Bear and I decided to get our hair buzzed together. It was his idea. He went first, and came out looking like summer.

Then I sat down in the chair.

“Buzz it,” I told the elegant French stylist.

She had a good laugh. Then she looked at me hard. “You’re serious?”

“I’m serious.”

She needed some convincing. I promised I wouldn’t be mad at her. I swore.

She did it, a disapproving look on her face. I was encouraging the whole time. When she was done, I grinned at my reflection. “I love it!” I said.

(and then I did this, to be more convincing) 

She looked at me skeptically for a long time. Then she said, “It looks good on you. But only because you are young.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m here now!” I said, and hopped up.

Bear rubbed my head. “You look great,” he said. “You look like a peach.”

“You too!” He looked really manly, with his very short hair. There was a chance I looked really manly, too. In my own way.

Off we went. It was Sunday evening. There was nothing to do. So I tried on a bunch of my favorite outfits with my new hair. My new/old hair. This is the second time I’ve gotten a buzz cut. The first time was a year ago. And I realized suddenly that I’d forgotten. Over the year, as my hair had grown back and grown wavy and puffed out and done curls and played tricks and I’d trimmed it a little and tried gel to tame it—and I’d forgotten what it feels like to get a buzz cut. The way your ears appear newborn. The way your face is brought into sharp clarification. Everything about it is so present, so eager. So bold.

I’d forgotten the way a buzz cut makes me feel about everything.

It makes me feel bold. It makes me feel brave. It makes me stand out. There’s nothing I can do except stand out. And I remember that I love standing out.

It’s funny, for someone who has been known to feel ugly. For someone who let a surgeon open her face with a knife. I like to be striking. (Remind me to write a whole post on this soon).

But it’s more than that—my hair won’t let me not be bold. It won’t let me not be brave. It won’t let me hide. And so with it, or, I guess, without it, I am my bravest self.

Weird. That not having some hair can do that to a girl.

But fantastic.

I bought a dress I’d been wanting—without sleeves. There was no time to feel self-conscious about my chubby arms, because my hair was commanding all of my attention. My hair had a mind of its own. It said, “Get that dress! Work it!”

(this is my friend Elena and me, working it. at this point i’m wearing her sexiest shirt, just to try it, and my tallest heels)

(we are really good at workin’ it)

It’s sort of amazing, how simple it is, as though I am cutting off my inhibitions with the hair. At a party, wearing the new dress and some very tall heels, I felt like being funnier—like talking more. A girl with a shaved head wouldn’t hold back. A girl with no hair in a long, fabulous dress would have something to say. She would be warm and clever and opinionated. She would be comfortable in her body. Otherwise, she wouldn’t be able to cut off all her hair.

So there. I was.

I hadn’t been feeling particularly bad at being myself before my buzz cut. I just felt better at being myself after. The way I did last time. The way I am pretty sure I will feel every time. Every time I am brave enough to try something ridiculous and striking and sudden. Every time I trust myself to carry it. I trust myself to be beautiful, anyway. Not because of, but just beautiful. Period.

Sometimes your comfort zone is cozy. It’s warm under all that hair. Sometimes it’s good to jump outside it and see how it feels. You might even find out what your ears look like, for real. They’re so pretty!

Or, you know, keep your hair and try something else that’s totally different. That’s fine, too

(this is my more subdued thumbs up. it doesn’t look like I’m doing it right, though. is there some trick to thumbs up?)

*  *  *

Have you ever changed something about your appearance and suddenly felt bolder?

Unroast: Today I love my face. It’s so unapologetic.

This is the story of the first time I cut off all my hair.

Here is a reader pic of herself being sexy and awesome, celebrating her gorgeous body. She sent it to me and I asked if I could share it. Thank you, Kimmy Sue! And thanks to the photographer, CAT EDGE: 

If anyone else feels like sharing pictures of themselves feeling awesome, feel free! And of course, if there’s cake involved, it’ll go in the gallery.

Here’s a picture of Bear and I, as per reader request

 (usually we smile more than this. but i thought we looked sort of mysterious and dreamy here)

For the longest time, I have only had one guy friend. And I used to date him, in college. Which complicates things. It makes Bear uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable, too. Not the him being my friend part. That’s fine. It happened naturally. We’re horrible gossips together.  But I wish I could erase our dating past. I shouldn’t have dated him. Even while I was dating him, I was hazily aware of that.

I am bad at guy friends. I have only had a few. Which makes me totally uncool, I know.

Once, I had more than a few, very briefly, and then, when I met Bear, they all vanished. Which was too bad, because I like hanging out with guys.

The problem is, they always try to kiss me. Some of them try to kiss me right away. Some of them do it sneakily, much later. Some of them wait years and year, but then, predictably, they try to kiss me.

The guy I already dated—he will never try to kiss me again. If you mentioned the idea to him, he would look immediately ill. We went through that, we came out of it, and now we’re safe. Thank god.

I know that men and women can be friends. There are lots of movies and books about how, actually, they can’t. How it’s this big mystery that we probably need more books and movies about. The Man/Woman Friendship Conundrum: An Attempt At Solving the Unsolvable Mystery About Whether Or Not Men and Women Can Actually Be Friends Without Eventually Making Out (By someone with a PhD).

There are lots of movies about a beautiful woman with a sweet face and hair that can either fall in long, sleek layers or go up in a tidy, spunky ponytail and her best guy friend. Allow me to spoil it: they end up together. Briefly, some other guy, usually a flashy guy who drives the kind of shiny car that women are apparently unable to resist, shows up, and she is tempted, and maybe eventually heartbroken. So she ends up with the friend, who loved her all along.

I hate that ending. I hate it because she never wanted him, and then she has to realize that she wants him, but it feels more like she has to settle for him because he wants her and he’s the only one left. And that’s the end of that friendship.

But of course women and men can be friends without kissing or ending up in bed or at the altar. I’ve seen it! There’s proof! My dad has close women friends from high school- he goes out to lunch with them. My brother’s best friend is a girl. He’s dating another girl. Bear has women friends from every stage of life. He has at least as many female as male friends, I think. The guys I was with before him also had plenty of friends who were girls.

I’m sitting here thinking, and it seems like most of the women I know don’t have close guy friends, somehow (except for one who is best friends with a gay guy– I am so jealous). But that’s probably a blip. They have guy acquaintances! They probably hang out with guys!

But I can’t seem to do it. And not, I’m assuming, because I’m irresistible. But, from my experience, the guys who choose to be around me are ones who want something to happen romantically. And the other ones lose interest and wander off. And now I am married, so suddenly, there are no guys in the world. There are the husbands and boyfriends of my friends, who I feel comfortable around and hang out with in the presence of their partners. And then there are single men who I probably shouldn’t talk to. Not because they are so tempting, with their shiny cars, but because it just feels awkward and misplaced. Because I haven’t had time to learn how to interact with them. Because my culture seems to certain that women and men together are a recipe for sex and disaster. Because I am bad at guy friends anyway, so how can I get good at them now, now that I’m sectioned off, spoken for?

I feel like there might be some sort of vague, slippery double standard. How did Bear end up with so many women friends? Why don’t I have a complementary bevy of awesome guys? We could introduce them to each other! Life would be all equal and balanced! Why does he get to feel annoyed and vaguely threatened by any interactions I have with men, while I have become close with his wonderful women friends? Sometimes his annoyance, coupled with my inexperience, makes the idea of a guy friend take on epic, mythic proportions in my mind. It is this impossible thing. It is slightly dangerous. Who knows what will happen…

I decided to find out.

