I was pretty pissed off this week. My therapist asked me to write about what I found valuable or positive about my own body. Now, my initial emotional reaction was to feel uneasy and conflicted about such a prospect. But, it launched me into investigating the layers upon layers of historical and social antecedents that has lead me to feel the way I do about my body. As a young child I was bullied about my body. It was not the type of egregious bullying that we are initially confronted with every day in the media, but a subtler bullying which can slip under the radar but can feel just as terrible. Growing up with muscular dystrophy, I could pass as healthy as long as I wore baggy clothes and long sleeved shirts. Muscular dystrophy is a condition that actually makes you skinnier than most people. It is a degenerative muscle condition wherin my body is very different from others. Growing up kids play and eventually, they might grasp onto an arm, leg or limb. The child like reaction was to find it weirdly skinny and say off handed remarks that would make me, the one being touched, feel uneasy. They would take turns grabbing my arms and remarking how weird I was. Flash forward to summer, where the kids would spend the day at the swimming pool. Naturally, being a young boy, I would not have a shirt on, and again kids would make fun of my skinny body. They would call me "skeleton" or give me the advice to eat more. I resolved not to go swimming again.
High school was difficult. This was where I would be consciously aware of how I didn't fit in. I would hide myself in the locker change room, when changing for gym. I would make sure I didn't engage in sexual experimentation, I was scared of someone seeing my bare body, it was frightening to be that vulnerable with someone because in my experience what accompanies baring one's body and limbs was primarily negative. To be naked was to invite the possibility of ridicule, disgust or fear. Eventually, I thought that if I didn't have my body to offer, I would cultivate and develop my mind by reading and studying. I also developed my artistic side, by drawing and spending large chunks of my time in the art room.
In University I shone. I got high marks and my mind was valued. I still knew my body wasn't of value, but at least my mind was. It was this sort of belief that I was asked to challenge in therapy and journaling. The belief that if you don't conform to particular bodily norms, or even natural beauty norms, that your body is to be hidden or that it is perfectly legitimate to feel shame for having a deviant body. The "trick", I learned, was to find something else you were good at, and that could be valued. The shame remained.
In part, the shame had causal links to my experiences of my mother's shame with her body. She didn't go swimming because she felt she was ugly, and did not conform to the sort of body that we typically observe in playboy, billboards or mannequins. She was older, over weight, and struggled with depression. She did feel she had other talents like cooking, cleaning and caring for others. But, she always felt the shame about her body. So her struggle was to acknowledge her positives while hiding or ignoring how she felt about her body. This was her natural reaction to her bodily shame.
I began to journal about some of the positive things that my ex found in my body. I have smooth skin, beautiful eyes, nice dimples, gentle hands, and a wonderfully unique body that can conform perfectly to a woman's curves when spooning. It was as if my body was made to cuddle. I can remember her commenting about my "magical" pelvic bone, that would grind against her clit and bring her to orgasm every time we had sex. These were hidden bodily treasures that society rarely sees or acknowledges. Rather, social preferences seem to be shallow. In other words it acknowledges a narrow group of people. Even when it expands it's vision (perhaps to the natural curves of the statistically normal woman's body) it still excludes most of the disabled community from the possibility of being perceived as beautiful. I began to think about the narrow vision of beauty that the current cultural climate provides us which is inherently exclusionary. It is exclusionary to anyone like myself, and that angered me. I have a lot to offer, yet I am narrowly marginalized because of these standards. I struggled with the anger that I was writing about, I was grumpy for days but then resolved that a less problematic belief was to acknowledge my own discomfort and felt tension. I wanted to be mindful of it, but at the same time acknowledge it as deeply problematic. I would not accept these norms for myself, rather I would broaden my vision of beauty to be more inclusive of deviating bodies. To seriously consider a disabled, scarred, curvy, flawed body as beautiful and just as human. A paradoxical beauty that would allow for greater acceptance of others, and perhaps eventually myself. It is not easy, most of the time I am sucked back into it all. The self deprecation begins every time I look at the news stands, or billboards and realize that I am not represented there. Something I can identify with is missing there, and my identity is not acknowledged.
