Mirror Mirror Challenge—and Giveaway

I'm terrifically excited for Kjerstin Gruys' literary debut, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall: How I Learned to Love My Body After Not Looking at It for a Year—which, for the record, is fantastic (and which you have a chance to win; scroll down)—so when she did a shoutout for bloggers to follow in her footsteps and go a day without looking in the mirror, of course I wanted to participate. But as longtime readers of this blog may remember, I've already taken a month-long break from mirrors—twice—and honestly, I didn't think I'd get much more out of abstaining from my reflection for a day.

So instead, I took a different route: Instead of refusing my reflection, I'd take it in mindfully. Every time I looked in the mirror on the chosen day, I took note of my first reaction to what I saw, and snapped a photograph, the idea being I could later compare my reaction with the "reality" of the photograph. Stripped of the context of my mood, would I actually see any difference in how I looked? Obviously this is full of flaws as an actual experiment: Each time I approached the mirror, I knew I'd be recording whatever crossed my mind, which naturally colored my reaction. Plus, overlaying my mirror-face with my photo-face means that the static photographs aren't necessarily representative of what I initially witnessed (though to be sure, I still have my mirror face, despite my best efforts to rid myself of it). Still, it was an interesting exercise. The results:

7:24 a.m., wake-up call: So fucking metal. (I don't normally sleep in my earrings but as my "so fucking metal" initial reaction implies, it was quite a night.)

8:07 a.m.: When did I get dark circles between my eyes?

11:05 a.m.: Have my eyes gotten closer together? Is that even possible?

11:38 a.m., post-makeup: Much better.

2:40 p.m., with Kjerstin: Happiness! (I actually didn't plan it this way, but my "mirror diary" day happened to be on the same day Kjerstin was in New York for her Good Morning America appearance. Obviously we couldn't resist taking a mirror photo of the two of us together, given our mutual abstinence. As Kjerstin pointed out later, isn't it sort of poetic that the photo is blurry?)

5:18 p.m.: Healthy. Why do sunglasses perched atop one's head make one look both brimming with good health and a tad glamorous?

6:34 p.m.: I look hungry, but I'm actually not. Do I look this way when I really am hungry? Eyes look big.

6:39 p.m., pre-workout: Maybe I just look pale, not hungry. Take your iron pills. 

8:52 p.m., post-workout: Girlish! Not like girly like feminine, just girlish like young.

10:11 p.m.: Tired, look it. Face looks rounder than it did earlier today? Round but pleasant.

11:38 p.m., pre-bedtime: I look like a compassionate librarian.

A few thoughts:

1) There might be a daily cycle of how I feel about my looks. I'm surprised to see that there was an arc to how I felt on this day—beginning in a self-critical mode, then switching to more appreciative, neutral, or merely observant as the day went on. My suspicion had been that every time I looked in the mirror it was actually reflective of my mood—feel bad, "look" bad; feel good, "look" good, even though my face doesn't actually change all that much. But I was actually in a neutral-to-moderate mood all day long, including the morning, when I was particularly critical of my looks.

2) The things I notice now in these photographs aren't the things I noticed when I was taking the photograph. Again, part of this is just the nature of how being observed—even just by ourselves, or by a camera—changes us. But still: There seems to be zero connection between what I saw then and what I see now. I think I look worse in the nighttime photos than I do in the morning snapshots (and I look older than usual in my "girlish" photo), but my thoughts toward the end of the day weren't nearly as self-critical. I don't actually look any more pale in the pre-workout photo than I do in the others. (I maintain, however, that I indeed looked so fucking metal in the morning.)

3) My activities, more than my mood, influenced what I saw. I didn't smile in these photos because I don't usually smile at myself in the mirror, and obviously it would have been a little weird if I'd not been smiling in the joint photo of Kjerstin and me. But beyond the smile or lack thereof, it's clear that I'm joyful in Kjerstin's company—a feeling that lasted upon my return home, even though I was groggy and disconnected (I'd fallen asleep on the subway ride home). 

4) I "appear," even to myself. About a third of my thoughts had something to do with putting on a persona, even though I didn't consciously approach the mirror with play-acting in mind. Metal chick, sunny glamourpuss, youthful girl, compassionate librarian (no idea where that came from, but I share it with you in the name of dutiful reporting): None of these are how I would identify myself, but I saw each of these types in the mirror at various points. 

At the end of my first mirror fast, I wrote about how I found that I was more aware of my emotional labor in regards to other people because I hadn't had the "warm-up" of appearing—if only to myself—in the mirror. I'd forgotten about that finding of the experiment until I saw how much play-acting I was unconsciously doing in the mirror with this experiment. What's interesting, though, is that I'm seeing that there's a whimsy to it that I hadn't previously seen. I wasn't trying to be any of the momentary personae that I spotted (okay maybe I like to play glamouspuss every so often); they just appeared. There was no comparison to some standard I'd dreamed up, because there was no standard in my mind. Instead I was just having a little moment of fun—which I hadn't recognized until I recorded my thoughts for this exercise.

5) The mirror is more tied to my eating patterns than I'd like to believe. I don't write about this much on here for a variety of reasons, but I have a history of disordered eating. (If you're interested, you can read my ladymag version of it here.) And one of the reasons I don't write about it here is because I'm firm in my belief that we as a culture have overconnected eating disorders to a wish to be thinner or better-looking—and that doing so masks the deeper, murkier reasons some of us develop eating disorders and some of us don't, even though we're all subject to the same cultural pressures surrounding thinness. So when it first became apparent to me during my mirror fast that there was a connection between the mirror and my eating, I was reluctant to admit any connection between the mirror and my eating history. But just as eating disorders don't neatly fit inside the frame of beauty, neither do they neatly exist outside of it.

So when I looked in the mirror and thought, I look hungry, even though I wasn't hungry, I knew it signaled something. What, I'm not quite sure. But here is what I notice now: That photo is rather flattering. It was a time of evening when the light becomes honeyed and soft; my hair was loose, the way I prefer it; the slight below-the-eyes puff that springtime allergies give me had receded, making my eyes look larger than they had. And yes, what I see in the photo now may not be what I saw then (see item #2). But I have to wonder how much I still connect looking pretty with being hungry. And if I happen to not be hungry, as was the case when I took the photo? I can still look hungry. Which means, in the mind of a disordered eater, I just might look thin. 

Consciously, I know better. I know that hunger does not equal thinness, and that thinness does not equal prettiness, and that therefore hunger cannot equal prettiness, and that absent other physical signs there's really no such thing as "looking hungry." And perhaps I'm overanalyzing this, or misanalyzing it—maybe I was conscious of not wanting to be hungry since I was about to hit the gym and wanted to make sure I was fueled up, or maybe part of my brain had been planning dinner and the messages just got jumbled up in that moment, or maybe it was just as random as the "compassionate librarian" thought that entered my mind at bedtime. (Which, really, random.) But once a part of your brain connects disordered eating to beauty—which mine definitely did, for some time—I'm not sure the two can ever be wholly unharnessed. Unearthed, examined, monitored—yes, of course. Yet for me, in some small way, as much as I consciously reject it, the two remain in tandem.

*     *     *

But! The purpose here is to examine how mirrors affect the way we walk through the world, and I'm looking forward to seeing how other bloggers participating in Kjerstin's challenge handle it. (Get a head start with Meli Pennington, whose musings at Wild Beauty World on her weeklong mirror abstinence are consistently intriguing.) If you're interested in the least in exploring our connection with mirrors, Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall is a must-read, and lucky you, I'll be giving away a copy. 

