I’ve always loved my back. My strong back. My feminine back. My back of curving shapes and soft silhouettes, my olive-skinned and cream-blushed back, and my back of inky parades and sacred sigils. I’m not entirely sure when this love affair began, except I remember being quite young. Even as a teenager, I would purposely choose to wear backless outfits, acknowledging my back as a statement of beauty. Despite my body changing through puberty, trauma, weight fluctuation, as well as aging, my back has remained the illustration of exquisiteness; symbolizing the duality of both power and feminineness. It wasn’t until many decades later that my love affair would somehow end up as the cover of my fourth book Porcelain.
There was a time when, before this terrible disease ravished my lower extremities, I had the same relationship with my legs. Sitting at my desk, thousands of miles away from home and so very many years into the future, I can still hear the chants from the schoolyard; boys yelling across the netball court during P.E., taunting me because my legs looked like “boys' legs” as they were powerfully strong, muscular, and athletic. A strange complaint, really, because it was those same boys who consistently spent the entire five years of high school trying to date me. When not in school, I especially loved wearing micro miniskirts and hot pants. The 90s was a decade of fashion crimes and tragedies, including the revamp of hallucinogenic prints and crop tops branding the word Babe. Like I said, tragique. Nonetheless, this was my era, and I was coming into my teen years garbed in all the latest fashions from trending hot spots like Miss Selfridge and Topshop. Besides, whether fashionable or not, I needed something super short to show off my glorious pins. Unlike my back, however, my legs were often greeted with an assault of hostility from almost everyone. The Body Positivity Movement wasn’t a thing back then and girls – girls like me - who loved their bodies weren’t to be indulged. We were to be corrected by all means possible. The more brutal the punishment, the more meaningful the penance, or so it seemed.
Luckily, both sides of my genealogy are seeped, stewed, marinated, and casseroled in stubbornness. Something which served me greatly while trying to navigate the intricate pressures of what’s considered archetypally beautiful in the Western world. Especially since that very distinctive and mandatory definition of beauty didn’t apply to me; neither in appearance nor in personality. With such an impenetrable stubbornness, choosing self-love over self-abuse, I even managed a career within the fashion industry, exiting it marginally unscathed. That’s how healthy my relationship with my body was back then. However, I must be clear: I’m not saying that I wasn’t ever susceptible to the societal pressures of body image or the fundamentally oppressing expectations of my gender, but I wasn’t ever fully recruited either. My self-love was steadily healthy throughout much of my teenage years, except for normal self-criticisms and adjustments, such as my experience with acne due to hormonal changes, or when peroxide and I decided to fuck around and find out, burning my hair to smithereens.
Sadly, I hadn’t realized that there would be, eventually, an expiration of my self-confidence. As troubling as it is to fathom, let alone accept, I’m no longer as comfortable with my imperfections as I once was. All my blemishes, flaws, differences, and shortcomings - all of which interweave a distinguishing portrait of me - have become a nudging burden in recent years. Out with comfortability and in with the crudeness of heightened self-consciousness. I can spend the next hour derailing my thoughts, sinking myself into a catacomb of explanations as to why such a transformation of ego has happened, but what would be the point? It wouldn’t achieve anything. Except maybe an excuse to eat some cheesecake as a much-needed pick-me-up. The point is that life is about advancing through personal cycles and within this chapter, my cycle is about reconnecting with the healthy ego that stubbornly saved my teen years from eating disorders, body dysmorphia, and low self-esteem. It’s about reconciling with the self-image that reinforced self-love, self-acceptance, self-protection, and self-advocacy, and which rebelled against the endorsement of one physical archetype for all. And I suppose it’s a fuck you, louder than ever before, to those who’ve played a role in the diminishing of what was a healthy sense of self-worth.
I want to fall in love with myself again. And I will. I don’t quite know when or how this will happen, whether it’ll be reborn in the flash of an epiphany, or whether I’ll have to befriend my body with endless apologies after so many years of unconsciously disconnecting from it, or whether it’ll be a combined effort of both. However, this rebirth of self-love will happen, and I look forward to the time when I’ll stand in front of the mirror, a body aged and heavier than in my youth, with grey hairs intermingled with my box dye color, and see the essence of my unfiltered beauty. Until then, I shall start with my back. My beautiful back. My back of strength, femininity, shapes, and silhouettes. The very same back that is the face of Porcelain.
The body positivity movement is a movement that redefines the definition of beauty, expanding it to an intersectional classification that’s inclusive to all. It’s a space to celebrate everyone, including you, beautiful.
