that cardigan because we would find another way to bridge our distance, our                  gaps, and make it so we never needed a quarter-sleeve frock of sunshine to stay woven to one another.

But you can keep my yellow sweater, and you can think of one day sending it back. But I hope you never do. I hope you never do. Because as long as you still have it, we still have a way of connecting our dots and finding one another again, in a world you swore never wanted my hand in yours.

Keep my yellow sweater. And I will keep pretending that you don’t keep another part of me. Another knitted mess of mine.

Keep my yellow sweater. You and I both know: I sewed my heart upon the sleeve.

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April 25, 2010 · 6:58 pm

3x + 5b – 6(10z)= True Beauty?

You’d be surprised to learn that a girl who failed algebra filled her diary with mathematical equations and formulas.

Scribbles of addition and subtraction dominated the loose leaf pages. Add more makeup. Minus hair frizz. Add whiter teeth. Take away love handles. For many of us its an equation similar to this one, always coming to equal the same outcome: Beauty. Desirability. Attractiveness.

Well I knew algebra well enough to see that I had a variable that canceled everything else out on my journey towards finding the true summation of beauty in this world. Psoriasis. My skin grows seven times faster than the normal rate. I experience what is called a build up, my skin builds up on top of itself, effecting the areas of my scalp and eyebrows. When I first found out that I had this skin condition, eight years ago, there was no real treatment on the market, just home remedies. Nearly every Sunday night I would sit at the kitchen table. My mother would apply tar to my scalp and then she would rip away the built up skin from the week before. I know… not a very pretty image. After the process ended an hour later she covered my head in baby oil to ease the bleeding of my scalp. One week later the skin had grown back and the tar rituals would commence again, each week for several years.

My peers did not look at me sympathetically, they looked at me and saw this plague of difference. I dealt with the labels I was given: the girl with lice, Head and Shoulders, greaser.  I learned not to expect the words I secretly wanted to hear: beautiful, radiant, gorgeous or even a simple, “you’re pretty.”

I just wish for the life of me that I could pin point exactly when I learned what constitutes beauty and how I came to dispel it from my reach.I look back on that young girl who was constantly etching equations in her diary and I cannot help but grow somber. I think about the tears that came from the harsh words of my peers and how with each joke and ridicule caused me to sink deeper into myself, more ashamed and more worthless.

I am still quite taken aback by the word “beautiful” and the power it seemingly holds. I think it is a dangerous word. I think it falls into hands in this society that delegate who really should have it. I think we all deserve it, not just when we get dressed up or when our parents pay us a compliment, I think we deserve it no matter what. With or without makeup. With or without losing 10 pounds.

Check out OperationBeautiful.com

We all know how easy it is to brush off that statement, “You are beautiful on the inside and that is all that counts.” It may be true but there is a magazine sitting next to me with a size 2 model on the cover who begs to differ. There are products on the market that I should be using, new applications of makeup that I should be trying. Beautiful is an industry that I tend to see as ugly.

It gets ugly when we forget to value ourselves, when we let our flaws become our most accentuated attributes. When we stare in the mirror and only see our blackheads or wish we could have better hair. Then we forget our inner workings, what really matters at the end of the day. Last weekend I saw a young girl in a circle with her peers grabbing at the baby fat on her hips, saying, “I am SO fat.” I wanted so badly to walk up to her, to tell her she was beautiful, to tell her not to waste her time with negative thoughts and to not put down her own best friend: herself. This coming from a girl who, as her mother ripped out the chunks of built up skin from her scalp, ripped out her own hopes of ever coming to life. Allowing ourselves to just be beautiful is easier said than done.

But I do think inner beauty is what we need to find at the end of the day; it is the only way to cling to something true inside of ourselves. What constitutes as “beautiful” or “desirable” is ever shifting and changing. We can beat ourselves up over trying but we won’t ever emerge as winners. And if we rely on other people to tell us that we are pretty or gorgeous then how do we cope when they are taken from the equation and we are left with only ourselves.

A friend of mine always laughs at me when I make a joke of standing in front of the mirror and giving yourself a giant hug. It sounds absolutely ridiculous and you don’t legitimately have to grip yourself in a bear hug fashion, but the takeaway is the idea of accepting yourself on a daily basis. It’s saying, “you know, I am going to have have Psoriasis for the rest of my life so I best learn to deal with it,” or “This is my size and these are my hips and this is what a curvy woman looks like.” There are a million different statements in each one of us, a billion proclamations of truth. But beauty to me, true beauty, no longer resides on a billboard or on page 76 of a magazine.

Beauty is no longer something I treat as a complicated math equation but rather a love letter; a love for my legs, for they help me to walk, a love for my eyes, for they help me to see, a love for my mouth, for it allows me to speak my thoughts, a love for these fingers, because through them I reach all of you, a love for my smile, because it holds immense power to brighten a room, and a love for myself, because I am unique and independent and oh yes, I am beautiful.

How do you define beauty?

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