To enter, leave a comment (karma points if you share your thoughts on mirror abstinence—or mirror diaries, but not necessary to enter/win) on this post by 11:59 p.m. EST Sunday, May 12. I'll select a winner via a random number generator (comments assigned number in chronological order, beginning with comments at the-beheld.com, followed by comments left at The New Inquiry). Enjoy!

Kjerstin Gruys, Ph.D. sociology student, Bay Area

When I initially met Kjerstin Gruys online, my first thought was: There’s another one! Several weeks before I did my own month without mirrors, Kjerstin had launched a project going a full year without them—the same year in which she was getting married, incidentally. (No, she didn’t peek on her wedding day.) A Ph.D. candidate in sociology, Kjerstin has focused much of her academic work on body image and eating disorders. But her years in the fashion industry as a merchandiser for Abercrombie & Fitch, and then GAP Corporate, were hardly an aside: Her dissertation on the shifting standards of clothing sizes merges her passions of body image, cultural body imperatives, and fashion. The best way to get to know Kjerstin’s work is following her blog, Mirror Mirror Off the Wall—and reading her upcoming book chronicling her yearlong adventure, slated to be published by Penguin in 2013. But she also took the time to share some candid thoughts with readers of The Beheld. We talked about the creative self, the role of trust in body image, and what singing alone in the car has to do with mirrors. In her own words: 

On Scales vs. Mirrors
I first really became conscious of body image and women’s issues in late high school to early college. I had anorexia, and in going through the physical and emotional elements of treatment, I had to carve out an understanding of how our culture kind of shaped my experience. Having an eating disorder, you’re always aware of your own body image, but it’s not until you’re recovering that you’re really forced to take a step back and realize that you have to question a lot of assumptions.

In recovery I had to gain weight and I couldn’t get on the scale, couldn’t know the number; if I got on the scale I’d have to check in with my physician or whatever. But I just had to trust the process. I had to trust that I really didn’t feel comfortable with the numbers going up, and I had to trust that the process of recovery was at some point going to get me comfortable with a larger number. In terms of recovery there’s a lot of self-monitoring and constantly asking myself whether my behavior is in line with my values or with my disease. And luckily the past four or five years the values have won out over the obsession.

So when I started this project I had to consciously think: How am I going to do this in a way that I know is healthy? I didn’t want it to make me feel more symptomatic and paranoid, so I actually had to make the decision to get back on the scale more frequently to make sure that my paranoia that I’m constantly gaining weight has a logical answer. I’ve had to get back on the scale, and I felt kind of ambivalent about that. But now I’m very pleased because it’s not worse—it’s better. In one sense the project has made me say, You know what, good enough is good enough. And that is actually a shift of my values. I’m still very perfectionistic at times, so there’s been a step back from perfection, which is great. But there’s also a sense of trying to find something else to quiet my questioning mind that’s scared about not knowing what I look like in the mirror. It’s possible that I still have some dysmorphia about what my body is, and avoiding mirrors sometimes allows my imagination to run wild. And getting back on the scale has helped me not be dysmorphic about that. Getting on the scale most days of the week keeps me more in tune with what’s going on with my body, which is important if you have a history of ignoring your body!


On Vanity and Pride
At some point I looked up the definition of vanity. It isn’t caring what you look like; it’s caring too much about one part of yourself. The definition actually had “too much” in there, which obviously is subjective. An outsider can decide that somebody is vain based on their own ideas, but the person herself might not actually feel that way. There’s no one way to figure out what is too much, although I think that people who are particularly vain are often not very fun to be around—vanity causes one to be very self-absorbed. Not intentionally, but that’s what vanity is. Vanity can be totally destructive to intimate relationships.

I can say without apology that an eating disorder is one of the most vain things you can experience. I’m in no way saying it’s a choice. But an eating disorder totally warps your whole sense of priorities, even in people who hide it very well. I don’t think someone can feel fully recovered if they’re only eating properly. Behaviors can change, but if there’s this thing—like weight or food—that is the most critically important thing for them to monitor in their lives, that’s where vanity comes in.

But vanity itself should be distinguished from pride. Having pride in your appearance is a wonderful thing. I wish all women were “vain” in that sense—in taking pride in their looks and enjoying what they see in the mirror—without that subjective idea of putting your appearance higher on your priority list than spending time with your loved ones or being flexible with your routines, whether that’s eating different foods, or trying a different look with your makeup or whatever. I have friends who won’t go camping because they’ll feel so humiliated wondering what they look like without makeup and mirrors. And I myself have a little mini mirror and cosmetics that I usually take with me camping, so I can try to look like I’m not wearing any makeup when I really am. I guess you could say that my no-mirrors project isn’t an attack on vanity itself. But it’s definitely an attack on mine.

I’m a little worried that I’ll be disappointed in what I see when I look in the mirror again. [Note: March 24 will be Kjerstin’s unveiling—if you’re in the Bay Area, check out the “First Look” party she’s throwing with media literacy group About-Face to celebrate body positivity.] I was like, What if I develop this really positive sense of what I look like, and it’s not actually what I see when in look in the mirror for the first time? So I’m scared about that—that would be a little bit sad and scary to go without for a whole year and finally look in the mirror and be like, Oh, I liked myself better before I was looking in the mirror again. But my hope is that I will kind of be in a good place when that happens and even if I look in the mirror and I’m like, “Eh, it’s not really what I expected or wanted,” I’ll at the very least feel like it isn't the most important thing in my life. That, and I know I’ll be excited to finally experiment with makeup again, and I’ll certainly do some shopping for new clothes. No amount of research or activism will ever dampen my enthusiasm for a shopping trip!


On Existentialism
Sometimes there’s almost a sense of numbness when I’m all by myself, without the mirror. It’s this sense of: Who am I, what am I? What is this experience? I’m thinking, I’m conscious, I can see my hands and feet, I’m typing on the computer, I’m petting the cat—whatever it is. But what am I? I can’t look in the mirror to see what I am. It’s made me realize that I used to use my reflection as a form of companionship and validation. So having moments when I think of these questions have been very bizarre.

One solution for those times (of feeling existential) has been to use something sensory, like scent, to signal one of my five senses to really experience the world instead of just being there. That’s helped me feel a little bit less like somehow I don’t exist. I’ll talk to myself, I’ll sing along with Pandora. I’m someone who doesn’t mind being alone a lot, and I really love driving in the car, listening to music on the radio, and singing at the top of my lungs. And I’m like: Okay, before I started being conscious of not looking in the mirror, being in the car and singing by myself never felt like an existential crisis. So I tried to kind of bring some of those things back, whether it’s feeling my toes on the carpet or smelling perfume or tasting chocolate. It’s like: Okay, I exist. I’m experiencing something sensual and I have an opinion about it. I’m not just a computer giving input and giving output. It’s weird realizing that simply seeing my reflection in the mirror was, in some ways, very grounding.

At one point I had a head cold, and I had no sense of smell. It was depressing. I’d figured out how to put on makeup without looking at myself, but being able to smell the product had actually been pleasurable for me, and not being able to see myself or smell the products left me feeling numb. I get a lot of pleasure about using scented products in the shower; if anything I found that since giving up mirrors I’ve become a bit more snobby about wanting to use more luxurious products, even though I try to avoid spending too much money.


On Trust and Self-Expression
So much of my issues with body image and not being a certain weight or certain size had to do with refusing to believe anyone who loved me when they’d say I was beautiful. I distrusted everyone, and I had my own sense of standards and disappointments for approval. It’s like if someone said, “I think you’re beautiful,” I’d be like, “Well, you’re either lying to me or you have bad taste.” That’s such a selfish side of yourself, and it’s interesting to see how difficult it is to give that up. I think most women struggle with this a bit. We’re supposed to be modest and not boastful, especially about looks—heaven forbid you say that you have a bangin’ bod! Normal women, if you compliment them, it’s like, “Oh, this old thing?” or “Well, maybe I look nice today but I’ve gained weight lately” or stuff like that. But with the mirror project I’ve really had to trust people, and myself. You start realizing that maybe this vision you have in your head about what you “really” look like—this idea of, “Oh, you might love me and think I’m beautiful, but really I’m not”—is faulty. Giving up the mirror is giving up the idea that your own image of yourself is the only image that’s real or even meaningful.