My one guy friend, who I dated long ago during a time of my life that I have repressed almost entirely, lives in Texas. We talk on the phone sometimes. But I’d been emailing back and forth with a guy I knew through writing, and we made plans to have coffee and talk about writing some more.

“You can be my guy friend,” I told him, boldly. He said that might work out. He sounded a little bemused.

And then, immediately, I was anxious. As though I was doing something wrong. I wasn’t sure how to break the news to Bear. The news that I was going to see a guy. In person. A real guy. And we were going to do things together. Like talk. And drink coffee. And eat stuff. And possibly even walk to the subway.

Bear wanted to know: why did I need a guy friend? Why did I want one? I had all these other perfectly fine friends. He was uneasy.

I went anyway, and tried not to feel as though I was violating some sacred code of marriage. The guy friend and I seemed to be getting along. I ordered a cannoli (cannolo?), he ordered a gelato (so then it HAS to be” cannolo”).

(oh no! it’s too phallic! what was i unwittingly suggesting?!)

We talked about stuff. I thought I was being relatively charming, and then I hit my straw with an emphatic gesture, and sent it flying onto the next table over, where it landed in a little girl’s lap. My new guy friend laughed a lot, and then he made fun of me a lot.

“I am usually not this bad,” I said. “I usually don’t lose my straw like that.” I tried to keep talking about important things, but he was still laughing.

I relaxed a little when he started talking about dating and I started talking about Bear. It was like we were saying, “Yes, yes, we know, girls and guys often get together for another reason, but that is not the point here.”

After meeting up in person, we continued talking online from time to time. The way that friends do.

I think that Bear is over it. Maybe he was just inexperienced with me having guy friends, the way that I am inexperienced having them. Maybe he just expects them to try to kiss me, because he wants to kiss me. Maybe it’s easy to make the mistake that all guys are the same. People do that a lot, with other people.

And recently, randomly, it occurred to me that having a guy friend doesn’t actually have to be anything very unusual. It occurred to me that it isn’t that I need to have guy friends, it’s that I’d like to be able to be friends with anyone I want to be friends with, regardless of their gender.  Because having a guy friend turns out to be a lot like having a friend. It’s practically the same thing. Wait—it is the same thing. Except, from my experience, you get teased a lot more. You get made fun of. And things feel straightforward, much like the stereotype. Which is nice. Because that is how my brothers and I interact.

And I like it.

I feel a little hopeful.

*  *  *

Do you have guy friends? Tell me!

Unroast: Today I love the line of my jaw.

P.S. I told my new guy friend that I was writing this post, and he said, “Just make sure to highlight my sensitive side, too.  I know that I am All that is Man, but I want people to know there’s more to me than macho awesomeness.” So don’t worry– there’s more to him than macho awesomeness. I swear.

There it is.

(source)

The latest in the “mommy wars.”

Because everything is a war these days, it seems. Yesterday, we were talking about the “war on obesity.” I even heard that Obama declared “war on marriage.” So “war” means “having a different opinion.” Or possibly “wanting equal rights.” In a moment, it might mean, “Hey, what you lookin’ at? You got a problem?”

But I want to talk about the so-called “mommy wars.” The cycle of articles and news reports and TV interviews and books that argue for the one good way to raise kids, and explain why every other idea is not only terrible, but it will definitely destroy your children’s future.

The mommy wars keep going, and going, and then they’re still going, because they are at their heart about two things that almost everyone cares about intensely: what it means to be a woman, and what is good for children.

So we go endless rounds. Breastfeeding vs. formula, weaning at six months vs. nursing for a year vs. nursing until the child feels done, SAHMs vs. moms who work outside the home vs. moms who draw an income from work they do while staying at home, attachment style parenting vs. hands off, supposed Tiger Mom parenting vs. supposed helicopter parenting. I think there are maybe dragon parents and dog parents too? Eventually we might get to iguanas and giraffes (parents who are always craning their necks to peer over their child’s shoulder?).

I am twenty-six. One day I would like to have a baby. At that point, I would like everyone to shut up. I would like everyone to stop marching around with weapons drawn and armor up, acting like there’s a war where there are only different sets of knowledge, different necessities, and different worldviews. In exactly the way that worldviews and knowledge and necessities are different surrounding other areas of life. Like what career you pursue, who you choose to date and/or marry, how you spend your free time, what motivates you, what makes you feel fulfilled, and, um, just about everything else.

My childhood was, in many ways, just about as alternative as it gets. At least, it was alternative according to mainstream media, which is fascinated by the things that it designates as alternative. My mom is a La Leche League Leader (a breastfeeding expert and mentor). She trained as a midwife for a while. She had home births, and I was there for my brothers’ births (it was loud). We had a family bed when I was little. My mom grew vegetables in her garden and we only ate organic, even before people were really into that. We didn’t watch TV. I didn’t go to school until college.

Wow. You might need to take a breath. That was a lot of alternative.

Oh, and we’re Jewish! So we’re minorities there, too. Yay!

When I was little, I carried my doll around in a little cloth sling. So did my best friend, Emily. I was jealous of her sling, because it had tiny cherries on it.

My family is an easy target in the mommy wars.  My mom is, especially. But if you think that someone who did all of the things she did as a mom is crazy and weird and has stringy hair, you should meet her. She will be wearing a tailored, stylish outfit, have her nails done, look surprisingly young for her age, and talk about how much she loves classical music. You will like her. She is friendly and approachable. Some of her friends have flowing armpit hair and wear flowing skirts. Some of her friends wear pearls and host tea and book club at their mansions. People are not the way you expect them to be, based on the description the other camp devised.

Which is why some people are still shocked to learn that I was homeschooled. “But you seem so social!” they cry.

That’s because I am.

Being from such an unusual background, it seems to me that the two sides of the supposed war aren’t very equal. Most women work outside the home, give birth in hospitals, put their kids in school, don’t have a family bed, and let their kids watch plenty of TV. There’s not a ton of competition from the “other side” here. If anything, the battle feels contrived.(Although I think a majority of American babies are breastfed for up to six months—so maybe that’s why this is perhaps the most urgent debate).

Recently, I watched “The Business of Being Born” with a friend. Even though my mom is a passionate homebirth advocate, I always vaguely assumed I’d give birth in a hospital one day. I hadn’t given it much thought, and didn’t feel particularly interested. But when I watched the film, I got curious, so I asked my gynecologist, when I saw her a couple weeks ago– what did she think about non-medicated birth? She snorted. She thought they were a bad idea. Before I could say anything more, she told me that homebirths are really dangerous and not to believe any propaganda I see or read about them. I asked about birthing centers at hospitals. She talked about the one at the hospital where she had her baby. They’re very comfortable, she said, with big beds and tubs.

“Sounds good,” I said, grinning. “Is that where you gave birth?”

She rolled her eyes. “I gave birth in a normal room,” she said.

I have a friend who gave birth in a “normal room.” She wrote about it, and her words were so gorgeous. She got an epidural. She was being monitored the whole time. And she was happy with her choice, and had a healthy, alert baby.

I am happy for her. Why wouldn’t I be?

