The problem with the hollow places is the echo. The sound of painful events reverberate in them like a drum when they are drawn up. To have an experience is one thing, but to keep it in the hollow places is another because there it will wait. It will wait until I am at my thinnest, until I am at my very least to spring up and remind me of my fragility and ephemeral hope.

I wouldn't have known this at 22, sitting in the back of my Dad's car, shivering in the cold, his next wife telling me how much better she knows him than I do, how much closer they are than I could ever be. I would not know how many times this moment would come back to me, so I sit there and allow her to tell me what I have known for some time; my father will only love me when it is convenient.

I had no idea at 17, lying on the cot in the basement of my mother's five bedroom house, staring at the particle board ceiing, that my lack of a place in her becomings and goings would reverberate along all the hallways of my life.  That I would have to deal with knowing for the rest of my moments that my mother sacrificed my comfort and security to get the love she had pleaded with her own parents for but never received. I lay in the raucous hollows, all stone and concrete, rigid with my silent commitment to end this cycle.

As I sit across the table from you, yet another woman touching you, telling you how that shirt matches your eyes, I wonder. I wonder if this will be another event that will ring within all those hollow places for the rest of my life. My heart races and my blood pumps fast, fast, fast. The sweat trickling down my sides and into my skirt confirms my panic. The hollow places are echoing to me. I try to feel it, to enjoy that sensation somewhat. I try to revel in my anticipation of a confirmation of what my history and my deepest horrors tell me. That I can only be loved when it is convenient. But you look at me and smile, our own secret language even, and I know the hollow places will not claim another of my memories. 

I would like to starve the hollow places. To cleanse the vast empty with fire so that only silence smolders there. I want to sit within the vast bottomless where the pain was kept, lonely. I want to miss that echo. But it is my fear that I will never be lonely here, that this pain will stay with me until I am finished.

I question if this could have been different. If I could have screamed, yelled at these people for their lack of attention. If I could have told them of the damage I would be repairing, the relationships lost, the nights spent crying because in all my efforts, I still could not keep these klunky sharp boulders from echoing throughout my hollow places. I know that I have to some extent, inherited this. My ancestors all knew the hollow places, and taught my blood and bones this method of containment. It is only logical, after all, to fill a space with meaning, even if it means ruin.

Each time this happens, each time I watch as another woman rubs her hand up and down your arm, squeezes your bicep, or does any of the other things some women do, I will feel the reverberations and start to sweat. I will wait for you to smile at me as I am being torn apart.

Will you remember that I live within the echo of the hollow places? I know that even with all my effort, I am not convenient to love. I have tried to be less of a handful and more of a wisp, a hush, a hum. But I was not born into that. I was born to the ragers, the fighters, the struggling miscreants so full of ancestral venom that no hush could calm.

Someday, I will not be bothered. I will not feel my body leap to fight or flight in the presence of disrespect or neglect. I will know, beyond my own skin, that convenient or not, I am loved. I will not need reassurance. I will know that whatever happens, I will be okay.  If I can push past this, work through it, feel it thoroughly one last time, I can say good-bye. I will not bother to worry about my inconvenient nature, my need to find something to rage against. 

But until then, I will be in all the hollow places, hoping that those memories decay to a fine powder, and then finally, to nothing at all.

To nothing at all in all the hollow places.

"If I could only lose this weight, I would feel more comfortable with my body."
 
I am sitting with a friend, across from her, hearing her say the words I have heard out of now, hundreds of people's mouths.

She lost a bunch of weight on a great diet she was on, but then she got sick of the diet and gained it all back, plus some. 

She says she has an amazing relationship with her husband, and they have been together for over thirty years. They love each other so much, but she wants to feel freer in her body when they are intimate.

He says he would feel better about himself if he looked like he did when he was in high school. He got so much attention for his body all through high school and college and misses that attention now that he is in his 30s.

He says he wouldn't feel so fat if his pants fit him like they used to. He is tired of having to have two sets of pants to keep in his drawer; it is overflowing and he can only wear half of them at any given time. When he is thinner, the larger pants loom as a warning. When he is bigger, his smaller pants remind him of what he once was.

She says she would feel better if she was just two sizes smaller and she could fit into the dress she wore at her sister's wedding.