It makes you think about what purpose your appearance really has. If my relationships are healthy and the people around me are treating me well and telling me that I look good enough for them to love me, and respect me, then why is my own critical vision of my appearance so important? I’m still struggling with that question. I do think it’s important to have a sense of self, but I’m starting to see my sense of self as being more about self-expression and creativity and less of a status thing, or about being too much of this or not enough of that. And in a way it’s a little bit constrained right now because of not being able to look in the mirror—I mean, right around the time in my life when I had started to think that my sense of self was an expression of my own creativity and sense of fashion and play, I’m not as able to do these things. But it’s something I’m looking forward to enjoying again when the year is over. It’s such a great thing to miss! It’s totally different from being paranoid that I don’t look good enough; it’s that I miss something expressive and creative, and I know that this is a really great step in the right direction for me.

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For more interviews at The Beheld, click here.

Mirror Mirror or Your Wall

I’ve written a bit before on here about how I tend to prefer videos of myself to photos, and this TV segment on self-esteem follows that pattern, so I’m particularly pleased to share it with readers. Broadcast journalists Debra Pangestu and Malgorzata Wojtunik, graduate students from CUNY’s channel 75, produced this five-minute segment on women and self-esteem, using my month-long mirror fast from last May as one of the anchors of the piece.

Courtesy Malgorzara Wojtunik and Debra Pangestu;
if this doesn't load, you can watch it at Malgorzara's website. 

So! This is what I sound like! (You should watch the whole video, but if you're just dying to hear my voice, I come in around 0:55.) I do not have vocal fry! And I apparently wear far more bright colors than I had realized! And I laugh when I’m talking, that is when I’m not looking very very earnest! This is actually the first time I’ve been on video with this caliber of filming (when I say I prefer myself on video, I’m referring to goofy vacation clips of me singing “Allentown” while IN ALLENTOWN), and it's neat to see what a difference good lighting makes. (I tried to hire Debra and Malgorzata to follow me around with their lighting kit, but they had "work" to "do.") In any case, here I am.

But the segment has a greater message beyond just proving to you that I’m not actually a middle-aged monk named Brother Frankie who's just posing as a ladyblogger for kicks. It gets into questions of how we determine our self-esteem, and how much control we actually have over our own image. Setting up a contrast between our self-image as determined by the mirror and our self-image as determined by social media, the reporters talk to Amy Gonzales, a researcher whose work indicates that social media may have the potential to increase our self-esteem. (Yes, this runs somewhat contrary to that study last year that got everyone talking, about how the more photos you had on your profile, the lower your self-esteem, which just seemed like bollocks to me and other like minds.) Study participants were put in a room and asked to fill out a questionnaire designed to measure self-esteem. Some participants had access to their Facebook profile while filling out the survey, others had access to a mirror, and the control group had access to neither.

The TV segment reports that the mirror group scored lowest on the self-esteem survey and the Facebook group scored highest, which is true, but that’s not what grabs me the most. (The mirror group’s score was lower by a negligible amount.) What grabs me is how the ways people used Facebook affected their scores: People who viewed only their own profiles scored higher than those who looked at profiles of other people, and those who made changes to their profiles during the study had the highest self-esteem of all. Which is to say: It’s not affirmation from others on Facebook that leads to a self-esteem boost; it’s the ability to gaze at and manipulate your own image. A little like...mirror-gazing and applying makeup, you might say.

I’m pleased with the segment and think the reporters should be too—they reported on a widely done topic (self-esteem) with a fresh spin, and they did it with professional panache. But there’s one sentiment I somewhat disagree with: “We cannot control what we see in the mirror, but we can control what others see on social media networks like Facebook.” One of the biggest things I learned during my mirror fast was exactly how much I do control what I see in the mirror: My “mirror face,” for starters, which ensures I’ll always be seeing a wider-eyed, poutier-lipped version of myself than what you might see when you look at me. Then there’s makeup, hairstyles, lighting, angles—not for our Facebook photos, but for the mirror. (I’ll spend more time looking at my reflection in a fitting room that’s softly lit, with mirrors hung in a way that captures me at my best, as opposed to a harshly lit dressing room that makes me look dumpier than I probably am...I hope.) And then there’s mood, moment, preexisting conditions, daily events, chance comments—we take in all of these, and they shape what we see in the mirror. It may not be conscious, but we absolutely control what we see in the mirror.

One of the main differences might be that with the mirror, we control what we see; with social media, we control what others see. But even with this, the differences are blurred. It wasn’t until my mirror fast that I had to accept—really accept—that my mirror face isn’t the face any of you would see when talking with me. I thought I could control my appearance because I could control my visual image of myself, but in fact I can do nothing of the sort. After the mirror fast, I realized there's a reason I prefer videos and candid photos of myself: I'm not posing. In trying to control my appearance whenever I knew I was being photographed, I was robbing myself of the very thing that makes me appealing (besides my ever-present scent of daffodils)—my warmth. How warm can one be when arranging one's face into a series of manipulations designed to avoid all points of insecurity? I needed to divorce myself from that image entirely before I could understand that there was something to divorce myself from. The only person I'm fooling with my mirror face is myself. There's much to say about Facebook and authentic representations of the self—but in this particular way, social media might be a more accurate reflection of ourselves than what we see in the mirror.

The Solace of Convention: Abuse, Beauty, and What Happened When I Left

This isn’t about an abusive relationship. This is about what happened next.

I decided to leave my boyfriend not because he had ever hurt me, but because I was turning 30. I mean, he had hurt me, but by the time I left him, it had been four years since he’d touched me with intent to harm. Our first year together was violent; eventually he was arrested for domestic assault, and he was one of the small percentage of men who go through a batterer intervention program and never harm their partner again. For the years that followed his arrest, I stayed with him because I needed to prove to myself that there was a reason I’d stayed in the first place. The relationship was never a good one, but by its end, it was tolerable. That is why I left.

More directly, I left because one day at age 29 as I was rising from a nap I literally heard a voice in my head say, “If you do not leave now, you will spend the rest of your life like this,” and while I had thought such things plenty of times, I had never heard it, never heard it with such finality and stark potency, and it was too true to be ignored. I spent a few weeks figuring out how I would do it in a way that would cause the least damage, and then I did it, and that is where this story begins.

*   *   *  

A few things happened around the time I decided to leave. First, I lost a lot of weight. Once I’d done that, I bought new clothes, clothes that were different from my normal jeans-and-hoodies gear that I had chosen because I didn’t like to wear anything that was designed to be looked at. I started wearing skirts and cute little dresses with cute little heels. I got a shorter, more daring haircut; with my diminished size I began to look nearly gamine. The increase in exercise made my skin glow. I discovered liquid eyeliner. “When did you become such a babe?” a coworker asked. “You’ve been an undercover hottie all this time,” said another. I would remember this as I’d go to the gym or plop down sums of money on clothes that had seemed unimaginable to me only months before.

You might think, as I did at the time, that my self-guided makeover was about rediscovering my self-worth. It was partly that, yes: When your “emergency contact” is the same person at whose hands you have suffered an emergency, your sense of self-worth isn’t exactly at its healthiest. It wasn’t difficult to see that my physical changes were announcing my renewal to the world.