So why did my gynecologist roll her eyes at me? Why, when I asked about different birthing options, did she quickly tell me that there was only one “right” way?

I think that’s the way people act when they feel like it’s a battle. There isn’t room for a second opinion. There isn’t room for another way.

When in fact, in life, everywhere, all the time, there are so many ways, you can’t possibly count them.

(a little like this)

I am happy about the choices my mother made. As far as I can tell, the only real problem is that I can’t talk about the TV shows we all watched when we were kids with my friends, because I didn’t watch them. And it’s sort of amazing how often people talk about the TV they watched when they were kids.

I am thankful for the choices my mother made, and for my unique upbringing and that sling (even though it didn’t have cherries on it), and the big vegetable garden that I played in, and all the time I got to spend with my family, and the gentle world I learned and grew in.

But I don’t think my mother’s choices were the “right” ones. I think they were often the right ones for our family.

And while I do think some types of mothering are less healthy than others (don’t lock your screaming child in a room, please!), I don’t think that this means war. I think this means being human.

I am tired of womanhood being pushed and pulled and dragged over the coals as we argue about who is the best mom. Leave womanhood alone. Anything we are as women, that’s womanhood. Done.

No one is the best mom. Everyone who loves their children and tries to do their best by them is the best mom.

And give a girl a chance! I want to have babies in this world, too! Let’s make it a warmer, gentler place, where people have conversations, not screaming matches. Where people take off their armor and talk about how much they love their children, regardless of whether or not those children are currently being breastfed. Where people are honest about their struggles and their decisions, and how little they know, and how much they know.

Sometimes, I have a feeling that the world is already much more like that then these ongoing articles suggest. Sometimes I think we’re probably almost much closer to that then it’s profitable to admit. Because war so often is about money, isn’t it?

I am not shocked by the woman breastfeeding her three-year-old on the cover of Time Magazine. And it’s not just because I was breastfed until the age of three (honestly, I don’t remember it at all). It’s because I’m used to people trying to shock me with the catchy headlines and dramatic images of the mommy wars. It’s just a mom and a child, and a boob. Which, on their own, should not constitute a battle cry. They never really did. They shouldn’t now.

*   *   *

What do you think about the Time mag cover? About the mommy wars?

Unroast: Today I love the way my neck looks in my shadow on the street. I just noticed it yesterday, on my way to the subway, and it was cool.

It is not totally rare that I am moved to tears, but this time it was for a good reason.

I was standing in a sleek little gallery on the Lower East Side, music beating in the background, as I looked at an enormous photograph of a little black girl holding the image of a white model’s face over her own. The colors were vivid, almost intense, but simple. The girls skinny legs and arms jutted. She was sitting, clutching the other face against her own. It had been torn from a magazine. It was a makeup ad. The girl was a Ugandan orphan. I wanted to peek under her mask and see her real face, but she wouldn’t let me.

The photographer was Gloria Baker Feinstein. She was in the city for her exhibit. She’s spent a lot of time in Uganda, and she established a non-profit for some of the amazing orphaned children she met and grew close to there (their art was also on display at the gallery). She also took a bunch of pictures of women eating cake, after reading this blog. And they are amazing.*

But anyway—I met Gloria in person for the first time, and she was wearing a leather jacket and being unassuming and quietly awesome and badass, and her photos made me cry.

And then that one, the one of the girl holding the pale face up to cover her own, dark one, made me suddenly think of this Op-Ed I read in the New York Times the other day. One that keeps bothering me. One that I don’t know how to talk about because it is by a black woman, talking about black women, and I am a pale, Jewish woman who is probably not fit to comment.

But I can’t help it. I’m commenting.

The article, by Alice Randall,  is about how black women operate under totally different beauty rules than white women. Instead of feeling pressure to be thin, they feel pressure NOT to be thin. Losing weight is uncool. It’s not allowed. Randall’s husband wishes she wouldn’t. He likes her body the way it is. He likes the plumpness. And attitudes like that, as innocuous as they seem, are killing black women. The culture of weight celebration is causing black women to get diabetes and heart disease. So they should fight back against the beauty ideals of their community, and lose weight, and get fit, and stay alive.

I don’t know, but something about this didn’t sound right to me.

There is so much pressure to be thin in our culture, in other cultures, all around the world, that I wonder if it’s possible for so many black women, here in America, to be afraid of losing weight. When I watch TV and there’s a black woman in a show, she’s usually thin. Thin and strikingly gorgeous, with a face like a supermodel. Sometimes she is unique in that her face is not exactly like a supermodel. Occasionally, she is heavier. If she’s heavier, she’s often also silly and goofy and funny. Very rarely, she’s heavy and serious. Of course, TV is not reality; not even reality TV. What you see on TV is not what you see in your community. But it influences it. The beauty ideals of the dominate culture infiltrate minority cultures. They do. We see it everywhere. They seep in, like a toxin. They leach into the water supply. They spread, and they spread. And then articles start popping up about how eating disorders are proliferating, as the images of white, thin beauty reach new places and put down roots there and begin to claim all of the billboards.

I don’t know how much to believe. It’s hard to say. But I’m not very surprised. I’ve heard over and over again about the struggles of being dark skinned in a world that prizes pale skin. It is hard to look different. It is so damn hard to look different.

I know, and I only look like an Eastern European Jew. And we’ve managed to assimilate very successfully, in large part, I think, because of our pale skin.

So I have trouble with this idea, that black women are killing themselves to stay heavy. Can that really be true? Or if it is true, I can’t believe that it is true across the board. There must be room to feel all sorts of pressures. Unique communal pressures and also the endless whisper of the larger society’s motivation. It is always confusing, isn’t it, what we’re supposed to do with our bodies– how they’re supposed to look?

And if it’s true, God, how disappointing. Because I’ve always loved the way black women in general seemed to be more comfortable with their bodies. The way beautiful black women on the subway sometimes wear stunning, daring outfits, regardless of their weight, in a way that I almost never see women of other races doing.

If it’s true, I feel like another escape route has been blocked off. A reader named Sarah mentioned the “war on obesity” in the comments the other day, and I keep hearing those words, too.  And while of course I want children to grow up eating healthy food and spend their lives diabetes free, and of course I want everyone to learn how to be as healthy as possible, I also wonder if it’s too simple to say, “Fat is bad. You are killing yourself.” And I wonder about what happens when we are all warriors against fat– when fat means both “ugly” and also “death.” At what point do we stop? How thin is no longer fat? Because everywhere I turn, people are ashamed, and afraid, and know their own inexcusable BMIs by heart, and feel as though they might be standing too close to enemy  lines. They feel as though they might have stumbled across them.

I should clarify– I don’t disagree with everything Randall says. I think it’s important to raise awareness about health issues. I also don’t think fat=good, automatically. Just like nothing automatically equals good. Clearly, it’s complicated. But I am a little worried that the Op-Ed makes some problematic suggestions about beauty and health.

Let’s address health issues, please! But let’s not make acceptance of non-mainstream beauty a problem in doing do. Let’s not imagine that women are simply too complicit, once they are told they look good. Let’s not pretend that’s the end of story. Let’s not imagine that all black women, or a majority of black women, or a large number of black women, feel the same about anything. Let’s not blame men for being appreciative of their wives bodies, just as they are. Of course, no group of women should feel pressure to only look one way, whether that means being heavy or tiny or anything else. But being heavy doesn’t have to mean being unhealthy, and if black women can be proud of the way they look, even if they are bold and curvy and thick and rounded, then thank god! Because maybe if they can do that, they can manage to like themselves, actually like the way they already are. The way I’d like to like the way I already am. Because life is better that way.