He says that his wife no longer looks at him like he is sexy. In fact, she barely looks at him at all. He thinks it's because he has gained so much weight. He has stopped making sexual overtures toward her because he is certain she no longer wants him.

I could go on and on. This could be the neverending blog post. There would be stories you could relate to, stories that would make you bawl, stories that might even disgust you, but they would all be about the same thing: the weight we carry. 

Like any other physical manifestation, weight is a symptom of something else, and most often it is your relationship with your body, with your spirit, with your soul. It is not that you eat too much or move too little; yes, this is what got you there, but these are also activities or inactivity caused by how you feel about you. 

Your body holds the history of the human race within it, and the history of the human race is kinda fucked. 

How did it start? It started when you were young, and you were taught to stifle your body. You were taught to ignore it. How? When you got a pain, you took something to numb that pain rather than figuring out why that pain existed. When you had to go to the bathroom, if it was inconvenient, you held it. When you were sad, you were fed candy.  When you were a teenager, to dull your social awkwardness, you drank or smoked or both. It started in millions of small ways that sent you the message that your body is to be stifled, manipulated and controlled. 

You were never taught how to cultivate a relationship with your body because very few people have. It is the hard thing to do, cultivate a relationship, but it is the most valuable thing you can do for yourself and for the world. The way you treat yourself is the way you will treat everyone outside of yourself, and the way you treat yourself is learned behavior, passed down through generations of your parent's families. And if you take a look back at the history of humans, you will find that it is is full of war, hatred, oppression and exploitation. Are you at war with your body?

Your body holds your history.

A deeper and more immediate issue is that your body stores all your memories. All the things that have happened to you. If they are unprocessed, they are in your body, waiting for a way to get out. If you have not been able to emotionally release your anger, pain, resentment, guilt, shame and sadness, you are carrying them with you. 

It is easy to focus on extra weight when compared to what you are ignoring. It is the most frightening thing to look at your pain, your emotional trauma, to look at what you don't like about yourself, to look at your fears of not feeling worthy of love, of neglect, of abandonment. (Those are my fears, I am sure you have your own you can wade through.) I know this because the diet and beauty industries are multi-billion dollar industries. We are paying others to distract us from what could be our freedom from them.

At first they are subtle. You must really listen, watch and learn to hear them. Then, not so subtle. If all these not-so-subtle messages go unanswered, the messages get louder and louder until your entire life is disrupted, and the small things that were only a tiny problem in the beginning? They have spread and interacted with other stuff in your body, and now...you not only have all the emotional stuff you need to deal with, you also have all this physical stuff as well.

I am not saying that it is fine for you to be overweight if it doesn't feel good in your body. I am saying that if your really want to feel good in your body, understand that this is a mindset about developing a relationship based on mutual trust, love, compassion, and respect. Going on a diet will not help you to cultivate this relationship. Getting your stomach stapled will not help you to create this relationship. 

Listen to your body. It will give you much more than a smaller figure. It will give you confidence, a deeper understanding of who you are, and it will give you the ability to relate to other humans in a more compassionate way. Because if you can't take the time to really listen to yourself, there is no way you are going to take the time to listen to anyone else. 

We have much more to lose than the weight we carry.

I want to be a snake.

I want to crawl out of my own skin in order to get out of the place in which I have put myself.  Every part of my body is screaming at me and for the five minutes I have been standing in one place, it's been torture, but still I stand, ignoring the screams of my body. 

It's exactly three hours and twenty minutes since he picked me up in front of my house. We've just had sex; rough, physical, and quick. It's what I needed. I loved it, and now, I just want to leave. I had to sit through a dinner with him. Sushi. When the waitress asked us if we wanted miso to go with our meal, I was about to say that I would, but he jumped in and said that the sushi would be plenty.

We sat at the table making small talk. I asked questions that might hopefully provide benign answers, and he used every opportunity to let me know how smart he is, how much of a rebel he is, how dialed he is. As he told me how huge the Unagi roll is, how it is like a whole fish on a roll of sushi, I hoped that it was also lightning quick.