But it wasn’t just change that drove me, nor even the satisfaction of looking good as I began to create a better life. This era wasn’t the first time that I’d felt pretty or had been called such. It was, however, the first time I felt like I “passed”—passed as someone who was blandly, conventionally, unremarkably pretty; passed as pretty without anyone having to look twice to make sure it was true.

When you’re in an abusive relationship, or at least when you are me in an abusive relationship, you don’t recognize how standard your story is. You think that you’re special. That he’s special, that he needs your help and that’s why you can’t leave; that you’re special for recognizing what a great gift you’ve been given, despite its dubious disguise. I never believed the cliche of “he hits me because he loves me,” but I came close: I stayed because I truly believed I alone was special enough to see through the abuse to see him, and us, for what was really there. It was an isolating belief—another characteristic of abuse, one I didn’t recognize at the time—but moreover, it was a combustible mixture of arrogance and piss-poor self-esteem, and one that made me feel unqualified to ever play the role of Just Another Person.

Upon exiting the relationship I’d finally recognized as anything but special, I wanted nothing more than to be unremarkable. Striving to be conventionally pretty was my way of re-entering the world of, well, convention. It was no accident that the first post-breakup date I accepted was with the most conventional man I’ve ever gone out with: a hockey-loving lawyer with a tribal armband tattoo who used the term “bro” without irony. It wasn’t that I thought his was a world I ultimately wanted to inhabit; it was that I needed to prove that the “special” men weren’t the only ones who would see me and want to see more. So I put on a pretty little dress with pretty little lingerie underneath, and I let him buy me dinner. I showed little of my inner self to him—I wasn’t ready for that, and I knew he wasn’t the one to show myself to anyway. But eagerly, and with every convention a pretty girl might use on a good-looking bro, I showed him the rest.

Beauty can be a tool. It can be a tool we use to tell the world we want to be a part of what’s going on; manipulating our appearance can be a tool we use to trumpet a part of ourselves that might otherwise go unseen. Beauty can be a way of participating.

To be clear, I don’t think adhering to the conventions of beauty is the way most of us become our most beautiful. Our spark and passion will forever trump our perfectly whitened smiles or disciplined waistlines. But for me, beauty became a tool to let myself begin to believe that I was worth being seen. When I was recovering from a life of apprehension—after years of longing for even a single day when the first thought that entered my mind in the morning would have nothing to do with him, after years of exhausting my every resource to try to convince my family and friends and boss and above all myself that I could handle it—the stream of assurance I got from looking pretty in an everyday, pedestrian, stock-photo, conventional sort of way was a lifeline. I let the slow drip of looking unremarkably pretty sustain me while I began the real work of rebuilding. Beauty—or rather, giving myself the tools of banal, run-of-the-mill, utterly ordinary prettiness—allowed me to reconstruct a part of myself that had gone mute for years. And then, I constructed another, and another, and another.

*   *   *

During the time I was dating the bro, I also became involved with a man with whom I formed a poor romantic match but, as it turns out, an excellent friendship. We stayed in touch after we stopped dating, but I hadn’t seen him again until last year, when I happened to be visiting the city he now calls home. I was backpacking, and the clothes I wore reflected that—jeans, layered T-shirts, a grungy hoodie, worn not out of a desire to avoid anyone’s gaze but for comfort and practicality.

I mentioned what a relief it was to not be wearing high heels. He eyed me evenly. “The little dresses you wore when we were seeing each other—they weren’t you,” he said. He sensed my recoil and amended: “You pulled them off, no worries. You looked good. But even though I hadn’t ever seen you wear anything else, I could tell it wasn’t...you. It wasn’t the you I knew.” In part, he was right. The cute little dresses, the high heels, the smart haircut: In embracing that part of myself to the exclusion of all other styles, I was still reacting to a desperately unhappy time of my life. I wore red nail polish because my ex hated it; I wore heels because he liked me so much in sneakers. I wore dresses because, for the first time in years, I truly wanted to be seen. It had been fine for me to embrace a conventionally feminine look to alter my baseline of how I wanted to present myself to the world. And I didn’t need that baseline any longer.

Yet what stands out to me now about that exchange isn’t the message, but his words, It wasn’t the you I knew. Abuse had swallowed me to the point where I could no longer detect my own identity—but he, and other people I was wise enough to trust, could. We form our self-image not only from ourselves, but from those around us. When you are in the fog of abuse, the chaos and torment that occupies the abuser’s inner life becomes your own. When you leave, that fog is replaced with what and who is around you: the man who said It wasn’t the you I knew; the friend who raised her glass “to the beginning of you” when I told her I’d left; the running partner who, years later, would become a partner in other ways as well. Even the tattooed-armband “bro” was an imprint of my desire to be utterly cliché for a while before turning my head toward what might actually make me special. Each gave me what beauty did—a sense of normality. But they also took me beyond the limits of what conventional prettiness could ever do. They reflected back not only what I knew of myself, but what they knew of me. They were my mirror.

I don’t recommend that any of us form our mirror entirely from others; that’s part of what lands some of us in an abusive relationship to begin with. But when you are beginning to rebuild a bombed-out identity, you need something beside you other than just your naked soul. The people around me were part of that. Beauty was another.

The mirror of plebian prettiness is a precarious one. It’s not built for the long haul, and it is easily shattered. There are a million ways my unintentional strategy could have been disastrous. But people who are recovering from difficult situations are often told to draw from their “inner strength”—good advice that forgets that sometimes, every gram of inner strength is going toward just holding yourself together. And with abuse, which is known for its powers of erasing the victim’s identity, the concept of “inner strength” is particularly questionable: You can’t draw from inner strength when you feel like nothing is there. I needed to draw from outer strength; I needed a routine that would help me reconstruct. I eventually got to reconstructing the inside. But I needed the framework first.

Attention to one’s appearance cannot be the end point of becoming our richest selves. But for some—for me—it can be a beginning.

_________________________________________

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and this post is part of the Domestic Violence Awareness Month blog roundup at Anytime Yoga. If you are in an abusive partnership—whether you’re being abused, abusing your partner, or both—tell someone. You can begin by clicking here or calling 800-799-SAFE.

Do We Have to Make Body Love the Goal?

When the National Organization of Women contacted me about today’s Love Your Body Day blog carnival, my first thought was to feel honored that an esteemed organization that has been a part of my life for literally as long as I can remember—my mother was one of the founders of a local NOW chapter in North Dakota when I was a wee one—had put me on their radar. Of course I’d be happy to participate (and I am).

My second thought was: What? I continue to be surprised whenever someone refers to me as a body image blogger. I’m pleased by it, of course, and it’s certainly not inaccurate; I suppose whenever a feminist writes about beauty, the tyranny of the body beautiful organically comes under critique. And while I do have a body-positive spin in the sense that I don’t think any of us should suffer in the name of our bodies—and I made a conscious decision early on to never bash any bodies on here, including my own—less than 10% of my posts here deal with body image, or even bodies at all.

More to the point of Love Your Body Day: I do not love my body, and I don’t particularly want to, and not once on this blog have I said any of us should.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t love our bodies, or at least sound an alarm when we find ourselves treating our body the way we’d treat something hated. But in my experience, the way to experience a relief from bodily scrutiny isn’t love, but not thinking about it so damn much. We’re at our best when we’re in a state of flow, wholly immersed in whatever we’re doing, whether that be our professional work, creative expression, or merely being fully present in the moment and sharing it with whomever is in our company. We’re at our best when we’re engaged—oftentimes engaged with others. Certainly many women treat their bodies shabbily because they’re focusing their energies on others and neglecting themselves; others, like me, start to treat our bodies shabbily when we become too focused on ourselves, allowing the roar of body dissatisfaction to dim out the world around us. And while conscious body love is a better response to that roar than continuing to punish my body in various ways, when I am focused on body love, my focus is both inward and separate from myself. When I file acts of self-care under that of love, it makes my body feel even more separate from my very self, instead of more unified.