Beauty is a problematic thing, but it seems to me that it is only contingently problematic. That is to say, it could be otherwise if we are more mindful and critical of these standards, and if we deconstruct these problematic assumptions that remain so hidden. These assumptions are subtle and they can slip under our radars in such a way that we internalize these notions and use them in ways that are unknowingly harmful to ourselves and others. I do think I am and can be beautiful, but at this point it is only paradoxically so.
High school was difficult. This was where I would be consciously aware of how I didn't fit in. I would hide myself in the locker change room, when changing for gym. I would make sure I didn't engage in sexual experimentation, I was scared of someone seeing my bare body, it was frightening to be that vulnerable with someone because in my experience what accompanies baring one's body and limbs was primarily negative. To be naked was to invite the possibility of ridicule, disgust or fear. Eventually, I thought that if I didn't have my body to offer, I would cultivate and develop my mind by reading and studying. I also developed my artistic side, by drawing and spending large chunks of my time in the art room.
In University I shone. I got high marks and my mind was valued. I still knew my body wasn't of value, but at least my mind was. It was this sort of belief that I was asked to challenge in therapy and journaling. The belief that if you don't conform to particular bodily norms, or even natural beauty norms, that your body is to be hidden or that it is perfectly legitimate to feel shame for having a deviant body. The "trick", I learned, was to find something else you were good at, and that could be valued. The shame remained.
In part, the shame had causal links to my experiences of my mother's shame with her body. She didn't go swimming because she felt she was ugly, and did not conform to the sort of body that we typically observe in playboy, billboards or mannequins. She was older, over weight, and struggled with depression. She did feel she had other talents like cooking, cleaning and caring for others. But, she always felt the shame about her body. So her struggle was to acknowledge her positives while hiding or ignoring how she felt about her body. This was her natural reaction to her bodily shame.
I began to journal about some of the positive things that my ex found in my body. I have smooth skin, beautiful eyes, nice dimples, gentle hands, and a wonderfully unique body that can conform perfectly to a woman's curves when spooning. It was as if my body was made to cuddle. I can remember her commenting about my "magical" pelvic bone, that would grind against her clit and bring her to orgasm every time we had sex. These were hidden bodily treasures that society rarely sees or acknowledges. Rather, social preferences seem to be shallow. In other words it acknowledges a narrow group of people. Even when it expands it's vision (perhaps to the natural curves of the statistically normal woman's body) it still excludes most of the disabled community from the possibility of being perceived as beautiful. I began to think about the narrow vision of beauty that the current cultural climate provides us which is inherently exclusionary. It is exclusionary to anyone like myself, and that angered me. I have a lot to offer, yet I am narrowly marginalized because of these standards. I struggled with the anger that I was writing about, I was grumpy for days but then resolved that a less problematic belief was to acknowledge my own discomfort and felt tension. I wanted to be mindful of it, but at the same time acknowledge it as deeply problematic. I would not accept these norms for myself, rather I would broaden my vision of beauty to be more inclusive of deviating bodies. To seriously consider a disabled, scarred, curvy, flawed body as beautiful and just as human. A paradoxical beauty that would allow for greater acceptance of others, and perhaps eventually myself. It is not easy, most of the time I am sucked back into it all. The self deprecation begins every time I look at the news stands, or billboards and realize that I am not represented there. Something I can identify with is missing there, and my identity is not acknowledged.
Beauty is a problematic thing, but it seems to me that it is only contingently problematic. That is to say, it could be otherwise if we are more mindful and critical of these standards, and if we deconstruct these problematic assumptions that remain so hidden. These assumptions are subtle and they can slip under our radars in such a way that we internalize these notions and use them in ways that are unknowingly harmful to ourselves and others. I do think I am and can be beautiful, but at this point it is only paradoxically so.