But so often, I want to pull a mask up and approach the world with a different face—a better one. I want to face the world streamlined, mainstream, understandably lovely.

And I have a feeling I’m not alone in this. I have a feeling we all struggle, one time or another, with the urge to be the image in the magazine.

(Photo by Gloria Baker Feinstein, who gave me permission to include it here. I’m so grateful!)

*  *  *

What do you think of the Op-Ed? Of the idea that black women need to fight the pressure to be fat? What about other women in other ethnic/racial communities? Are there very different pressures related to body image? Or is it always a mix of unique and common beauty ideals?

Unroast: Today I love the way my ears look against my short hair.

*I’m still not sure what to do with them, so I just put them in a Tumblr. But if anyone has a better idea, please let me know. I’m bad at this stuff. Marketing. Promoting. Getting the word out. I just want to sit here and look at the pictures of happy women eating cake, and smile to myself.

I was eleven. I was at a slumber party. Remember those? It was for my friend Amy’s birthday. She’d invited a bunch of girls over, and there were going to be games and punch and cookies and sleeping bags.

She lived in the biggest house of anyone I knew—with bricks on the front and fancy things like porcelain figurines and sculptures of horses inside. I thought her mom was fancy, too. She was very, very thin, with an air of sadness about her, and she always had her hair up, with a few wisps escaping. She had a long, elegant neck, and she wore slim, matching clothes. Amy’s dad had left her mom for one of his college students. I thought the student would be terrible—an empty-eyed girl with round breasts popping out of her pink lacey shirt. I imagined her as a sort of ill-intentioned Barbie. But once they dropped Amy off at my house together and she was confusingly earthy and friendly, wearing cargo pants and Birkenstocks, with a gap-toothed smile. And Amy’s dad was chubby and bashful. I thought he looked ashamed, standing in front of my parents with his girl, who was only nineteen.

I was already nervous in Amy’s house, because I had seen her dad with the girl. And because I felt sorry for her elegant mother, who I imagined was British, even though she didn’t have a British accent, just because I thought that British people were all elegant and liked sculptures of horses. I felt awkward, feeling sorry for someone’s mom. I knew it wasn’t my place.

(source)

I didn’t want to be alone in any of the rooms of the cavernous house, because I felt like an intruder. I didn’t want to touch anything, because everything was so clean and in its place. Not like in my house, where there were toys everywhere—makeshift guns, rigged from paper towel rolls and tape and rubber bands, that my brothers were always trying to shoot at each other with. Mom had a “no guns” policy that had never stopped them.

The other girls at Amy’s party seemed really cool. I could tell they were the girls at school who people wanted to hang out with. There was something faintly vicious about the way they clustered and then turned their heads swiftly, like birds of prey. I was homeschooled, of course, and I knew Amy from 4-H, where we grew plants together and I entered the art contests and she entered the riding contests. Her best friend, another girl in 4-H, was one of my best friends, too, and I was relieved that she was at the party. She was nice and got along with everyone.

It’s taking me a long time to tell this story, because I’m remembering so much about that house, and how it felt to be inside it, and all of the drama that family was enduring as the other families stood silently around, helpless and fascinated, watching. But the story is not about infidelity or professors who sleep with their students or elegant houses. It’s about toe hair. Because something happened at that party that changed the way I thought about my body forever. And it started with my toes.

Amy’s mom brought us snacks and hovered for a while in the background of the expansive carpeted living room while we set up our pink and purple sleeping bags (mine was olive green, hearty, and grownup-sized—it looked like it had been in the military before arriving at my parents’ house. They had gone camping a bunch before I was born). The girls giggled about some boys they knew from school and I put in a giggle or two. I was worried that it would be a long night. But within an hour, everyone was getting along, the way you still can when you’re eleven and then can’t for some reason, a little later, when you’re fourteen or so. I was the outsider, but the girls were being nice enough, and Amy was a gracious hostess.

And then we got to the games. We played Ouija board. We asked it if there was a ghost in the house and it confirmed that there was. Her name was Gertrude. We asked it if various boys liked us, and they mostly did.

(source)

There were presents, and ice cream cake, and as we all snuggled into our sleeping bags, we played a game with lots of little square cards. I can’t remember how it went, but the basic idea is that whoever stood out from the group in some way, according to what the card said, would have to do something.

“Whichever of you is the tallest, run around the table three times.”

There was more to it, I’m sure.

“Whoever has eaten pizza today, yell your name five times.”

Sometimes it was a bunch of people. We’d all eaten cake, of course!

Everyone thought the game was great, and we kept playing for a while.

Then Amy was reading the card, “Whoever has the hairiest big toe…”

And everyone burst out laughing. “No one even HAS hair on their big toe!” cried one of the girls. “They’re making that up!”

“We should check,” said someone else.

“I don’t have any,” said someone, looking. “That would be so gross!”

You can probably sense where this is going.

Furtively, I pulled a foot out of the sleeping bag and glanced down, shielding it under the glass-topped coffee table. Oh my god. There was a tuft of hair. I froze. My heart was pounding. How had I never  known that I had hair on my toes before?! How was this happening? I looked quickly around. Everyone was busy inspecting their toes. Terror rose in my throat. Soon they would begin inspecting one another’s toes, and then they would discover that mine were the hairiest, and I’d have to stand up in front of the group and do something ridiculous, as punishment for my disgusting flaw. I felt as though my body had betrayed me. Had secretly sprouted toe hair just to shame me and make other girls laugh at me.

“This one’s weird,” I said in a choked voice.  “Let’s just do another one instead. This one is so gross. No one even has toe hair.” I was taking a desperate gamble. What if someone called my bluff? I swallowed hard. Everyone looked at me, and I could feel my face heating up. Could they tell from my face that there was hair on my toes?

“Yeah, whatever,” said one of the girls suddenly. “Let’s do the next one!”

And we moved on. I kept my feet inside the sleeping bag for the rest of the evening, and in the morning, I quickly pulled my socks on. No one could know. No one could ever know.

(these would be off-limits for a while)

I don’t know what happened to Amy’s mother and her father who left for the gap-toothed girl in the Birkenstocks. I don’t even know what happened to Amy. She and my other friend stayed close, I know that much. But about a year later, my family moved to a town about an hour away, and I didn’t go to 4-H (which had been kind of lame anyway) anymore. We talked on the phone a few times, but we didn’t have Facebook yet, and soon I had new friends, and that was that.

But something changed for me that night, in Amy’s high-ceilinged living room with the grand fireplace. I learned that my body could be gross to other people. To me, even. I learned that it could have things that were wrong with it. That weren’t supposed to be there. That were a mistake. I learned that I would have to do something about those mistakes, if I wanted to make friends and be cool and pretty and not be laughed at. I’d have to start shaving the hair off my toes, maybe.  (OK, it’s true. I’ve done that.)

