There's no cool way to hate yourself.

This Saturday night, I have been watching several wonderful and inspiring documentaries on women and their journeys. (Yes, I know...but HBO is addicting!)

The last documentary I watched was on Gloria Steinem, the well-known feminist leader.  I was struck by her late in life journey more so than her numerous accomplishments as a  movement leader—later in life, she wrote a book called “Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem.” She spoke of her realization that she, in fact, had very little self-esteem. In her quest to find it, she went through a retrospective analysis of her life in an effort to find her own center and her own sense of self. http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/gloria-in-her-own-words/index.html

This in turn reminded me of the Ashley Judd article that went around a few months back in which she firmly (and rightly, in my opinion) chastised the media for waging a battle over women’s bodies and appearance. http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/04/09/ashley-judd-slaps-media-in-the-face-for-speculation-over-her-puffy-appearance.html

A quote that I saw on the Internet around this time period was “There’s no cool way to hate yourself.”

What a powerful sentence—in this culture of skinny models and trendy diets, there is no cool way to hate yourself.

As a woman trying to find myself in this world, I found it more convenient to talk about all the ways in which I didn’t measure up. In college, we dieted and compared notes on which alcoholic drinks contained less calories. Even when we binged (or just went out for that late night Taco Bell run), it was always with the undercurrent of me knowing we were doing something wrong. Deviant, even. (In my opinion—not that everyone felt this way).

Weight and looks were always part and parcel with self-worth and more often than not were seen as directly reflective of one’s own sense of self. In other words, if you were gaining weight it was because something was wrong—you were going through a break up, the freshman 20 was in full swing, there were a lot of stresses at school. Comments about women’s weight flowed freely between groups of friends, not to mention between family and others.

Conversely, losing weight seemed indicative of something going right—you were finally eating better, you cared about how you looked, you wanted to start dating again. Does this seem obvious? It's sad to me if it is.

As seen from the two parallels I have drawn, my own relationship with myself and my weight has been a deeply troubled one that has caused me great pain for much of my teenage and adult life. It is hard to say which came first—the societal assumptions placed upon me or my own projections of self worth onto society.  Either way (and likely both), I entered my twenties with a strong sense of my own ugliness.

Yes, I knew I was ugly. Just as I knew I was smart and a feminist social justice organizer blah blah and that my voice mattered, I simultaneously knew my body was hateful. I stood in front of the mirror and saw all the places where I didn’t measure up to other’s expectations of me. I desperately, desperately, wanted to be skinny/perfect even as I sat in my feminist philosophy course and reveled in the voices of strong women. I hated my curves and the way people would look at me. I hated that people treated me like an object and so I ignored it. I didn’t date much in high school or college, which from what I understand was more often assumed to originate from a sense of superiority. Oh, if only I had been eloquent enough back then to talk about my insecurity and the cycle of self-hate that went through me every single day from the moment I woke up.

Even as I started gaining more confidence in my looks, I still struggled with my body. This fleshy, messy human body that I inhabited. It still seemed alien to me and far too squishy and imperfect no matter what I did or how many calories I restricted.

I wrote this poem (embarrassing moment, I debated putting this in the post…) about my experience at the height of my struggle with food and self-hate. While I am no poet, this has been a wonderfully therapeutic process for me as I continue to dig deep into my own darkness. I share it because, like this post, I want to add another voice to the women who fight for our dignity as beloved creatures of the divine.

She used to wake up everyday and smile with the emptiness inside of herself.  She would place her hands on her stomach and feel her heartbeat, steady and sharp and then she would stretch her back and place her hands on her hipbones as they jutted out. 

Moving out of the bed and onto the scales she would weigh herself and feel the creeping glee of a lower number than the day before.

Slinking around the house like a wraith she curled into the couch and read a book, watched the news, and plotted out the day. The coffee would provide enough energy to get to lunch time and the next coffee would boost her on to the dinner time and the banana and pieces of meat would take her until bed time where if she could just fall asleep again before the emptiness began to cave in on itself then she could wake up the next day even happier and even more proud than the day before.

The dinner time was the hardest time because the coffee stopped working and the cigarettes stopped curbing the pangs in her stomach that were nothing compared to the waves of terror that swept through her soul like a fire.

The wait outside the cafeteria brought the tears, hot and rolling with shame and anger and the question buried deep within of how a sandwich had become so scary.

Back and forth, back and forth she walked and turned and ran and stopped and whimpered and screamed inside of herself.  The decision to get the sandwich with the chicken salad was delicious, but every bite that went down was a reminder of her failure.

She left the cafeteria and curled into her bed and wondered what she would do the next time she had to confront the sandwich and the hot shame of not being able to make such a simple choice.

She had wanted the sandwich and yet she never wanted another sandwich again and yet why was it so wrong to want a sandwich and when will she ever ever ever be able to eat like a normal person again?

She put her hand on her side and reveled in the bones of ribs and hips and the skin that lay over them and the fat that wasn’t in the coffee but was in the sandwich and she plotted out her next day with the coffee and the coffee and the sandwich.

This struggle continues for me today, but has been greatly helped by several strong and confidant women in my life. Because it isn’t enough to tell someone to love themselves—I have learned the act of loving oneself speaks so much louder than words. When I see women loving their bodies, I feel elated. Isn’t that the ultimate act of rebellion, to say to the world that you will not bow down to their expectations of you? That you are the only one who can determine your self-worth?

As someone who has talked about community building and social justice for years now, I am struck by how long it took my words to catch up with me. I said many lovely things that were intended for other people rather than allowing myself to be broken open to the radical new idea of my own wondrous being.

I believe I am beautiful because I am a wonderful Creation of the divine. Even when I don’t feel beautiful, it is essential that I reframe my definition of beauty rather than my self-worth.

The love of God is vast enough to encompass even my brokenness and I should allow myself the same grace. I am now coming to see that our beauty is actually more in the broken, dark places than it is in the painted faces we show to the world. Our experience is all the more poignant because of the journey we undertake each day just to love the self we have been given.

It is particularly appropriate that the scripture today is Amos 5:8, which reads

Seek [God] who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning, and darkens the day into night; who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out upon the surface of the earth: The Lord is [God’s] name.

Tonight I pray that I continue to seek the God who turns our deep darkness into the brightness of a new day. Systematic reform must start in my soul, and I pray for the strength to each day confront the voices that say I am somehow less than. I pray that I remember to treat my body as a Temple to decorate and love, not a place of hate and restriction. After all, tomorrow is Pentecost- what a joyous day! Hallelujah!