Eat the Damn Cake

I am a writer now, but when I was a little girl, I thought I would grow up to be a painter. After all, I painted nearly every day. And when I wasn’t painting, I was drawing. Mostly princesses. Sometimes their stepsisters, who always turned out not to be evil in the stories in my head. The princesses also always had brown hair. That was important.

Sometimes I drew cats, because I secretly wished that I was part cat, or at least would end up being able to communicate with cats psychically (at eight or so, I finally had to admit that I still couldn’t understand cat thoughts, but to this day, I have dreams with cats in them more than I think the ordinary person does, soo…just sayin’).

I started drawing as soon as I could hold a pastel, and I didn’t stop until I was maybe seventeen.

When I was fifteen, I put a bunch of my canvasses in an enormous plastic carry-case and went to New York City, to an art school fair at Pratt, where schools had set up booths and for the first few minutes, it seemed like I was the only person there not wearing black.

“You are really talented,” I was told by several schools. “But you’re too young. Why are you here?” 

I was there because I painted all the time.

(rejection makes me feel like this)

It’s been almost a year since I last played keyboard. My senior year of college, I played nearly every day. I had a beat up, sized down silver keyboard on a stand, and I wrote music constantly. Song after song about the parking lot that my dorm room looked over, and what it might symbolize about life. Song after song about the guy who acted like he liked me back and then seemed to change his mind. Occasionally I wrote about both things at the same time:

“All the cars in the parking lot are waiting, waiting, but they play it cool/ I know, I know exactly what I want/ but there are so many rules…”

See what I did there? It’s like I’m the cars! I’m so clever. So very clever.

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My best title ever, right?

I don’t think I can naturally “pull it off.”

I almost never have the things that magazines say you’re supposed to have when you do anything I want to do with my appearance. When you wear a short dress or cut off your hair or do bright lipstick or long dresses or whatever.

Honestly, I have no idea what my “look” is. You know, like preppy chic or flowy hippie or electric hipster or fairy grunge or urban hillbilly runway. I don’t even know what I look like. (And also, I don’t know anything about style. But I want to see what urban hillbilly runway would look like.)

Who the hell knows what they really look like?

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Isn’t it always different? Isn’t it different in different lights, in the mirror in the bathroom as opposed to the snide mirror in the hall as opposed to the generous mirror against the back wall? Isn’t it different in every photo? Some of them are downright cruel—that doesn’t count as a smile! Am I being possessed by some sort of really petty demon?—some of them are almost decent.

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Bear and I were having a disagreement. I thought he was being ridiculous. I thought he was reacting disproportionately. He was getting so upset over nothing. He was hurt over something that didn’t even matter.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “Just get over it.”

“I hate it when you say that,” he said. “Because it really does matter to me.”

“But it shouldn’t,” I said.

“But it does.”

“But it shouldn’t. Can we just talk about something else?”

“Sometimes you act like it’s my fault, when I’m upset, instead of trying to make me feel better.”

Yes. Guilty. I do this. I totally do this.

And I have no right to do it. Because actually, I don’t have the world figured out.

You seem surprised.

In fact, it has taken me several years to figure out how to make delicious cauliflower. Do you know how hard it is to make cauliflower delicious? Before I figured it out, I baked it in tinfoil and sautéed it with garlic and olive oil and puréed it and made mashed potato cauliflower. And some of those were good, but they weren’t delicious. It was a long road. And that’s just cauliflower.

(look at it all! mocking me...)

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After feeling awfully sorry for myself yesterday, and moping around for a bit, and then frantically pitching approximately three-thousand* magazines while frothing at the mouth, I took a moment to think.

I highly recommend moments like those. Thinking moments. Where you go, “But seriously, what the hell am I doing?”

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I was freaking out. I am one of those people who tends to freak out. I tend to believe the worst. I tend to interpret things negatively. If someone gives me a weird look on the elevator, I am more likely to think, “Why does she hate me?!” than “Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I’m carrying fourteen bottles of diet orange soda?”

When something bad happens to me, I am likely to think, “Well, this just says it all. I know the truth now. I suck. That is the truth. Nothing good will ever happen to me. And I’d might as well accept it. Maybe I should cry a lot, dramatically, at my computer, while I’m accepting it. Yes. Definitely the way to proceed.”

And then I proceed that way.

But when I took a moment to think, after my bout of frantic pitches, it occurred to me that a lot of this probably comes down to how I think about success.

How do you think about success?

I think about it like this: GOLD MEDAL NOBEL PEACE PRIZE PULITZER A MILLION DOLLARS GIANT BOOK DEAL HOUSEHOLD NAME SUPERMODEL MOVIE STAR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD LOVES YOU MORE THAN THEY LOVE THEIR KIDS.