Bumper-sticker wisdom aside, love is not only an action word: It is a feeling. I don’t want to have feelings about my body any more than I want to have feelings about my intellect or my voice; I want it to be one part of the entirety of who I am, not something I have to have all these emotions about. To do that I need to care for my body—and I also need to consciously devote my love to things greater than my body, my self. If I keep my body into the category of Things That Should Be Loved, I’m continuing to sever my self—the self that can love—from my body. As with many people who have struggled with an eating disorder, the disconnect between the self and the body is part of what has allowed me to treat my body poorly at times. The times when I’m truly treating my body right are not times when I’ve decided to love my body for all it’s worth, but times when I’m authentically engaged in the world around me.

If that bit of bumper-sticker wisdom is correct and “love is an action word,” that leaves me with little to work on. Care, on the other hand, is also an action word, and one that leaves me with a goal, not an elusive sense that I’ve either succeeded or failed in “love.” Care is a step we can take to make sure that, as Rosie Molinary writes, we are doing “the work we are meant to be doing and [giving] the gifts we are meant to be giving to this world.” At its beginning self-care may even be a way for us to even identify what that work is, something I struggled with for a long time. Care prepares us for our lives’—and our bodies’—greater journeys. My journey does not necessarily exclude loving my body. Neither is body love my goal.

I don’t want to diminish the wonderful work of people who explicitly work to activate body love—women I consider my allies in trying to help all of us not be so damn obsessed with this stuff. Golda Poretsky’s Body Love Wellness, Medicinal Marzipan’s Body Lovin’ Projects—this is good work from smart women, and they’re but two examples of the plethora of body love work out there. Participating in these programs can bring a sense of flow in their own right, and I imagine the power of being wholly engaged with body love is mighty indeed. I know many people have been helped by programs specifically targeted toward body love, and that aid is vital and real—and in many ways, what body love experts are saying isn’t that different from what I’m saying here. As Golda says, “You can’t just arrive at [body] acceptance. If you’re coming from a place of not accepting your body, you first have to swing the pendulum the other way to love.” But the active path to body love isn’t the only path toward a similar end goal, even as it’s alluring when you’re in a place of tumult with your body.

That place of tumult—of war—can be damning, silencing, and most frightening when you don’t even realize how much it can hold you back. I’ve been in that war at times. I know how hard it can be. I know. And looking at body love from afar seems more comfortable than the prickly, unbearable spot of shame that we inhabit when we wage war on our bodies. It is more comfortable. But body love is not the only way to find that space of comfort; love needn’t be the goal you’re working toward. For some of us, striving for body love as our personal pinnacle serves to reinforce the very self-consciousness that prevents us from doing our work in the world. Self-consciousness needn’t be negative in order to be damaging; caring for ourselves can be an act in its own right, not a pit stop on the path toward body love. For if the problem is that we wage war on our bodies, consider that the opposite of war is not love, but peace.

This post is part of the 2011 Love Your Body Day Blog Carnival.

Beauty Blogosphere 10.14.11

What's going on in beauty this week*, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
The new face of MAC: Miss Piggy. You know, I used to be skeptical of MAC because it was trying to seem terrifically edgy while simply being an arm of one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world. And I maintain that advertising can never be subversive, so I'm not about to do the Internet equivalent of pat MAC on the back. That said, between its makeover campaign in the UK and Miss Piggy, the company has officially won me over. Its brand managers have a keen appreciation of the fantasy aspect of makeup, and even though I wear makeup in a pretty straightforward manner, I like that MAC isn't asking me to buy its product to make a better version of myself.


...To Toe...
Footloser: As a disliker of most things remake (with the possible exception of the Joe Cocker "With a Little Help From My Friends") I remain appalled by the new Footloose, and DOUBLE APPALLED by Deborah "Traitor" Lippmann's polish collection inspired by the remake. My feet will remain tight.


...And Everything In Between:
Big hair: Hairstylist Bashar Brown opened up a UK salon catering specifically to plus-size clients. The idea makes sense—larger chairs and drapes, for starters—but some salons are just snooty anyway regardless of one's size, and I'd hate to see salons seizing this as an opportunity to further snootify their offerings since "they have their own salons now."

Backpedal: Procter & Gamble assures shareholders it doesn't support political causes—and then reveals its $40,000 donation to conservative causes in Ohio, including support of Senate bill 5, which would restrict collective bargaining power of public employees.

Gross violation: In other assuring Procter & Gamble news, the district attorney in Scranton, Pennsylvania, assures the public that "No Procter & Gamble products were contaminated" in the case of the P&G employee who has been injecting his semen into coworkers' yogurt containers. 

Latin American biodiversity: Colombia's plan to become a major cosmetics player: Bank on its biodiversity, which, in conjunction with the call for natural ingredients, could easily prove a boon to the nation's economy.

What I see in the mirror: Wonderful series at The Guardian in which well-known people are asked to share what they see when they look in the mirror. (via Already Pretty) For as Elissa at Dress With Courage reminded us this week, "Your body image is how you perceive, think and feel about your body. This may have no bearing at all on your actual appearance." 

Dirty politics: Interesting twist in Massachusetts politics: Senator Scott Brown posed nude in a 1982 Cosmo spread to help pay for law school. When his likely rival, Elizabeth Warren, commented that she "kept her clothes on" to pay for her own degree, Brown later responded to her jab with, "Thank God." I don't care what Warren looks like or how Brown paid for school; what's interesting is that people thought Brown's words were unkind, as though it would be a compliment to say that we should all want to see a politician nude. Can't we just fast-forward to the sexy stuff like S.139, the Equal Access to Tax Planning Act?

Stuck on you: Beauty Redefined is offering their fantastic body image media literacy billboards as sticky notes. "You are capable of much more than being looked at" is a success writ small as well.

Sunspot: Nail polish that changes colors in the sun! I was all over "mood polish" in the '80s so this is catnip to me.

The best dry shampoo: Two of this week's Beheld topics are magically synthesized this week at Persephone magazine, where Tuesday's interviewee Golda Poretsky writes about not washing her hair. (Her secret hair powder trick made me snort out loud, and it's one I guarantee you haven't heard of yet.) 

What a drag: Rachel Rabbit White asks why we don't love drag kings as much as drag queens. I'm not into most drag queens—most of the ones I've seen seem to be co-opting the sucky stuff about femininity and presenting it as sheer fabulousity instead of truly engaging with it or critiquing it. (In fact, the only drag queen I've seen and truly loved is...a woman, the World Famous BOB, who is a self-described "female female impersonator" and manages to be both fabulous and critical of the feminine role.) My quick answer to her provocative question is that we're used to seeing women take on the hallmarks of masculinity but not the other way around; I suspect that if we had a more culturally equal society drag queens would lose much allure as well.

Small pleasures and the new Dr. Pepper slogan: Finally, someone says something intelligent about the "lipstick index" other than note its existence. (Lipstick sales haven't gone up in this recession, leading to patter about a "nail polish index.") Thank you, Molly Lambert.

"Self-consciousness isolates and cancels": Sally works her magic at Already Pretty to weave together a few of my favorite topics: self-consciousness, projection, and the words we speak to one another about our appearance. 