That was the first time. There would be many other times. Like when I learned that my nose was too big, at another slumber party, actually, when a girl told me she could tell I was Jewish from my nose, because it was big. And then again, when a girl told me I should get a nose job. When I learned that my breasts were small. And much, much, later, when I learned that I had too much pubic hair. And during the process of being fitted for a wedding gown, it seemed like there was something wrong with my weight, and that my waist was perhaps not tiny enough. Those lessons are learned everywhere, all the time.

I try to pay attention these days, because I am also always learning other lessons. Lessons about how good I look, how naturally my body does its own beauty, how successful it is, and how few mistakes have actually been made. Sometimes I don’t even mind the toe hair. Most times, actually, now.  But it’s been a long road from that birthday party. Because once things fall apart and break, whether a porcelain figurine, a marriage, or a sense of one’s own inherent loveliness, they can be complicated to rebuild.

(source)

*  *  *

When did you realize you stood out in a bad way? What happened next?

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in a clingy maxi skirt because I finally found one and bought it and I am so, so ridiculously excited about that.

Reader cake pic! She says I inspired her to shave her head. She looks amazing and I am just about bursting with pride right now

Here’s her unroast: Today I love how my curvy and petite body looks in the jeans I’m “not supposed” to wear – skinnies!

Feel free to share yours any time!

I  look a lot like my mom.

At least, that’s what everyone says. I don’t really see it.

(my dad, mom, one of my brother, and me. I am holding a lot of stuff, for some reason)

Classic daughter behavior.

When I was a kid, I had this book of hairstyles. The photographs were close-ups, shot by some famous fashion photographer. The models were famous models, and the hair stylists were legendary stylists to the stars. I didn’t care about any of that. I just loved looking at the amazing hair. I wanted to paint pictures of the pictures. My favorite was of this model with very dark brown skin and purple lipstick. Her hair was incredibly short, and her face was literally the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. After I flipped through it in Borders,  I saved up my money and bought the book because of her face. But there was one picture in that book that annoyed me. That disrupted the flow of gorgeous faces and fantastic hair.

It was a picture of a woman with her two daughters. The woman was a famous model, now retired. The daughters were maybe fourteen and sixteen. Someone had thought it would be a cute idea to show them all together. The problem was that the mother was so much prettier, I thought, in my childish, unsympathetic way.

The mother belonged in this glossy, incredible book, but her daughters were out of place. Their faces were less refined versions of her face. They were duller, lumpier, muddled, as though her genes had been muted by their father’s, or misapplied. I felt sorry for them, but I wanted them to get out of my book.

Later, when I was both more aware and more aware of the way beauty worked in the world around me, I thought of those girls and their mother. And I remembered that the girls had actually been lovely, with their more complicated faces. And I thought of my mom and me.

Because I am one of those women with a very pretty mother.

A mother who was always the pretty girl. The kind of girl who will sometimes complain that she doesn’t like her toes, or something, and no one will believe her, because it’s hard to imagine anything about her not being pretty and well-formed.

Once, when I was a teenager, I ran into a casual acquaintance of my family in town, and he looked me up and down and said, “I think you might be almost as pretty as your mother!” And I felt suddenly faintly ill.

A string of boyfriends all told me how beautiful my mom was. As though they were surprised. “I have to admit this—your mom is really good looking…” They were nervous around her. I was easy. It was my mom, sometimes imperious and faintly dangerous, sometimes warm and laughing, who needed impressing.

I felt sort of proud of her, sort of unsure how to react.

Every time we’ve gone out together, over the years, the person behind the counter of the little store we’re in inevitably says, “You look exactly the same!”

Which clearly isn’t right. But I take it as a compliment, even though I am twenty-six and she is fifty-six.

Even though I used to  wish that people wouldn’t compare me to someone who isn’t even close to my age. Especially when I was younger, I was frustrated by this. Do I look like I’m forty-five? I thought when I was fifteen.

But generally, I don’t mind being compared to my mother, because I know people think she’s attractive.

(she has this infectious smile that I’ve modeled my own smile after)

Sometimes, after someone has told me that I look just like my mom, I catch myself rushing to a mirror. I am automatically comparing our faces. I see where mine is duller, where the features got muddled. I got the big, bulky nose, while hers is straight and sculpted. Her eyebrows are fine and feathery, mine are heavy and dark. My face looks softer, longer, confused about its mission. I can see some of my great-grandmother, on my dad’s side, struggling to surface.

My mom recently lost a lot of weight. For most of my life, she was thin, but never skinny. She is taller than me, and never looked overweight. But she has changed the way she eats completely in the past few years, and grown more and more slender as I have gained weight. She wears stylish clothes now, and her hair is always freshly done. I hug her, and she feels like less and less in my arms.

She looks great. There’s no denying it. She isn’t depriving herself of food, but she doesn’t eat the foods I like. She does a lot of yoga and is outside a lot and just generally has a fit, healthy air.

And there’s a part of me that senses that I’m letting myself go. You know how they say that. I’m letting myself go as she hones herself. I feel suddenly large next to her, for the first time. After I see her, I wonder if I should change my diet. I am always the only one eating a bagel, when I visit. She keeps bagels in the freezer for me. No one else will touch them.

After I see her, I wonder for a second if she thinks, on any level, that I am letting myself go. No, she doesn’t. But how can she not, when she is so careful with herself? When she would never eat a bagel.

I am proud of my mom. She is a strong, opinionated, motivated woman who does things the way she wants to do them. Who is as comfortable choosing radically different paths as she is walking the most conventional ones with flair and a perfect outfit. She defies categorization. She is an incredible gardener. She is intensely organized. She throws parties.

I am not very much like her, in so many ways. Maybe most.

Although we both hate it when people leave the towels crumpled after a shower. Hang them up STRAIGHT. SPREAD THEM OUT. They dry better that way. It’s so simple.

My mom and I are different people, as moms and daughters tend to be. We are a different mix of genes. I have my great-grandmother, for example, a gentle woman with a bold nose who spoke at least seven languages. I have my father’s father, who was so sweet. I have my dad, who is disorganized and messy and often silly. Who has more pronounced eyebrows.

I have my own body, which wants to do its own thing.

And sometimes I wish for a moment that people would stop comparing me to my mom.

Maybe it would have been better, in a way, if they had never started.

*  *  *

Do you look like your mom? Do you not look at all like your mom?

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in a vaguely tribal pattern.

Cake pic from a reader! Well, cakes, technically. Even better. Send me yours!

P.S. So I have to tell this story here—Anne Hathaway was behind me in line at the grocery store, and I was about to pay when I remembered that I’d wanted to buy cookies. I asked the guy behind the counter to add cookies to my order, and he tried, but for some reason this threw his little computer off, and then the credit card machine stuttered out and the guy was frantically trying to fix things. All because I wanted cookies. A lot of them. I was having people over that night, but Anne didn’t know that. She was very, very thin, and had amazing tufting hair, and was wearing sunglasses inside, on a rainy day. She looked so unhappy. She was buying kale. We waited there together forever. And then, finally, I got my cookies, and I fled.

P.P.S. I wrote a silly little list piece about things women should do with their hair. It’s on the Frisky over here, if you want to read it.

This is a guest post from Anna Sansom. We met on Twitter. That happens sometimes, in this crazy new world. I really liked her blog, and I asked her to write this post. This is Anna:

 Here’s what she has to say: 

I was 15. I was horny. And I knew I would never have sex. I knew I was doomed to stay celibate forever because no one – man or woman – would ever find my body worthy of love.

