FemAsia Team
My body’s first betrayal was not its own. Never abuse, not when it is the nagging nasty reality of a woman’s world that people will tend to sit too close, to encroach into your space, their hands lingering, yet subtle enough you wonder if it’s in your mind or theirs. Who can call it that, though ‘NO’ is a big fat block in your throat when so many many others have it that much worse?
Yet those betrayals were external. When my body started to betray me, I wasn’t prepared. How can you prepare for being unsure of which cavern your mind will take you down today? And how can you be certain you’ll ever come back, when the path beneath you is dark, shifting and uncertain – yet that path is you?
What can keep you steady through a mental transformation that changes how you see the world and how you see yourself? How do you hold on to who you are when who you were no longer exists, buried under an avalanche of symptoms and side effects, not just mental but now physical too, the treatment some days nearly as nasty as the disease?
When I got fatter, I found that I was not the only one keeping track. It wasn’t just everyday bystanders either. Doctors would assure me that as soon as I got rid of the weight, I would find everything fine again, disregarding that I’d felt better at higher weights and that most of their diagnoses were just educated guesses. Or they’d tell me that I should do some real work,‘to get my mind off things; that it was all in my head’.
Then, when I finally started to lose that weight, slowly, laboriously, more chance than my own effort, my brain focused on navigating a different path than the one to good looks; there would be people standing by to remind me that I was not ‘as advertised’. “You look thinner in your pictures”, they’d say. Or “you should try to get back to your old size, you look better like that, have you tried the exercise?” The clothes I tried on told me I was unattractive; my mind told me it was hardly just the clothes. People crowded around, ever willing to testify.
The funny thing is, I was never conventionally beautiful. But it never mattered as much as when I became conventionally not-beautiful.
People close to you will tell you that you shouldn’t expose your weaknesses – that vulnerability leads to attack – or at the very least, that pointing out your flaws will bring them to notice in a world that demands perfection of our women. So I listen, even though I know that you never have to point for them to be seen because, try as I might, I am scared. I stay silent, even though I know that seeing this from someone else would have made me feel less alone.
I’ve seen the ‘success’ stories, the #nomakeup #nofilter selfies, and those who get tons of support for daring to share who they are, as they are. For every viral sensation, however, there are many more girls like me in the shadows, who have found that the spotlight can burn. I don’t want to be known only as the girl who is weak or depressed, or who grows her hair in places reserved these days only for men. Just as I know there is more to me, I know too that there will be those blinded to it by the glare of that exposure.
So I stand in front of the mirror and I tweeze away the evidence. I practice my smiles and coping, and I save my knowledge that I know can help, reserving it solely for those close enough to earn my trust. And I hope. I hope that one day, I will be secure enough in my own body, to stand before you in my own name, if not quite bare, then bared – not made up, but with my foundation strong. Until then, I am anonymous.