Beauty, Disrupted: Supermodel Carré Otis's memoir is out this week, and though the number of celebrity memoirs I've read I can count on one hand (I was once stranded in a cabin with nothing to read except Shirley Maclaine's Out on a Limb), this seems promising. She touches on something in this interview with ET that you rarely see acknowledged in talk about domestic violence: "I think that that initial meeting [with ex-husband Mickey Rourke, who was arrested in 1994 for spousal abuse] was an immediate familiarity. It was sort of recognition of somebody who I knew there was an incredible charge with, and energy between. So in a way it was that 'dangerous at first sight' ...and now I think, I know better —those are the red flags." Also, it's cowritten with Hugo Schwyzer, who always takes a fresh spin on questions of appearance and gender in his own work.

Daredevils, from left: Annie Edson Taylor, Maria Spelterini, Maud Willard

*I spent most of said week taking in a different sort of beauty—upstate New York and Niagara Falls—so this roundup isn't as complete as usual. In compensation, I offer you an off-topic collection of daredevils: Annie Edson Taylor (the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel), Maria Spelterini (the first woman to cross the Niagara gorge on tightrope, in 1876, shown here wearing peach baskets on her feet during one of her three follow-ups to her first successful crossing), and Maud Willard, a dance hall actress who perished in 1901 while trying to shoot the rapids in a barrel. She was accompanied by her fox terrier, who survived, presumably by shoving his little nose inside the single air hole in the barrel.

Golda Poretsky, Wellness Counselor, New York City

For Golda Poretsky, body acceptance isn’t quite enough. “I named my business Body Love Wellness because for me body acceptance was the key for everything else to fall into place—but you can’t just arrive at acceptance. If you’re coming from a place of not accepting your body, you first have to swing the pendulum the other way to love.” Drawing on the “diets don’t work” principles of Health at Every Size, her background in nutrition and holistic health, and her skilled combination of enthusiasm, warmth, and frankness, she counsels group and private clients who want to exit the dieting cycle. Her book, Stop Dieting Now: 25 Reasons To Stop, 25 Ways To Heal, was published in paperback and Kindle, and she lectures and gives workshops around the country, including teleclasses. We talked about the willingness to fail, being revolutionary, and how a question about cough drops got her wheels turning. In her own words:

On Trust 
I was literally on diets from the age of 4 on. I was either on a diet or off a diet, and if I was off I felt like I should be on. In 2005 I did Weight Watchers and I lost 40-something pounds, and I thought life was great. I still hadn’t met my goal, but I was feeling really good—and then the weight started coming back on, and I was still doing the program. I was all, “What’s the deal?” People turn that around onto you and make it like you’re doing something wrong. I literally had this Weight Watchers check-in where we sat down and they were like, “Well, you must be eating a lot of cough drops.” No, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to be doing. So I started to research it a little bit, and I started to think about it, and I realized it wasn’t just me. I found Kate Harding’s blog, which is sort of what everybody finds when they first come around to this, and I was like, “Oh! I don’t have to be in this constant paradigm of worrying about my weight, struggling with food all the time.” I started seeing research saying that losing weight and gaining it all back was the norm. But it's still hard to let go of that desire to lose weight, and there’s always that one person you know who keeps up their weight loss for years, and you think, Well, they must have it right. 

That lack of trust in their own experience is the attitude a lot of people have when they first come to Health at Every Size. They think, “Okay, size acceptance makes sense, but it’s not for me.” They try to resolve new information that way, by dismissing it for themselves. Because it’s not a comfortable place to say, “I know 99% of people see things one way. I see things differently.” It’s hard to live in the world that way because we still have these internalized worries about how people are literally being cast out for being different. I see it with clients, I saw it with myself, and we have to say, “Okay, you know, it’s not easy. Certain people are not going to agree with you, certain people are not going to support you—but you’re a revolutionary.” It’s more internal than anything else. The idea of being revolutionary is one of the ways I support myself when I feel overwhelmed. It helps me remember that it’s not easy, and that change takes time.

I always remind people that they need support, and that it’s not this thing that happens overnight. I’ll hear people say, “I tried body acceptance for a week and I didn’t get it, I couldn’t do it.” It takes time. It takes trust in yourself. It takes the willingness to fail and keep going. You might feel great about yourself for two weeks and then suddenly you’re walking down the street and you catch a glimpse of yourself in a window, and you think, Wow, I thought I looked better than that. But if you’ve been thinking about self-acceptance, you begin to have the tools to take that moment as just information. You can say, “Okay, I didn’t like my reflection. So maybe I just have some work to do on seeing myself in the mirror. And what else was going on with me that day—was it a bad day anyway? What was my internal dialogue like?” It’s taking negative experiences as information rather than proof that you're bad or wrong or ugly or whatever. It’s trusting that if you keep doing this, it will work—which it will. Not liking what you see in the mirror one day isn’t proof that you’re not doing body love right. It’s information that indicates, Okay, this is something I can work on. I think very often we see our quote-unquote “failings” as proof of something not working, as proof that we’re damaged, rather than part of the journey. Things are rarely that linear.

On the (Non)-Intersection of Dieting and Confidence 
I remember starting Weight Watchers with a friend of mine. In a couple of weeks we’d both lost about eight pounds, and I remember her saying, “I know I lost weight, but I feel less attractive.” I was like, Me too! People say this stuff to you once they start noticing, like, “You look really great.” And then you’re like, How did I look before? I didn’t think I looked that bad. There are studies about how dieting lowers your self-esteem: There’s this feeling, like you get on the scale and you’ve lost weight, and the sun is shining and the birds are singing—there’s just this feeling. And then you get on the scale again and you’re up a couple of pounds and the world falls apart. Everything becomes tied to your weight. And when you’re able to separate feeling good from weight, you get to feel consistently good about yourself—which is actually more attractive to other people.

There are always people you know who are just really attractive--you’re drawn to them, and they’re just really sexy people. But they’re just people! People tend to think that that quality is just this innate thing, and maybe it is, partially. But I also think it’s about that person having a clear concept of what’s attractive about themselves. They know they’re worthy. The internal is much more external than we realize. So if you’re okay with yourself no matter what size you’re at, it goes from, “Oh, I feel thin, so I can go out with my friends and have a good time” to you just feeling whatever you feel. You can go out and have a good time, you can meet people and believe that you’re as attractive and beautiful and sexual as someone who is thinner than you. We hear a lot of times, “It’s not about how you look; it’s about how you feel.” Well, yeah! But it’s very hard for people to just make that happen. It’s a big mind-set shift.

I’ve worked with a lot of people to try to make that mental shift happen. But it’s not just a mental shift; it’s also physical. I have this thing called the body-love shower. And all it is, is that literally, in the shower, you really concentrate on how good it feels to touch your body—how good it feels to touch your shoulder, your chest, your butt. You do everything in a way that feels good for you. You really enjoy the sensation of touching, and if you do this every morning for a week, you will feel differently about your body. You will. And suddenly it’s not about how you look. It’s about what your body is capable of sensually, how your body is capable of giving and receiving pleasure. And that is much bigger than what magazines tell you.

On Living From the Neck Up 
A lot of times we’re taught to live from the neck up. That’s another issue I hear a lot from people, because they don’t accept their bodies and they don’t even want to think about their bodies. There’s a disconnect, and that disconnect allows you to act a certain way toward your body. If you’re not part of your body then you can starve it or binge or whatever, because it’s not you. It’s like it’s this part of you that isn’t acting the way it’s supposed to, and you kind of whip it into shape or whatever, but it’s not you. So when you eventually start to connect the two and you’re like, “This is my body. How do I want to be treating it? Do I want to be intentionally hurting it? It is me.”