The evidence stared back at me from the mirror: my body was ugly, misshapen, alien. At 15 my body was covered in angry, red stretch marks from puberty’s overnight arrival. My sacrificial body hadn’t stood a chance. Puberty had roughly torn my skin apart wherever it could: my hips, breasts, upper arms, the backs of my knees, my upper thighs.  It wasn’t just my skin that failed to keep up with puberty’s rampage: my breast tissue ballooned, the ligaments strained, gravity won the day, and the result was long, stretched breasts. I never had pert, round, youthful breasts.  My nipples always pointed down, my breasts sagged: pendulous.

Puberty dealt me another cruel blow: acne on my chest and back that left me with white polka-dot scars across my shoulders and in my cleavage.

I was 15 and my body looked like a battlefield.

I was 15 and I weighed over 200lbs.

And yet, at 15, I was horny.

Fast forward two and a half decades and I can reflect on a series of lovers. Each one found me beautiful and desired me. Each one respected me and treated me well. How did that happen?

This isn’t a story of miraculous transformation. I wasn’t the ugly duckling who became the swan. I didn’t have an epiphany that suddenly made me see my own, internal beauty (‘cos it’s what’s on the inside that counts, right?). My body will always wear her scars. I currently weigh over 200lbs.

This is the story of a horny 15 year old who knew that sexuality was important to her. The 15 year old refused to accept a lifetime of celibacy (or being non-discerning about who qualified to be a lover because anyone would be better than no one).

The 15 year old who thought she’d never get laid lost her virginity at age 18. By age 18 I’d become aware that it wasn’t the sex that was important; it was expressing my sexual self that was key. It wasn’t just about feeling horny; it was about knowing that this sexual part of me was an important part of me, and a part that should not be ignored or stifled but rather explored and celebrated. By the time I was 18 I couldn’t bear to hide and deny my true self any more.  I took a deep breath, looked past what was in the mirror, and stepped out onto the path that led me straight to my needs and desires.

I now realise that my acute awareness of the importance of my sexual expression was (and continues to be) a gift. When I unwrapped the gift and peered inside, I saw body acceptance.

Sometimes I forgot I’d been given this gift. I put my body through punishing diets and exercise regimes in an effort to change what I saw in the mirror. I berated it and called it names when it was too slow, too fat, too different from how a woman’s body was supposed to look.

But each time I undressed for my lover, each time I caressed my own skin, each time I made love, I remembered the gift. I remembered that I only have one body and that I can be thankful for that body and all it enables me to do. I remembered that there is nothing wrong with me: I am perfectly and uniquely “me”. And when that is good enough for me, it is good enough (more than enough) for my lovers too.

I’ve never lost my fascination and passion for sexuality. The 15 year old has matured and developed into a woman on a mission to support other women to enjoy their own bodies and their own sexuality. I want women to celebrate their sexual selves and I promote this through my blog The Ladygarden Project. I also want women to enjoy sex and their bodies now – not deferring it until sometime in the future when they feel slim/beautiful/sexy/worthy enough, or to relegate it to something that only exists in their past. I encourage women to be Sexy at Any Size through my website and workshops – supporting women to feel sexy and sexual whatever the size and shape of their body (this goes for age and stage of life too).

The gift of body acceptance is not time-limited. It’s not dependent on being a certain size or shape, or of looking a certain way.  And it is a gift that multiplies. The more we use it, the more we share it, the more it grows.

One lover beautifully described the lines on my belly as being like the ripples on a pond when a pebble has been dropped in. Body acceptance has a ripple-effect. The more we accept our own bodies, and enjoy them just as they are, the more those around us accept their own bodies too.

(source)

*  *  *

Anna Sansom lives in the UK with her partner and two cats. She recently moved to the countryside and to be nearer the sea as she loves paddling and swimming whenever the water is not too cold. She works part time as a health researcher at a university and uses the rest of her time to learn about, explore, and celebrate women’s sexuality. She blogs, runs workshops, writes erotica, makes vulva cushions, and generally encourages herself and those around her to be more playful and enjoy life. She strongly believes in making the most of every day. 

You can contact Anna here: anna@atanysize.com

Anna’s unroast:  Today I love my freckles because they add interest to my face and prove that I’ve not been photoshopped!

P.S. You can find a post from me (Kate) about sexiness here.

This piece also appears on HuffPost

I took my body for a walk.

It was wearing a long white dress that clung up top and on the butt and then stretched for the ground, slinging itself over the occasional active knee.

Its breasts would not do real cleavage. Unless I hoisted the bra up. You have to catch them right. It’s this complicated thing. You have to sort of scoop them in and up. And then they slip out of position again, and it’s gone.

Its rounded arms were bared, because of the heat. Which is unusual. I thought, with slight dread, oh no, it’s only the beginning of the warm season. I will have to bare the arms so much more.

Its belly made a little puffy circle just below the belt, which was pretending that there was no belly, because belts pretend that.

Its legs might not have been long enough for real grace. But they were mostly hidden, anyway. The polish was chipping on its unruly toenails at the ends of its squarish feet.

I could feel that its neck looked awkward, so I tried to stand up straighter, but then I’d forget. I didn’t want the head and neck combination to look like a turtle. I thought there was a chance that it might be looking like a turtle already. That maybe it was impossible for it not to look like one, because of the construction of the head and neck areas. Something to do with the raised lump at the base of the neck, a protuberance of opinionated spine.

I walked my body past some men. I didn’t look to see if they were looking at it. I thought I could feel eyes, but it felt awkward to know. Almost as though I might be able to read their thoughts, and maybe they would be rating my body, and maybe it would only be scoring midrange.

I wondered if I shouldn’t have dressed my body in something so revealing. Maybe it wasn’t the right body for that. It didn’t have a lot of the things that other bodies that look sexy in revealing things have. It might look a little ridiculous.

I caught a glimpse of my body in the dark window of a laundromat. Its arms looked slimmer than they felt, hanging there, from the shoulders. Sometimes, though, they looked larger than they seemed, and then I would get confused. How big are they, anyway? How worried should I be? It’s hard to tell.

What a strange thing, to be attached to this body. With its jiggly parts and its imbalances and its oddities. Sometimes, as I move this body through the world, it feels like an assemblage of quirks and miscommunications—a stack of odds and ends; a series of rough-edged pieces that never got completed or perfected or even sanded down.

I’m not sure how I ended up with it. Why am I the caretaker of this random body? What am I supposed to do with it?

I have certain ideas about how it should look, and then it does something totally different. I have thoughts about how it should move, but it’s difficult to maneuver properly. It still can’t dance in a sexy way, for example. Even walking is sometimes not quite right. Also, I haven’t yet figured out what I should do with its hands when I’m at a party. I often clasp them in front of it, but that seems old-fashioned. Does anyone clasp their hands in front of them these days? Do you have to be a senator to do that, or at least a man in a suit? It’s unclear.

I took my body for a walk. It was wearing a long, white dress that I thought might look good on a body. I couldn’t tell if mine looked good enough in it.

Its hair wasn’t doing the thing that I was almost positive it should be doing. Instead, it was fluffy, like a fluffy helmet. If I could pick hair for the head of this body, I think I would pick rich, dark, chaotic hair. Thick, lush, almost-black hair that curls and spirals and rushes everywhere. So I’m not sure what to do with this thin, mousy hair that it came with. Another error, probably.

