"Who Understands Me When I Say this is Beautiful?"

Dismantling the Cultural Narrative about My Body

Last night, I closed myself in the bathroom and took a bath with a pink bath bomb that fizzed as I stepped into the water. I laid down and breathed. I watched my breasts rise above the water, perfect domes.

Yesterday, I caught a glance of my body in the mirror, and I was struck down by her beauty- I never looked at her like that when I was young.

Now I live in her with gratitude. I listen to her exhaustion. I tend to her like I would a child, applying lotion on all that is rough, gently wrapping her in a towel, encircling her with love.

I am learning to choose myself.

***

One student, I’ll call her Denae, tells me that Billy has said something awful to her. In his pathetic attempts for laughs, he has made a joke about her size. A shot out of nowhere. They were discussing music, and something offended him, and he yielded his straight, thin, white, male power like an arrow. Told her, he was seeing double, triple, a comment so base and stupid I don’t really even get it when she explains it to me twice. “He was referring to my chin.”

It is a skill to yield power so effortlessly, a birthright. "The master’s house cannot be dismantled with the master’s tools” (Audrey Lourde).

Community is not a denial of difference, but a gratitude, an awareness, a shift away from comparisons that diminish us to something more evolved, an appreciation for each other’s gifts. Billy has broken trust in our classroom community. Denae sits in my corner chair not to tattle on him but to process with me.

The community we live in abides by a cultural narrative. When I was a teenager, if your body did not conform to a standard of beauty, it was seen as less then, you were seen as less then. I’m saddened when I think we’ve come far, and then I realize perhaps we haven’t come far at all. We are still putting people in boxes, expecting them to squeeze in. And yet Denae is not ashamed of her appetite or her size. She knows there is something wrong with Billy’s comment. There is not something wrong with her. Yet, his comment still sent her to the bathroom to gather herself.

When I was her age, I absorbed the things people said about me. Fat…Ugly…Cow.  Did you fall and land on your face? I thought these comments were an indictment of me, pointing out a weakness within me. I thought I was bravely fighting back when I started restricting my consumption of food, counting calories so I would take up less space in the world, so I would be seen as something of value by the Billy’s in the world. When I was younger and people commented on my body and appearance, I thought there was something wrong with me. I was broken by the words they hurled at me. I wanted to be something worthy in their eyes. So, I made myself smaller and smaller, and when people again commented on my body and appearance, I thought there was something right with me.

I failed to see it as two sides of the same coin that reduced my worth to something only valued in reflection, in the eyes of others. I lost sight of my inherent value and beauty. I looked to others for validation.

Recently, I have been watching The Vow, the documentary on the NXVIM cult, and I am a bit shocked at how these women gave up years of their life, they were enslaved for years, trying to make themselves fit, trying to make themselves better, and some of the things they did were so extreme, it is a little hard to understand, but then I reflect and I realize that I also spent years of my life enslaved to a way of seeing that diminished me and others.

How do I accept myself in my remaining years? How do I look at myself and say Beautiful? How do I reclaim my power and support the Denae’s in the world to do the same?

“Who understands me when I say this is beautiful?” (Jimmy Santiago Baca)