Living from the neck up makes it difficult to really look at the whole of yourself. When I was in law school, I went through this period where I couldn’t look in a mirror, and I’ve talked with other women who sort of have this too. I literally would look just for second, really quickly, with the light off. I wouldn’t really look. It’s creepy! And I was also much thinner then, I was younger. I was really struggling. What helped me is affirmations. I started to actually say affirmations in the mirror. It sounds really corny, but they sort of saved me. At first I couldn’t do it without crying, but there was a part of me that was like, Do this. It changed my relationship with the mirror. Now I actually do a lot of mirror work with my clients, especially if they’re fixated on one part of their body being not okay. I have them find five things they like about that part of the body and say them aloud. That can be hard, to say things you love about your body when you don’t necessarily believe it yet, but I really think you can’t just try to accept yourself, you have to try to truly love yourself. Most people think acceptance is the first step, but I think if you're trying for acceptance, you'll land somewhere between acceptance and dissatisfaction. You have to go all the way to love and then maybe you’ll settle into acceptance, or maybe you'll really go for broke and experience true love for your body.

_____________________________________________

Feeling invigorated by Golda's words? Body Love Wellness is offering a deal to readers of The Beheld: The first five people to sign up here will receive a free Body Love Breakthrough session, which will help you develop essential tools for wellness and self-acceptance. Fantastique!

Invited Post: Letting Myself Go

When I read the essay "Chasing Beauty: An Addict's Memoir" by Good Men Project publisher Lisa Hickey, I was riveted. I'd been turning to The Good Men Project for insightful commentary on gender issues aimed at men for a while, but this was different. This was speaking to men, yes, but it was also speaking to me: "[W]hen I’m beautiful—or close to beautiful—it’s all I think about. When I’m beautiful and I’m with you, I’m wondering if the guy across the room thinks I’m beautiful. I think beauty is going to connect us; but I’m not connecting with you, I’m connecting with a beautiful image of myself that I think you might like."

If you followed my month without mirrors project, you know that divorcing myself from my image of myself was one of the major themes I was working with—so to read someone else share her own thoughts on the matter was a thrill. I reached out to Lisa to thank her for her work, and she responded with what in some ways functions as a sequel to "Chasing Beauty." This time, it's "Letting Myself Go."

_________________________

 
It’s five years ago, and I’m walking down the street with Caroline, a work colleague; we just had grabbed a couple of salads at the nearby cafeteria, and she’s asking about my dating life. I murmur what I hope is something non-committal about the non-existence of a "dating life," and she says “Yes, I had a friend who also let herself go and my friend found it really hard…” And that was the last thing I heard. The implication that I had somehow “let myself go” was just too hard to bear. I couldn’t listen to another word she said. It was true I was no longer beautiful. It was true I used to be beautiful. But “letting yourself go” implies that you woke up one day and said, "Aww, screw it, ugly wins" with a shrug of the shoulders. Or perhaps you gradually crossed off this and this and this from your beauty routines. But it didn’t come close to acknowledging that there was still a Herculean effort going on with me vs. the forces of nature, and that the tidal wave of ageing was simply winning out no matter how hard I fought.

*   *   *   *   *

Last night I’m in the car with my two daughters, Shannon, age 16 and Allie, 19. I tell them about Autumn’s experiment with a month without a mirror. They both get all excited about the concept. Allie yells out gleefully, “Shannon could never do that.” At the same moment, Shannon says, “I could never do that.” Shannon is honest and resigned. “I think that makes me narcissistic. But I couldn’t do it. I need to see me to be me.”

I’ve written about my addiction to beauty that I’ve had most of my life, but beauty wasn’t all I was addicted to. It took me an equally Herculean effort to get sober after I became a blackout alcoholic at age 14 and drank every night of my life for the next 30 years. The addictions went hand in hand. I never understood the concept of being comfortable in my own skin. And I couldn’t stand it. So I drank to get rid of me. As a long-term life plan, it wasn’t the wisest of choices.

Caroline’s dig at having "let myself go" came at two years into being sober, when everything was still perilous. There was no escape route. I had to figure it out. I had to get a life I could own and embrace. A life I could own—that was a new concept for me.

About that time, I was realizing something profound about my interactions with other people. I couldn’t recognize faces. I had always known there was a problem, but now it seemed impossible. Everywhere I went—my kid’s hockey games, work functions, meeting someone for coffee—I had no clue who people were. Men, women, children, would come up to me, have a conversation, and I had no idea who I was talking to. I started to panic about going out in public. It was one thing if someone was the same place I had seen them last—office cubicles were a pretty safe bet—but anywhere else I’d have to search for contextual clues to recognize someone—clothing, the room we were in, height, glasses, voice, piercings. Without something specific, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t recognize someone I had met the day before unless they had really specific unique qualities. I was constantly smiling or saying “hi” to people that might be someone I knew, just in case they were. I couldn’t tell a complete stranger from someone I had known for months.

It was maddening, and I found a name for it—prosopagnosia, or face blindness. I never knew why I had it, or what caused it.

Until I read Autumn’s one-month experiment without a mirror, with this paragraph in particular:

When I see my image reflected on a mirror behind a bar I think, Oh good, I look like a woman who is having a good time out with friends. Or I’ll see my reflection in a darkened windowpane, hunched over my computer with a pencil twirled through my upswept hair, and I’ll think, My, don’t I look like a writer? Or I’ll walk to a fancy restaurant and see my high-heeled, pencil-skirted silhouette in the glass of the door and think: I pass as someone who belongs here. You’ll notice what these have in common: My thoughts upon seeing my reflection are both self-centered and distant. I’m seeing myself, but not really—I’m seeing a woman who looks like she’s having a good time, or a writer, or someone who belongs at Balthazar.

And it hit me. My inability to recognize other people’s faces happened because—whenever I met someone—in my mind, I was visualizing my own face, not theirs.

Everything clicked. I had been so worried about how I was being perceived, that it was me I was seeing in every situation, not the other person. No wonder I couldn’t remember them.

This story really, truly does have a happy ending.

I’m still sober, and along with it, all the joy of having a life I’m not constantly trying to run away from. Accepting the fact that beauty cannot, should not, will not be the defining quality of my life forced me to figure out which qualities should be. I learned to talk again by writing. I learned to connect through social media—slowly, learning about people first, caring about them first, letting them care about me long before they even knew what I looked like. I had always wanted to be funny, so I took a humor-writing course, and then a stand-up comedy course, and then an improv class. People laughed. I wrote poetry and did poetry slams. I learned to love public speaking—a feat I never would have thought possible. Public speaking, after all, requires you to actually connect with an audience, not just stand up there and look good. One of the first times I tried, it was a presentation to a room full of 75 people, most of whom I had known in various times in my advertising career. And I started out by saying “I bet most of you are here today because you didn’t actually believe that I could speak in public.” Loudest laughter I had ever heard.

Somewhere along the way someone told me, “If you want self-esteem, the best way isn’t to tell yourself you look good. It’s to go out and do something esteemable.” OH.

Somewhere else I heard, “Love is an action word.” OH. “Feeling” love wasn’t enough to make the other person love me. OH.

A sentence from a book: “Seek to connect, not to impress.” OH. OH.

And, gradually, gradually, gradually, I realized—once I didn’t have to worry about appearing funny but could talk and upon occasion have a funny sentence come out of my mouth; once I didn’t have to worry about appearing intelligent but could just offer insights that combined my knowledge with the other person’s equally important intelligence; once I didn’t worry about appearing loveable, but instead could just act with love to the person I was with—then—then—then—I could actually get into the flow with another person, just as Autumn described it. Not by performing for other people; and certainly not by desperately trying to come up on the spot with an appearance that I hoped would impress them. And once I got in the flow with the other person, even my memories of interactions changed—my memories became about them, not me. And I was able to recognize faces.

I had finally figured out that in order to connect with people—really connect with them—I, did, in fact, have to let myself go.

And that’s something I can live with.

