Today at the beach I consciously felt it for the first time.
Freedom from any thoughts about you.
For a single second, I was only a child playing with the waves and not a woman body to be looked at.
For a single second, I was experiencing my body from inside, instead of looking at it from outside.
Recently I realized how much of my life has been shaped by you.
I don’t remember the first-time little version of me became aware of you.
Who made the first comment about you and my little self stopped being so carefree.
I don’t know the origin story of my shame.
I remember the first time I took out my eyebrows in 5th grade until there was a highway in between my eyes. My mother was absolutely terrified.
I remember waxing my moustache in 7th grade and getting called out by boys at school because I was “shinning” as they put it so poetically.
I remember growing up and realizing other girls don’t have body hair in places I have or don’t have so much of it in places they already have.
I remember feeling “less than”.
I remember realizing I can’t never fully get rid of you even if I spend all my money and maybe I end up with more of you, stronger, in my efforts to do so.
My body became a battle-field museum showcasing my endless effort of trying to get rid of you. Razor bumps in my thighs, the pimples in my back from waxing, ingrown hair marks.
Seeing you became my enemy, so I stopped looking at my body. I haven’t really looked at my body for many many years now.
But I never really realized to what extend you shaped my life until recently.
You determined my personality, my love life even whether I get to marry or have children in the future.
Reality of you meant I would never be loved.
Maybe I would be wanted for a split second when you are sleeping inside my skin but the moment you started to show an inch of you, I would become un-loved.
Thinking that you are un-lovable is a painful thing. Looking at all the women around you and feeling “less than” is a constant torture. So, I created this persona: An intellectual, ambitious career driven woman who don’t need any man. I convinced myself that I didn’t want or needed any men in my life in the first place.
But everyone needs validation so I clung onto occasional bread crumb of validation & desire like a growing ivy around a piece of wood. It took me years to get over literally any people who I get close to. Because, validation was my sedative medicine from chronic pain and every time something ended, I experienced withdrawal symptoms from it.
You dictated who I have become.
You are the author of every story I wrote thus far. And the sad thing is I don’t know if I will ever have the autonomy to take back the pen from your hands.
My shame is still so very present, so very real, so very heavy.
But maybe the fact that I can start to talk about you,
or the fact that I can see & feel love for that little girl who lost her freedom to you is a sign that I can take back some of my agency from you.
Little me, I want to tell you: I finally see you. I finally understand your pain. I finally can say to you: “You are loveable!”
What made you think you are not loveable is the system that made you feel like your body is a check to be deposited for love.
Love is not the same as desirability. Desirability is dictated by industries that are profiting from your shame. This is not a game you can win.
You are loved so so much.
Most importantly, I think for the first time, by ME.
Welcome to the newest section of Flux newsletter: “What am I _?” I will share questions, things I am reading, listening etc. Hope you enjoy!
What am I ___?
Reading 📚
This book helped. It made me understand my own experience inside my body. I can’t stress enough how much you need to read this book.
Girls get the message, from very early on, that what’s most important is how they look, that their value, their worth depends on that. Boys get the message that this is what’s important about girls. We get it from advertising, we get it from films, we get it from television shows, video games—everywhere we look. So no matter what else a woman does, no matter what else her achievements, her value still depends on how she looks. —Jean Kilbourne, creator of the film series Killing Us Softly: Advertising’s Image of Women
Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object. —John Berger, Ways of Seeing
As self-objectification creeps into your life, your identity is split in two. Instead of your whole, embodied, thinking, feeling self, you become a distant observer.
wonder what the person on the machine behind you is seeing as you run.
You are detached and self-conscious during intimate moments with your partner rather than being present and passionate, regardless of how positive or enthusiastic they are about you. You slip outside yourself, observing your body from afar countless times each day.
1952, the scholar Simone de Beauvoir described this concept by saying that as a girl grows up, “she is doubled; instead of coinciding exactly with herself, she also exists outside.”
Social psychologists Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts first named this concept “self-objectification” in the late ’90s, which they defined as “the tendency to perceive one’s body according to externally perceivable traits (i.e., how it appears) instead of internal traits (i.e., what it can do).”
what we really want people to know is: Regardless of how you look, or how you think you look, you can feel good about yourself because you are not your appearance. Your beauty is not your life’s work. You don’t have to be beautiful. As blogger Erin McKean wrote at her site, A Dress a Day, “Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked ‘female.’” As you begin to see the way your identity has been split in two—the viewer and the viewed—you can start to see yourself and experience your life in a new way.
Once you see what self-objectification is and how it has impacted your life, you can’t unsee it.
When you feel it, stop. Stop scrolling, stop watching, stop measuring and evaluating and comparing. Recognize that you are splitting against yourself—judging and blaming your body for your fears of how you might not measure up.
Wait—I can feel that I’m picturing myself being looked at instead of just living. It’s so easy to do, but I deserve more than this. It does not matter how I look right now. I deserve to look out and see the sky, the people walking past, and feel the air on my skin. I deserve to breathe for a moment and think about other aspects of my life.
Find more of the quotes I saved in my Goodreads page!
Listening 🎧
We Can Do Hard Things Episode “BEAUTY: How did we get trapped in this cage, and how do we break free?” by Glennon, Sister & Abby
Each week I share Glennon with you, can’t help it!
So, see you next week!