I guided my body down the stairs, into the subway station. A man yelled after us, “Why are you alone, honey? A girl like you shouldn’t be alone. Yeah you!”

And we both ignored him.

Which one did he mean?

The body.

But suddenly I thought that it did feel lonely, up there in my brain, far away from this body.

A girl like me shouldn’t be alone.

No girl should be alone, in her head, with her strange, difficult body somewhere beneath.

But then why is it so hard to remember that this body—this compilation of odds and ends body with its turtling spine and its inability to dance sexily and its breasts that don’t do traditional cleavage—is me. Not just a thing that I am arbitrarily in charge of. But who I am. Right now. In this moment. On the street. In the white dress. On the subway. And I am always changing. I am somewhat awkward. I am confusing and complex and beautiful in a white dress. I can bare my arms. I can feel uncomfortable. But sometimes I can feel completely at ease.

I went for a walk. It was warm and sweet-smelling, and the leaves were full of the anticipation of summer. The sun felt startling and good on my skin. My toes were happy to be free. Everyone who saw me thought I looked lovely. Or maybe they didn’t. But I did, anyway. Not the most graceful, but totally original. A little random, maybe, but also, somehow, right.

(actually, it looks like I have a little cleavage in these pictures. It’s an illusion.)

*  *  *

Do you ever feel separate from your body? How do you come together again? Some people said physical movement/exercise, when we had a similar conversation here.

Unroast: Today I love the way my feet feel in sandals.

A reader cake pic for the gallery! Yay! Send me yours!

Last year, we moved to Brooklyn. And practically every my-age person in the city said, “Well, yeah, of course you did!”

We settled in. But not enough.

I know, because last night, Bear and I were walking around our neighborhood (we do this a lot at night, actually), and suddenly I noticed a coffee shop. It was at the bottom of Jay Street. I guess I’d just never walked that far down Jay. I thought everything ended at the bar. The road slants down there, and gets rougher, and you approach the navy yard and the old, rusting, snarled power grid that Con Ed is supposed to eventually relinquish to the city to be made into a park.

I have complained many times about the lack of coffee shops in my neighborhood. I’ve made sweeping statements about “if they knew what they were doing,” and “building community” and “you can tell it hasn’t quite arrived yet.”

And the whole time, there was this adorable coffee shop at the very end of Jay Street, where I’d never even found the time to walk, somehow.

Sort of a well-known coffee shop, apparently. The Brooklyn Roasting Company. My friend recognized the name immediately.

“I can’t believe this,” I said, stopping in the middle of the street. “This isn’t happening.”

“I can’t believe this,” said Bear.

“What is wrong with us?”

“Why is this happening now?”

And then something else happened. We walked a few more steps, and there, almost directly across from the first coffee shop, was a second one. TWO COFFEE SHOPS. Both industrial chic, but cozy looking (this is the look that Brooklyn has perfected. It always involves salvaged wood).

It was ridiculous. We’d discovered two coffee shops in our neighborhood, the day we found out we had to move. 

Had to move, because our rent got raised. Our rent, which was already much higher than what we’d thought we should spend, was suddenly much, much higher than that.

I thought they might raise our rent. I was nervous about it all the time, in the back of my head. When we’d signed the lease, we’d chosen the one-year option. We regretted it almost immediately. At the time, we didn’t know the area very well, and we felt like we were taking a risk. So we didn’t want to lock ourselves in. And then we realized, like two days later, that we loved this place. And I bought my first piece of real furniture– the first piece that hadn’t been my parents’ or my grandmother’s before– a big soft gray couch, on sale, from Macy’s. A perfect couch for tumbling onto in the evening. For snuggling. For lounging luxuriously. A huge couch that took up a lot more of the room than it looked like it would, when I saw it in the showroom in New Jersey.

I thought they might raise our rent, because the area is hot and getting hotter. Somehow, I didn’t really know that either when we moved here. I thought Brooklyn was all sort of similar, and all very far away from the Upper West Side. I was like that. We picked the neighborhood closest to Manhattan, easiest for Bear’s work commute, and went. We didn’t know we were picking a neighborhood that was skyrocketing in popularity. With the corresponding skyrocketing prices.

But I did not think they would raise our rent by ONE-THOUSAND-FIVE-HUNDRED DOLLARS.

Who would think that?

I thought, “Shit, it’s gonna be two-hundred. What then?”

When I was thinking that, and had no idea about the $1,500, Bear and I talked it over, and he ran a bunch of numbers on the spreadsheets he’s so good at making, and it seemed like it made sense to buy. With rent the way it is in the city, buying actually was a better deal. We’d end up paying less. We’d have the option to sell, later.

But then Bear asked a local real estate broker and she said they wouldn’t raise the rent. There was no way, she said, that they would raise the rent.

Yesterday I got the forms, left unceremoniously in front of our door. And I saw the new number, with its $1,500 increase. And I knew we were moving. 

Not even a year after finding this apartment, and on the same day that I discovered the coffee shops, I started looking for a new home. Sitting in the new cake and cookies place that JUST opened up a couple blocks away, I quietly resented the people walking home to their apartments.

Bear and I went for a night walk, to talk everything over. He thought we needed to narrow our options, but after trying for a while, it seemed like they still weren’t narrow enough.

Suddenly, Brooklyn felt wide-open. We could go anywhere. But should we go anywhere? Did we even have any idea where to go? 

Bear said that we could protest. That we could bargain with the company that owns our building. They might go lower. But we both knew it was already too high, so even if we bargained, and they conceded, we would still probably end up leaving.

Selfishly, I thought of my couch. My big, sweet, comfy couch. I was looking at apartments much deeper into Brooklyn, already. We could spend less money there, and get something nice, probably. Something big  enough to fit the couch.

“This is so stressful,” he said. “Too many things are happening at once.”

“It’ll be an adventure!” I said. “It doesn’t have to be about the stress. We can have fun.”

“No, it’s stressful,” he said.

But honestly, the more I think about it, the more I think that it will have to be an adventure. Suddenly, I have to find a home to BUY, to live in for years, in a new neighborhood, and I have about two months to do it. Maybe a little less. I don’t know anything about buying a home. I think it can take a while. But I don’t have a while. Unless we want to do something more complicated like move all of our stuff into a temporary rental and then move again in a bit. I guess we could do that.

But there’s a part of me that is a little excited at the thought of having to do it all NOW. Of having to throw myself into this strange new situation. Of finding a place that will really be mine, that no one can suddenly decide is worth a totally different amount that means I suddenly have to leave it behind. I feel defensive. I want my place to have armor on it. I want it to be impervious.

And at the same time, I am furious. One-thousand-five-hundred dollars more a month? Who are these people? How can they do this?

There is a new organic market opening by the subway. And a cool restaurant with a well-known chef. And there’s the cake place. A CAKE place! With such moist cake. There’s the waterfront. God, I love the waterfront. I love seeing the city, tight and sparkling right up to its neat edges, constrained by its long, low island base.

I like my kitchen a lot. Which is rare, in the city. I might really like the coffee at the Brooklyn Roasting Company.

But here we go…it’s a wild ride, this whole being a grownup thing. This whole renting an apartment thing and packing and moving and finding a place to stay.