What happened next was something so vile I deign to describe the scene, it was such an offense to my sense of propriety and order. The food arrived at the table, and we prepared our wasabi and soy to eat. He immediately went for one of the large ends of the Unagi and I started on the middle, thinking that I would be getting the other large end. Unfortunately, and against every rule of food that I have been taught to observe, he ate that end too. As I watched him reach across the table and grab the second large end of the Unagi, I had to stifle a gasp. Of course he didn't want miso. He was going to be eating most of the meal. Nearing the end of dinner, when there was one small and lonely piece of the roll left, he told me in a tone that let me know I was indeed lucky, that it was all mine. 

It wasn't always like this. There was a time, months before, when it was fun to hang out with this man. But, I think, in the absence of awe on my part, he started to work more and more, proportionate to my lack, at trying to win me over. I am not  the type of person who fakes orgasm any more than I am the type of person who fakes fascination. It just takes too much energy. In fact, I would say that faking fascination takes more effort and feels more criminal. Especially when the attempts to inspire fascination become more and more desperate. The first time, I thought it was just a bad day. I thought maybe he was just feeling a little insecure. Why else would he tell me that he did each day's NYT crossword puzzle with a pen?

And each time, steadily, over the last few months, he became more and more specific and, unfortunately, dishonest about how cool he was, and this served to push me away, slowly and decisively, so that I would finally find myself here, standing in his living room, wanting to shirk off my skin in order to escape. 

There are many men with who I spend time and have sex, men who I find interesting, open, and fun. It is still casual, but the time spent with these men are a shared experience, not one in which I am a one-woman audience to the one-man show of the grand and glorious illusion of a hero's fantasy.  

I can't help but think that for all his effort, he is an asshole. I put on my champagne pink feminist hat, then take it off again, then on, then off. I am at turns painting him as the neanderthal "dude" who sees himself as the center of every woman's universe, riding high on his black horse, (because he is such a rebel), and offering bright shiny apples to all the women he passes. They are delighted, and giggle at the sweet, delicious gift. But then I paint a bright white over that canvas and know as I look at it that this is more the truth. This emptiness, this want of a subject. I know that he pushes so hard to impress me to prove something to himself.

I am the unlucky lady who didn't giggle at the apple.

I am also the person left to question. I feel shitty about myself and my thoughts about this man. But this is what I signed up for; casual sex with a familiar stranger, and if you were to isolate the sex in a vacuum, you could say I hit the jackpot. But unfortunately, I am now dealing wtih a guy who seems to need to impress me, and the more he tries, the more I feel his emptiness. The more I feel his emptiness, the more I feel like a horrible person; I don't like him the way he likes me and I don't need him to like me the way he seems to need me to like him. 

When I was a nineteen, a friend of mine taught me a valuable lesson about men which I have carried with me to this day. Men need to feel like heroes. I have found this to be true with the exception of a very few.  But it is hard to play the damsel in distress when you are not that person. In fact, the more that expectation sits with me, the more I resent it, and that's when my inner feminist starts talking to me about who this guy thinks he is. I love that woman but sometimes she is a bit short on compassion.

But, she is also right. I'm just here for the sex. The whole reason I love casual sex is in part because I don't have to be vulnerable with these men. I don't have to show them the cracks and crevices where my weakness lies.  And I know this guy. This is the guy who wants you to want him so that he can act indifferently. He is the guy who wants to hook you so that he can treat you like you are quite low on his list of priorities. I have known this man over the course of many lifetimes, and every cell in my body is also aware of the bait he uses, the methods, though antiquated, he still employs.

And as I stand in his livingroom, aching to leave, he tells me to sit down, because he wants me to read a short story he has started writing. My insides scream loudly, abruptly and unconsciously so that I jump a little, and for a moment, I worry that he might have heard them too. I sit down at the breakfast bar in his kitchen and he puts the book in front of me. I am so wanting to be anywhere else other than where I am. He tells me that it is a science fiction/fantasy-type short story, and wants to know what I think. 

I start reading and it is exactly what I expected, he describes a woman getting up and out of bed, what she looks like, how she moves, how insanely beautiful she is, but not a whiff of motivation, not a hint of a revealing thought. He uses too big words interspersed with too many small ones, and the thoughts in her head all end with, god help me, exclamation points. It is an excrutiating several minutes that I use to read this, and when I'm finished, I ask what kind of feedback he wants. He says anything, so I decide to go with two bits. Bits that I believe to be unimportant in comparison to the bigger problems with his unfinished work.

