All Flared Up

“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.” Thich Nhat Hanh

Once, when I was in my late 30s, my then therapist asked me to stand against the wall where she had hung a human-sized post-it note. I had noticed it during my previous session and had wondered what it was doing there, but forgot to ask – so absorbed was I with my own personal crises.

“I am going to trace the outside of your body,” she told me. I thought about tracing circles around upturned glasses when I was a kid and how satisfying it was to see how perfect they were. “Stand with your arms and feet a bit apart,” she said as she rummaged through her desk drawer for a writing instrument.

I did as she said, though deep down I knew that whatever she might draw would be far from the perfect circles of my childhood.

“Now, I want you to watch me as I trace so that you can be sure I do not manipulate what I am doing,” she instructed me. “I will be tracing your body exactly as it is. Be assured that I’m not going to angle the pencil inward or outward – it will be perfectly perpendicular, you will see.”

“Alright, I trust you.” As she began her work at the crown of my head, I was surprised at how pleasant it felt to have the outer boundary of my skin so lightly brushed like that and I realized how rare it was for me to actually be able to feel where my skin ended and the rest of the world began.

“There, that’s it,” she said when she reached the other side of the top of my head. “I want you to slowly take two large steps forward and when you are ready, turn around.”

I moved slower than usual, slower than I do when people tell me to be slow. I don’t know if I knew why in that moment, but now – all these years later, I can only assume that I was afraid of what I was going to see. Afraid in a weird way. I mean, I knew it was going to be the tracing of a person but somehow I thought maybe it might turn out to be something else, like a giant elephant or a hot air balloon.

This was how it was for me when my son was born. The first words that came out of my mouth when I saw him were, “Oh…it’s a human being.” As if I thought it was just a watermelon growing in my uterus.

When I finally summoned the courage to turn around, I didn’t have words. It was a drawing of a person, of course. But it wasn’t me. It couldn’t be.

Reading my face, my therapist gently said, “This IS you. This is exactly how you look. Remember, you watched me – I did not manipulate how I held the pen.”

“But, it’s so small. I mean, I’m so small. How can that be?”

“This is because you have body dysmorphic disorder which means that what you see in the mirror is not as you actually appear,” she explained. “In your mind, you are way bigger than you really are.”

I cried when she said this.

Tears of relief and disbelief at the same time. They were also tears coming from a chasm of grief, one that had been carved in me slowly and deliberately for over three decades. How many years and how much energy had I lost on what has been make-believe this whole time?

And for what reason?

To be accepted? To be perceived as attractive? To tame the parts of me, including my flesh, that I deemed unacceptable? To be invisible?

Now, at 54, I understand that it was all of those things. It wasn’t just about control – which is what they tell you when you have an eating disorder. It is much more layered and complex than that.

Fact is, I allowed myself to measure my beauty and ultimately – my worth as a human being by the size of my body. And because of that, I shrunk my ability to be a strong person, capable of doing anything I might want.

Instead, I was hungry…all the time.

Hungry for acceptance, for acknowledgement, for happiness. Hungry for a life of meaning and purpose. A hunger unfulfilled, leads to a life sapped of energy and desire. It was a life that consisted of following the social norms. A life that was not mine.

The gift of menopause, or any major life transition, is to reinvent yourself. To embrace the potential for a cellular-level upgrade. I am doing that now. Learning to take up space that is mine – both psychologically and physically. Learning to be the beautiful person I know deep down that I am.

Because the world needs me. Because I need me.

“She wins who calls herself beautiful and challenges the world to change to truly see her.” – Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth