Dearest,
Come a little closer; I don't want everyone to hear. It feels a little confessional, and I am sorry to burden you, because our love is so pure, our relationship is on a high plane of enlightenment looking down at these earthly concerns. Ours is une affaire d'esprit.
I was maybe 5, or even 4, when I first realized I wasn't what I was supposed to be. It seems ludicrous to me now that as a sub-six year old I would have any notion of what to be. By 'be' I mean the specifically female awareness of 'what you are supposed to look like.'
There were ways I was supposed to behave, too, of course, but those were more direct expectations; Be seen and not heard. Sit quietly. Don't run around in here. These directives were mostly spoken, and they mostly had to do with not making noise, now that I consider it. So, here was what I had for tools at age six: Shut Up, Now!; and, You Are All Wrong.
My hair was wrong, my body was way wrong, and my face was wrong, too; I needed glasses. Oh, and did I mention my feet? Well, they were so wrong that only one kind of shoe would fit them. I feel terrible guilt about this, because now I love saddle shoes in tan and navy. But this comes from a mature eye- it took me 20 years to learn to love those dorky, clunky, über cool shoes. When it was all I could get, I hated them. They were not lovely, girly, princessy, shoes. They were boyish and drab. They had stupid laces, instead of patent leather straps and buckles. There was a lot of self-loathing in those days.
It's all a continuum. My awareness that I was not right visually is nothing compared to a woman born with three elbows, or 7 toes. Or whatever else it is that makes a person think they should buy a bottle, tube, or jar of "Look Like Her." I have hundreds of these bottles, and I still don't look like Her. I wonder if anything can be done for us, in our self-made hell of in-adequacy? I mean, of course, that a million things can be done, but is there a universally useful change that could be made in the way we peddle images pretending to be products?