He argues with both; and in the end, I realize this too, was meant to impress me. I realize too late that I was supposed to giggle at the apple.

We are finally in his car, and going back. He talks about his boat (again) and how he loves going crabbing and visiting the small locall islands on warm, sunny days. I tell him it sounds great, and as he talks it up, more and more, I get a sinking feeling that he is going to ask me to go on his boat with him. FOR A WHOLE DAY. As he goes on, I watch it approach, the invite, which, in the end is less of an invite and more of a kind of, "if the stars align and we happen to both have nothing to do on a sunny day" type statement, but it comes, and when it does, I don't have the heart to be honest. 

The feminist in me is telling me he is the Man on the Horse again, dropping apples, but in my own emptiness, I know that he is afraid to ask. I know that he wants more of me because I keep giving him less. 

I accept the invitation in the same way that it is given, with an "if the stars align" answer, but I know that when the stars do align, I will be out of town, or with my fella, or working. I will be, for the rest of my life, too busy. 

I would like to be the kind of person who says, you know what? I think our time together is coming to a close. Or, maybe, the kind of person who can say in the most compassionate and kind way, I'm just in it for the sex. But, I am not. I am the kind of person who cannot bare to hurt this dude, or, more precisely, risk hurting him in a way that might bring some type of retaliation. I am the type of person who wants to be safe.

He pulls up, this time to my fella's house, as it is happily about half the distance as it is to my own, we exchange smiles and thank yous, and I get out of his sports car and walk toward the house, not looking back to wave or smile. I walk, knowing I will never see him again, feeling more freedom with every step I take. Feeling more and more comfort within my skin. Feeling less guilt as I unlock the door and walk into the living room where I can be all the things I am, selfish, vulnerable, loving, nurturing, funny, smart, creative and about a billion other things whenever the mood strikes me.

This is where I want to be, and as I look around the house, I know that it is not the geography. It's the place where the expectation to just be me is at its pinnacle. It is the safest, surest place I know, and I can create it wherever I go, whenever I feel safe enough to do so.

This is why I feel bad. Because I know it is a choice I could not bring myself to make with this particular hero. I think, as I walk to the kitchen, that we are both the lesser for it.

I am bending over behind the counter, reaching for a mug, thinking about my boyfriend. I shaved his head the day before, thinking he would look younger with less of a receding hairline, and now that he is bald he has changed. As I am wondering if his hair was his kindness, I stand, grasping the mug. He is sitting at the counter as he always does, Old Bill we call him, half-empty beige coffee mug in hand, grimy old overalls hanging off his shoulders, eyes firmly planted upon my ass. 

I turn to face him, and a second later, his eyes meet mine. 

Three years later, I am walking through the Portland airport, pre-makeover, ugly green carpet staring up at me, waiting for notice. I run into a friend of my older brother's, well, half-brother, and he asks me why I did it as he looks at my head, his question heavy with regret for me, embarrassment for me, and days later I get a call and a lecture from that same brother. He lets me know how mainstream people will see me, how they will judge me. I used to want to fuck that guy who I now surmise called my brother, concern in his voice as he described my recently balded head, right up until the moment that he looked at it with such remorse.

Fifteen years earlier, I am lying on a bed in a boys bedroom with a pillow over my head. Two boys are fondling me, talking about me like I am not there. Commenting on my hot body and my ugly face, and how great that pillow is. Sixteen years later, one of those boys dies. Twenty-five years later, the other sends me a friend request on Facebook. I decline.

As I look back, they slowly ooze together, morphing into the same man, expecting out of me what they have been taught to expect, and distressed when I am crazy with rage at not being considered as I am; a genius, an artist, and a warrior. I feel the power rise in my chest, and I know I am more than what they think they gaze upon, no matter what that is, because they are dreaming into me less than I am. They are dreaming into me someone they can manage.

Over time, I became aware that to really be seen might be dangerous, because these men, this man, only wanted to see me as simple, quiet, easy. But I am not, and more than anything, dangerous or not, I long to be seen. I long to know a person willing to sit with me long enough to see past their expectations of me. I long to know a person who will wake up out of their gaze and see me as I someday hope to be.  