_________________

Lisa Hickey is publisher of The Good Men Project, and CEO of Good Men Media, Inc. When she’s not writing about beauty, she’s writing about men. Her post on The Good Men Project that started the connection between Lisa and Autumn is here: "Chasing Beauty: An Addict’s Memoir."

Beauty Blogosphere 9.16.11

What's going on in beauty this week, from head to toe and everything in between.

From Head...
Earth face!: If body typing is appealing on the level of being an ersatz personality test, physiognomy like this new face-reading book being touted in The Daily Mail is even more oddly appealing, even though I think it's utter bullshit. Always fun to play, though!


 ...To Toe... 
If the shoe doesn't fit: Decoding Dress on why capitalism made her hunt for a month for black pumps. With her size 11 fitting, "There aren’t enough women like me to make it commercially worthwhile for manufacturers to cater to us." (Solutions, or at least ways to ameliorate the problem, here.) The shoe size question is interesting to me, as when applied to clothes we can't help but integrate the discussion with body image (as Already Pretty did this week by reminding us that "Clothes should fit you, you needn’t fit them," and as an oldie but goodie at Inkdot does with this post on tailoring). Shoes have less of an impact on our body image than clothes, so looking at the lack of diverse size options in footwear is a nice way to examine the sizing problem from a numbers-based perspective—and, yep, the man ain't giving Decoding Dress a new pair of shoes easily anytime soon. 


...And Everything In Between:
Ask a Dude: Hairpin's Dude answers two questions this week about appearance: How to accept a compliment when you're all hot and heavy with someone, and what to do when you find out your gross boyfriend has been making gross comparisons between your body and another woman's. Gross!

I'll have what he's having: We're more likely to consider someone beautiful if we think our friends think the person is beautiful. Science sez!

Fashion weak: Ashley Mears, sociologist, model, and author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model, on modeling as precarious labor, with few rights for the people wearing the clothes that make Fashion Week so damned glamorous.

Southern belles: A look inside the world of Venezuelan beauty pageants, and what it means for all Venezuelan women. (Banks there give loans for plastic surgery with slogans like "Have your plastic on our plastic"?!) Venezuelan models tend to be in high demand in the U.S.--very young women who can earn far more from their families while living abroad than they can from working at home--so I'm wondering about the economic implications of the beauty imperative there.

"If you could change one of your physical characteristics, which one would it be and why?": This was asked at the Miss Universe pageant, which is, as a reminder, a pageant in which contestants are selected for their physical beauty—but, of course, still need to be prodded to put down their appearance. Aiaiai! (Thanks to Caitlin at Fit and Feminist for the link.)

Vote for "The Illusionists": Filmmaker Elena Rossini (you've met her here before) is up for a nice publicity boost from IndieWire; won't you take a second and vote for "The Illusionists," a promising documentary about the exploitation of women's bodies for profit? UPDATE: "The Illusionists" won! (And had won before I posted this roundup, which I hadn't realized.) Nice work, all!

She's a winner!: Guinness world record holder for world's longest fingernails tops in with a combined 19.2 feet in length. Vacuuming, of all things, is what she claims is the hardest thing to do. (Clearly she does not wear contact lenses.)

Survivor: Cosmetics salesman is lone survivor of plane crash in Bolivia. No word as to whether skin cream played a role in his survival in the Amazon jungle.

Fly this: I've seen plenty of "travel-friendly" beauty products but had never thought about what it meant for the industry: Sales of products under three ounces have grown 10% a year since liquid restrictions were placed on U.S. flights.

Mirror Abuse Resistance Education: A high school in the UK has not only banned makeup, but has removed mirrors from the bathrooms. I think this is pretty awesome--I hear the idea that makeup allows you to express your individuality, but if the idea is to focus on learning (à la school uniforms), this certainly removes a distraction. Attention, Shelley College students: I had a great month with no mirrors, and Kjerstin Gruys is having a great year without 'em--you'll thrive during your on-school hours if you let yourselves, okay? 

Everybody loves Tavi: Nice piece in Slate about the advantages Tavi Gevinson's Rookie has over traditional teen mags (plus an acknowledgement that feminists in teen magazines aren't unicorns! we exist!). 

Smart eye for the racist guy: Remember that Crystal Renn shoot in which her eyes were taped back but of course the idea wasn't at all to look Asian? Minh-ha T. Pham at Threadbared takes it on: "Renn’s explanation is an example of a post-racial narrative in which race is simultaneously articulated through and disavowed by discourses of class, culture, patriotism, national security, talent, and, in the case of fashion, creative license."

It's called "lift and separate," Captain.

Cartoon boobs: Hourglassy on breasts in comics. Hint for aspiring comics artists: "When fabric is stretched across boobs, no matter how tight the spandex, it does not suction cup itself to each individual breast."

The Evolution of Ape-Face Johnson: Speaking of comics, cartoonist Carolita Johnson has a stunning piece in The Hairpin about her journey from supposedly funny-looking child, to high fashion model, to supposedly funny-looking model.

Army of two: Fantastic talk between Cristen Conger at Bitch and Hugo Schwyzer on the male beauty myth. "It’s self-centered in terms of meeting your own ideal, becoming the man you want to be. This all started with the Army...when they went with the most brilliant advertising slogan ever: 'Be All You Can Be.' ...They decided to stop selling patriotism because that was old school and start selling personal transformation, and that was absolute genius." (Or take it from the horse's mouth: Men's cosmetics marketers on their thoughts on the difference between marketing to men and women.)

"As much as I love feminism, I don’t believe it’s the only concept you will ever need": Nothing to do with beauty! But everything to do with feminism, and this Sady Doyle piece is one of the best I've read recently.

New No More Dirty Looks challenge: Meditation sort of kills me—it's one of those things I know I would really benefit from, but it feels impossible to do. So I'm eagerly jumping on the next No More Dirty Looks challenge: five minutes of meditation every day for sever consecutive days. (There's a prize too, but what prize could be better than EVERLASTING CONTENTMENT?) Guidelines for the challenge here, plus a nice how-to guide that shows you there's no "trick"; you've just got to do it.

Paging Amelie: A take on what it's like to be the "manic pixie dream girl" trope that plenty of smart feminists have deconstructed, and that this smart feminist has embodied. (I've played MPDG and have experienced a hint of self-loathing for it over the years, and this helped me ease up on that front.)

Apology not accepted: Virginia of Beauty Schooled guest posting at The Daily Glow about why beauty makes us happy. "I noticed that a lot of women tend to apologize for how happy beauty makes them.... Somehow, we’ve gotten the idea that it’s shallow to get too excited about beauty." But no more!

What do women look at first on a man?: Warning: This is sort of creepy and uncomfortable, but interesting as well—a man strapped tiny cameras to his biceps and crotch, then asked women for directions and let the cameras witness what body parts they looked at first. It's also interesting to see how various women respond to being approached; we only really know our own experiences, so it's a nifty insight into how others handle stranger interactions. (Basically, we're really really nice.)

How to be bold: Ashe at Dramatic Personae on fashion and self-consciousness—and here I thought I was the only one who owned amazing pieces she never wore because she felt self-conscious in them!

"The point of all this" fitness jazz: A group of bystanders to a car/motorcycle crash lifted the burning car to free the motorcyclist underneath, and (naturally!) it's caught on video. That's not what impressed Caitlin of Fit and Feminist, though: "What struck me was the presence of a young woman in the crowd. She didn’t hang back and watch.... Instead, she jumped right in. I’m not a betting woman, but I’d be willing to wager that woman is physically active... Maybe she plays sports or she does a bootcamp or she takes a Pilates class. I don’t know. All I know is that confidence in her body and her physical abilities is tightly woven into the tapestry of her self-image.... She doesn’t recite it as a mantra in hopes of one day actually believing it."