10:56pm August 27, 2014

When I said I don’t get depressed about my looks…

… I should say that’s a current thing. It’s not a lifelong thing.

I’ve always had a tendency to stick up for my body hair, though. I could never bear the thought of tweezing my unibrow, or, when it came in much later, my chin hairs. I hated when people would bleach my mustache. I just felt like these things were part of me, no matter how much I got teased for them and no matter how much the teasing hurt me.

But being fat… that’s something I had to get used to. I haven’t always been fat. I was a little fat as a teenager when I was on psych drugs, but I lost all that weight when I went off them. Then I was starving for awhile, which meant that even when I wasn’t getting enough food, getting food at all was enough to propel me from 100 pounds to 170 pounds practically overnight. At the time, I just felt good that it meant I was eating more.

But at some point, I got really self-conscious about my weight, and very scared about gaining weight, and very much wishing I would lose weight. And very uncomfortable with the way my body looked as a fat person.

But one day that disappeared and it hasn’t returned.

Now I see myself as ugly and beautiful at once, and I think both of those things are very important.

It’s important to me to be ugly, because ugly just means I look unique.

I am highly attracted to unique-looking people, and many of them would be considered ugly or even disfigured. This includes a lot of disabled people as well. It’s not a fetish thing, it’s just because I’m faceblind and it’s easier to recognize people if they have a noticeable appearance or pattern of movement that differs from the norm in some way. And people who differ from the norm in those ways tend to be regarded as ugly and unattractive, which is a shame.

Being ugly means things to me. It means being like a rock or a tree. I can’t explain it. It means things that have depth to them, and resonance in the world around me.

Being beautiful is just the flipside of the coin. I am beautiful. I’m not just saying that. I really do believe my body is beautifully ugly and ugly-beautiful. And I cherish both of those aspects of myself. My body is me. My body is just as much me as a rock or a tree is itself. I am like a rock or a tree or a clump of dirt that you can’t always see the beauty until you’ve been looking at it for awhile, and then you go “Oh wow that’s not as ugly as I thought it was, in fact there’s this beauty that shines through.”

And I believe there’s a beauty that shines through everything in the world, if you know where to look for it. No matter what you are looking at, there is a beauty that can shine through it. It doesn’t matter if the object or person is technically something you would call ugly, the beauty is there, and it’s like a light that fills the person or thing, and it’s real, and it’s important. It’s not skin-deep beauty, it’s beauty that comes from the depths of the world itself.

And I’ve been able to see myself more in that light lately, it’s the way I normally see other people who look like me, after all. It feels hypocritical to be able to see beauty in everyone “ugly” except myself. Even though I know it’s more complicated than that, it comes from a lifetime of training to see myself as uniquely unattractive. They used to call me a ‘troll’ and other choice names. Pig nose. Spock’s sister (eyebrows). Plug nose (because my nostrils resembled an outlet plug). All kinds of things.

I was especially sensitive about my double chin, which I have had long since before I was fat, unless I stuck my face out as far as I could. That has to do with the way my jaw is structured, mostly.

So many parts of me that I could see as 'wrong’. Most people have them. Most people don’t get past them.

But one day I did get past them. I don’t know what happened. I just know I started looking in the mirror and liking what I saw. I didn’t flinch when I saw my reflection. When I started my usual examination of all the parts of me that I saw as gross and unappealing, suddenly I saw them as unique and appealing – to the right person, of course. I don’t expect everyone to find me attractive, and I don’t think it’s necessary for anyone to find me attractive. But I find myself attractive and I am sure there are other people who do as well.

Tumblr may have played a role. It has felt weird, getting compliments on my clothing, my hair, my face, my body. I know someone was worried if they complimented me too much, I’d get focused on beauty and off of politics. But I doubt that’s going to happen. I do think it’s important to write about body image, but it’s far from the only topic I’m interested in and I’m not going to give up those other topics just because I’m also writing about body image now.

And my body image as a fat disabled genderless DFAB person… all of that is fraught with peril. Every single part of that equation tries to point me down the road to thinking I’m the bad kind of ugly.

I’m writing a story about a disabled girl who everyone jokes is the “apprentice to the village idiot”. She has seen paintings of wood nymphs and the like, and she decides to seek them out for comfort, for solace, for help, since the humans in her village (aside from some family) don’t tend to give her those things. She has extremely visible disabilities. She pictures the nymphs and forest spirits as something out of a Waterhouse painting, almost. Something elegant and conventionally beautiful. Then she actually meets them. They come out and let her see them, let her touch them. There are spirits of trees with broken branches, spirits of rocks with splits down their center, spirits of all kinds of things. And they all take human form in order to better communicate with her, as is their custom. And she is shocked. And scared shitless. To find that at least one of them looks almost exactly like her, that all of them look disabled or disfigured or ugly, that none of them are what she expects. And she cries, and she wants to run away, and maybe she does, but she comes back, or maybe she doesn’t run away at all. And then she slowly begins to accept who she is, and how she is, and they help her with seeing that disability is as natural as they are.

And that’s how I see things.

If a tree spirit were to appear to me, it might have an arm or a leg missing. A rock might have a hairy double chin like mine. There’s no reason these spirits have to look 'perfect’, other than that’s how people with ableist biases in their heads have been painting them for centuries.

I see nature as full of disability and I see disability as fully natural. This doesn’t mean I see disability as fully a good thing - take a look at nature sometime and tell me it’s all good. But it does mean something. It does mean… something.

And I don’t get depressed about my looks anymore because I can fit myself into the natural world. Dave Hingsburger once compared me to a three-legged dog, the way three-legged dogs just get on with their lives however disability has affected them, and figure out how to do things on three legs and don’t freak out about it. He saw that tendency in me. I have to agree, although I’d rather be a three-legged cat. It’s just Dave had met a three-legged dog the same day he met me so dogs were on his mind and he’s a big dog person.

But he had a point… I do see the way I look, the way most people look, the way 'ugly’ people look, as part of natural variation among humans and therefore as something that is at least partially beautiful. I know there’s a lot of people out there who would rather say “You shouldn’t care if you’re ugly or beautiful.” But I do care. I care about being ugly and I care about being beautiful. I think I’m ugly and beautiful and that the two can’t be separated and that most “ugly” people are the same way as me. I think there’s something important to be said for not valuing beauty as the big thing people have to aspire to. But there’s also something to be said for being able to see beauty in places most people would never see it. I don’t think these things contradict each other.

So those are my ramblings on beauty and ugliness. I am proud to be ugly. I am proud to have beauty that shines through the ugliness, like every other ugly person. I am proud to be attractive or cute or beautiful in the eyes of some beholders, anyway. All of these things – they don’t contradict each other, they just speak to the messy and complicated world we live in.

Nothing exemplified this whole thing better than when a woman was exploring my face at very close range. She became fascinated with “those little black dots all over your nose”. They were blackheads. I was ashamed of them. She thought they were amazing and beautiful, and not gross at all. That was a turning point for me as well.

So there have been a lot of turning points. But lately I love how I look. I love being short and fat and hairy and unibrowed and disabled and looking it. I can’t explain the change, but I’m happy it has happened. I find that insults don’t even hurt me anymore, they just show me the person is cruel and needs to find a better hobby than harassing people about our appearance. I like to give them nice big closeup selfies of the hair that grows on my double chin. :-)

tl;dr: I’ve had body image issues in the past, but lately I’ve embraced both my ugliness and my beauty in equal measure. I find both of them important, and I don’t see ugliness and beauty as contradicting each other. People who would insult me on the basis of my looks, however, are simply assholes who deserve whatever gross-out they get by having to look at me.