This is what we lose in this paradigm. This is what we miss in our quest for ideal, in our quest for beauty, ageless perfect beauty. We miss out on our humanity, on our opportunity for connection, on our chance to really see each other, to see and know ourselves. 

I never minded really, that guy's eyes on my ass. Not really. What upset me more is that in his eyes, I was one of millions, instead of what I am, one in a million. Big difference.

"The heart is the most meaningless shape in the artist's vocabulary, in that it has been overused to such a point that it could not possibly take on any other meaning but love of the most vapid variety."

I am sitting in a critique in art school and my teacher is ripping my lino print to shreds. I was in the midst of getting over an embarrassing break-up when I made it, and I foolishly thought it might be good if I could make a piece to express my anguish, so I created a puke green heart print and wrote a brief story about how my wretched and short-lived relationship ended, backwards over the top of it. 

My teacher was not amused, he was not entertained, he was not even intrigued. In fact, if I remember correctly, the quote above might be the only thing he said about it before moving on to the next person's work. 

 I always think about this critique when a random guy I meet virtually on Tinder tells me that I am beautiful, as if it is the best compliment he could give me. As if after I hear those words, I will lay back and spread my legs open with a beckoning look in my eye. 

Additionally, I fucking hate Cy Twombly. Don't know who that is? Well....don't drop a Goog on him, don't seek him out. He is not worth the effort. But, for the purposes of this little rant, I will let you know that he is an artist whose work I have always hated. Well...no. Not always. At first, I merely disliked it. Then, after many years of watching my contemporaries and teachers drool all over his work and his whatever, I cultivated a heated and passionate hatred for his work. 

These two seemingly random and disparate anecdotes have helped me to put beauty in its proper place, and keep it there, quite happily. Beauty, or the estimation of it, is in every way, subjective. It is not my responsibility to think everyone or everything is beautiful, nor is it the end all be all of what I hope the sum of my efforts will be on this planet. This is why I don't entertain the "change the beauty standard" conversation, because I am actually and enthusiastically in favor of, "abolish the beauty paradigm" concept.

Beauty is not a goal to attain. It is a state of being; it is something we say an object has or has not, and, it is completely subjective. Now, when I speak about feeling beautiful, what I feel in actuality is comfortable in my skin, powerful, and at ease. That feels beautiful. But if a person, random or otherwise, tells me I'm beautiful, it doesn't mean a whole lot. It's an opinion, and how much value I place on that opinion, or really, the opinion of anyone about almost anything about me, directly relates to how happy I am. That's a fact, and in knowing this, I am free to not give a fuck. 

It seems that many of us are missing the point. It is not about changing the beauty standard, it is about understanding that it is ridiculous to even have one. It is stupid to believe it has anything to do with real people. It is like saying, "Coke looks good, I want to look like Coke." Or, "I love the flavor and texture of cake. What can I do to my flesh to make it taste like that?"

It is folly. There are so many things on the buffet that is human existence, and putting beauty as the main course is selling ourselves WAY SHORT. Life is about experience, it is about feeling, connection, and engagement. The sooner we reject the idea that looking "beautiful" is the apex of the human experience, the happier and better situated we will be to attain our potential. The sooner we drop the effort to be perpetually young and beautiful objects, the better off the world will be for it. 

I am not going to go in to how many chemicals and poisonous materials are in beauty products. I am not even going to go in to what people spend every year in the vain attempt to alter themselves into the shape of another person. These are all statistics that are readily available to anyone with a search engine.

What I am going to go into is how little the human species has evolved ever since beauty and fashion became the focus of our efforts. By way of comparison, in the 1960s, computers filled entire large rooms, took many people to run, and did statistical problems more quickly than the human mind. Now, everyone with a smartphone carries one around in their pocket. And smartphones make old computers look like abacuses. People have not developed much further. We are still only using like, ten percent of our brains and the mass of us are still being manipulated into killing each other for the benefit of the very rich. 

Beauty is a beast. It distracts us from who we are, who we could be, and what we might achieve. It is keeping us from our best selves and frankly, from really knowing each other, and until we understand that a beauty standard is just another way to manipulate and control the masses, we will never develop further than that. We will die among the waste products of our efforts to be beautiful, never knowing what we could have become.
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#bodypositive #selflove #loveyourself #nofucksgiven #behuman