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Sometimes I think we get too specific about beauty. We think we know exactly what it’s made of.

I can look at my face in the mirror and describe to you at great length exactly what would have to change in order for me to be gorgeous. I am mathematical in my precision. The same with my body. A couple inches added to the length of my calves, a tightening of the skin on my back, a slight adjustment to the shape of my breasts. I am surgical in my attention.

And then I remember that once, I didn’t think of beauty as a string of measurements and numbers and proportions. I didn’t have to think of it, really, because it was obvious that I was it. So, the day before my 26th birthday, I want to pause and remind myself of another side of beauty.

Here are some reasons why I was a gorgeous little girl:

I was smart. I could figure things out.

I had brown hair. Which I thought was the best color.

I had beautiful things. Like an old wedding dress that a tiny great aunt had once worn and a veil that an aunt had worn. I rocked that outfit. I was a princess in it, and not necessarily a bride. I had dresses covered in flowers. I had shirts with trains. I had a dinosaur costume.

I looked different from my friends. Which was important, because I could distinguish my beauty.

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So it’s the last day of Body Image Warrior Week (creation of the fabulous Sally McGraw of Already Pretty), and I wanted to share my contribution with you. You guys have heard this stuff before. But it doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop saying it You can also find this piece on the Huffington Post, and on some awesome BIWW blogs. 

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I write about body image because I love eating cake, but women around me are always dieting.

I write about body image because I have been told it doesn’t matter, but every year, more girls have eating disorders.

I write about body image because everyone cares about beauty, no matter how much we tell ourselves we don’t. And because, really, we are beautiful, no matter how much we tell ourselves we aren’t.

I write about body image because I moved to Manhattan, where suddenly everyone was very thin and very careful about eating and always going to the gym and suddenly it occurred to me that I was not thin enough and not pretty enough and very bad at going to the gym.

I write about body image because I noticed that after I noticed that I was maybe not thin enough, I stopped eating some of my favorite foods. They slipped out of my diet. I said no to dessert. I felt guilty when I gave in and made pasta for dinner. I felt guilty all the time, because all the time, I was cheating. There were all of these rules about what I could and couldn’t eat, and how much of it was OK, and I had somehow memorized them without even being aware of it, and now, when I broke them, I was ashamed.

I write about body image because I got a nose job because my big Jewish nose seemed like the opposite of beauty. Because when I told people that famous, beautiful women never have big Jewish noses, they always said, “What about Barbara Streisand?” and that was a long time ago. No one can think of anyone more recent. And also, because when my boyfriend who became my husband told me over and over that my nose was beautiful, I didn’t really believe him, even though I should have.

(me, being sexy with my nose taped, after my second surgery)

I write about body image because people make fun of people who get cosmetic surgery, even though when I got cosmetic surgery, there was nothing funny about it. I hated my face. I wanted to destroy my old face.

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There are parts of my body that I never encounter. The backs of my knees, for example. We have a civil, but distant relationship.

Yesterday, for the first time in maybe a month, I went to yoga again. I had just read this piece, by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano of The Beheld, for Body Image Warrior Week, and I thought that I would definitely draw myself as a connected entity, with a neck that meets with shoulders (you’ll get that if you read the piece).

But at yoga, twisted into a strange position in my unfortunate spot by the radiator, it occurred to me that I actually don’t know my body all that well.

My body feels unpredictable and slightly dangerous to me. It does things I don’t understand. For example, and this is gonna be about menstrual blood, so all boys stop reading here: at the end of my period, it always stops for a day and then comes rushing back for a day, like it missed me and changed its mind.

My body has been known to play mean tricks on me, which might be why I am wary. One day, suddenly, my hair started falling out. Years ago, in college. Before that, I had such thick hair, it would occasionally flex and snap one of those flimsy ponytail holders, showing off. After that, my hair was wispy and apologetic. It never fully grew back, and when I got to New York City, I went to the doctor, and sat on the table, humiliated and determined, and asked him what my options were.

He looked confused. “Options? There aren’t any, really.” But he gave me a prescription for a Rogain knockoff and he ran blood tests. In the convenience store on the other side of Broadway from me, I had to ask the woman behind the counter for the hair loss treatment. She pulled it off the shelf and gave me a long look. “This is for men,” she said firmly.

“I know!” I said. I paid for it, wishing I could just lie and say it was for my boyfriend or my dad or something. But I am never able to lie and will probably die because of it one day, when the pirate lord who has taken me prisoner stands me up on the plank and asks me for the last time if I was trying to start a mutiny and steer the ship over to that island, with the pretty beach and the palm trees. I was!!! I love pretty beaches! I can’t help it! I WILL DIE FOR YOU, PALM TREES!

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(I don’t know where that came from. Sorry.)

The doctor called me. I was severely anemic.

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