“Hey,” said Bear, a little later, when he is feeling slightly less stressed, “We’re lucky we got to live here in the first place. Let’s just think back on this as our lucky year.”

Which is true. We are really, really lucky. We are lucky to be living here now. We are lucky to be able to afford a place with a nice kitchen in this ruthlessly expensive city. So incredibly lucky. I never thought I’d be that lucky. Which is why I can’t be too upset now. I can be a little bit upset. And then I can get back on StreetEasy, and look for a place to live. A place that will be my home.

(it will need to have these things in it)

*  *  *

Have you ever had to move suddenly? How did it go? What is it like to buy a house? Advice?

Unroast: Today I love the way one of my eyebrows quirks up. I’m quirky!

A therapist once said a really helpful thing to me.

She said, “Even if you stop thinking negatively, you’ll still succeed.”

She was talking about my grades, in college.

I think it was the end of my junior year, and my dad had just been diagnosed with gastroparesis. So his stomach was paralyzed, and he couldn’t eat without being in incredible pain. It did not look like he would be able to eat again, at that point. I called the counseling center and got myself an appointment, and then I found myself sitting across from a pleasant-looking, nondescript woman who has mostly been lost to memory, with a standard soothing voice, who listened to me talk about how scared I was that my dad would die. How scared I’d always been about my dad dying, really, since he’d always been sick. And what would happen to my life if my dad died? I couldn’t imagine. It seemed like there was nothing, after that.

I came back for a second session, but this time I talked about how enormously important it felt for me to get perfect grades. To justify the cost of college. To make something of myself. To be good at what I was doing. To prove myself.  I had chosen a state school for its affordability and proximity to my job, but I still felt like I couldn’t rest for a second, because I needed to make sure I was succeeding.

(I think I’m bad at figuring out what this should unlock)

So I felt bad in general, and also, my dad couldn’t eat.

And that’s when this nameless therapist who I could no longer pick out of a small coffee shop told me that I would still succeed, even if I stopped being so mean to myself. She said hard work isn’t about guilt. It’s not really motivated by that desperate feeling of “what if I fail?” We just believe it is. She said that kind of thinking gets in the way of working hard. The results have nothing to do with it. They have to do with something else entirely.

And that idea caught on, for some reason, and I remembered it.

And then I forgot it, when I started thinking, “I’m such a failure! I have to pitch more magazines! If I don’t get published in a magazine, I’ll have failed as a writer.” And when I started thinking, “If I can write my book faster, maybe I’ll be more of a success. I’m so lazy. I’m always falling behind.” And I started thinking that those thoughts were helpful, in a way, because they might motivate me to do something. To write faster. To pitch more. To get ahead.

But they’re not. And they don’t. They just make me feel worse.

And then I started noticing that sometimes I used the same logic on my body. “Look how fat your arms are,” I’d say to my image in the mirror. “You’re gross. No one can be pretty with arms like that. You need to lose weight. Fifteen pounds. No…Twenty. No carbs starting tomorrow. And exercise! Why aren’t you exercising, you lazy bag of crap? You’re disgusting! You should be running, every day. For a long time. Forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour. Every day. No excuses. Starting tomorrow.”

(whatever.)

Do you think that happened? Do you think I’m now running for an hour every day?

Of course you don’t think that! Because that’s not the way this stuff goes.

The way it goes is you get used to thinking mean, bullying thoughts about yourself. You get used to picking on yourself and your poor, confused arms that never actually did anything wrong. You end up heaping this abuse on yourself, and in the back of your mind, you actually think that it’s useful. That if you didn’t think this way, you’d never do anything about it.

And yet you’re not actually doing anything about it.

Look at that. That’s  interesting. You’re not doing anything about it. Just yelling at yourself in the mirror. Hmm.

So how about we try something different? How about we separate things. The way I feel about my arms is NOT going to make me stop eating cake. So I can either keep eating cake while I keep shouting slurs at my arms, or I can work on accepting my arms while I enjoy some cake. And if I really, really can’t get over my arms, forever, I can stop eating cake and start working out, and also, at the same time, work on appreciating the way I look more.  Because the working out and not eating cake is actually separate from the arms. It’s about building new habits, which requires encouragement and patience, not bursts of self-loathing. Maybe, if I really want to change my arms, I can restrict my cake eating, but not cut cake out of my life completely, and I can lift weights and sign up for kick-boxing, and focus on making those things a part of my routine. And at the same time, I can try to focus on things I like about my appearance, and let myself enjoy the gradual change in the shape of my arms.

Which is not to say I’m going to do that. But it would be a better route.

(source)

Or maybe I can make a serious effort to exercise more often, but because exercise is healthy and good for my heart and my longevity, and isn’t really about my arms at all. And maybe I can try to make sure that my exercise is happening because it feels good to get in shape. It feels good to not be out of breath when you have to jog a little, to get to the G train because it’s so damn short, and it stops in the middle of the damn platform. That is not about my arms. It’s about my life. And the G train.

The point is, we need to stop believing that meanness is motivation. It’s not. At the end of its cycle, it gets wrung out into a puddle of guilt, which seeps into everything, so that everything is damp and uncomfortable.

I love to write. Calling myself a failure doesn’t make me write more, it makes me afraid to write. If I leave myself alone, I’ll write all day. I’ll love the way it feels. I’ll work feverishly on my book, instead of being paralyzed by this gaping fear of rejection. Right now, for example, an agent is interested in seeing my book, and I have not sent it to her. Because I’m so afraid that she might reject me. Because I have made myself so certain that getting this book published is the most important thing in the world, and if it doesn’t get published, I will suck.

That isn’t right. If this agent doesn’t like my book, I’ll send it out again. And again. And eventually, someone will pick it gently up and cradle it. And eventually, it might even get published. Because I have that kind of drive, when I’m not talking back to myself. When I’m letting myself be.

And as for my arms—there’s no way I’m gonna stop eating cake right now. Or even restrict my cake eating. Maybe one day I will. Maybe it will feel more important. But right now, when my mind does that thing, in front of the mirror, when it starts up  with, “Whoa—your arms are SO fa—”

I cut it off.

“I don’t care what you think,” I say to myself. “I’m not going to go on a diet tomorrow. Obviously. We’ve been through this. So I can either like my arms, or I can move on. Those are the options.”

Sometimes I manage to like them, just for a second.

(nice arms!)

Sometimes I notice something else instead. My shoulders, for example. Look, they’ve just been sitting there, for so long, not getting any attention! My chin. Check out that chin! Exemplary. There is a lot going on with my body. It’s not all about the arms.

It’s never all about any one thing.

My dad’s stomach would never be normal again. But he did a lot of research and found a medication that relaxed  the paralysis. Something his doctors didn’t think to try. He just kept reading and reading and poking into forgotten corners until he found a solution. And I went to take my finals with the therapist’s words in my head. I could succeed without telling myself I might fail. I was succeeding already. And my mind relaxed a little, too.

Negative thoughts don’t make us stronger. They don’t help us get where we want to go. They’re bullies. They need to be ignored or put in their place. You are already succeeding. Look around at everything you’ve done. Eat some cake. You deserve it, because it’s delicious. Because your arms, and I’m not kidding here, your arms are fine.

*  *  *

Unroast: Today I love the way I look in green.

A version of this post is also up on Psychology Today