I've completely lost all concept of what my body looks like.
I used to have a pretty objective idea -- my world depends on that objectivity.
When people, like Mike from last night, ask "what colour is the sky in your world?" I reply comically with "octarine" and inside I am secretly congratulating myself on the truth of the question.
Because I colour my own damned sky, because with enough depth of perception and enough objectivity, I can do more than adjust hue and contrast.
Because when I ask the sort of question that from most women is loaded "what do I look like in this" -- I want to hear the honest truth.
I want you to tell me I look fat, that this dress is not made to lie against my belly.
I want you to tell me that I have funny shaped legs.
I know I have funny shaped legs. I know that I have enough thigh to feed an entire napoleonic cannibal army.
I want you to tell me that when I don't wear makeup that some days my skin glows and my cheekbones are never diminished, but I don't want you to be afraid to tell me that when I'm stressed its blotchier than most women in their quarter century should ever be. I know that. I know my skin, I have worn it for so many years.
I know my face. I know my cheekbones and surprising nose, I know the shape of my mouth and the slight strangeness to my chin. I know what the culmination of my features is. Yes, I wish that I had larger eyes like Allison's wide green pools, but I know what the colour of my own hazelgreengrey glass beads looks like against my polish-pale skin.
Ever since I first gleaned a glimpse of myself from the outside, by sheer fluke of encountering an ugly duckling as awkward as my own twelve year old fat and frizzy-haired self, I have been desperate for that awareness and the power to change myself and the world around me that comes with such tenuous knowledge.
I crave awareness of every flavour, awareness of when I do something incredibly stupid, awareness of when I've been whining, when I've been begging for attention that I shouldn't necessarily need.
I want someone to be intimate enough with me to not be afraid to tell me such things
so that when I learn of them, I can argue with them, I can protest, and then I can accept and set about changing them. Improving. Growing. Exploding past the potential of my paltry twenty five years.
I want someone to poke me gently on the shoulder and say --
"that joke was only funny the first three times, now its getting awkward".
I'm not afraid of being awkward, I'm not afraid of being the fool.
I'm afraid of not knowing. I'm afraid of not knowing everything, and for once this isn't a fear that I want to get over.
It is a fear that I have cultivated, a fear of dishonesty and living delusionally, a fear that is in direct contrast with the bigger the city and the wider the street that I hurl myself down. Streets where survival is based on how well you can blind yourself.
Perhaps I am clutching to the last thing that makes me different, this need to be able to hear the things that no one wants to hear. To bite the bullet and bow my head when I'm bad so that I can truly believe that when someone says good, good -- it isn't just sound.
I do not want to be appeased.
When I wear my tight pants and tight tops to go climbing, when the harness straps too tightly about my disproportionate waist and my belly and bum bulge out, I can feel it there.
But because I know of it, I'm not embarassed. It is who I am, and not something I can really hide, looser pants will never fool anyone and hence I am not ashamed.
I don't want to have anything to hide.
I want to open my greatest secrets to you. I want you to look at me and know what sits behind the wide grin and the sad smile that only turns up at the corners, both.
All this to say, that my body image is changing as climbing takes its toll on me, and I am losing perspective of myself until I manage to shift perception with it.
My shoulders are growing, the blue pinstriped blouse that I wore to the interview yesterday used to be loose in the shoulders and now the seams are a good inch too tight, if I take off the jacket I look like I'm hulkifying out of my shirt.
For a while I thought my hips were shrinking because my body seemed to be becoming proportionate rather than pear-ish, but it is my shoulders that have grown.
My ass is as wide as it has ever been, although perhaps it has moved upwards a little in its roundness.
My lower back seems tighter, but maybe that is also in comparison to the immensity of my shoulders.
My arms are bigger, rounded a little from the muscle underneath the layers of fat, but the layers of fat are still there.
My legs are the same. I can feel that.
My waist... My waist seems to have shrunk into someone else's proportions, but again, this is a question of perspective.
Next week I will see friends who are visiting from Paris.
Next week they will tell me where I have fallen to with the perspective of the months we haven't seen each other in, and perhaps if I have the courage to ask them, they will point out some other person with the same shape as me
so that I can once again define my universe and stalk through the confines of insecurity on sheer force of knowledge.
If I can trust my base axioms, it is amazing how much trust I can pour into the universe.
But trust oh trust, is so difficult. Truth is so tenuous, but when finally, oh finally, I manage to believe
not in gods or in faeries but in men
(and women)
believe that they are not avoiding to mention sensitive things out of their own weaknesses and fears, believe that they are not saying things because they think I want them to
when they can turn to me and speak aloud whatever it is I bring up in them, to speak aloud their thoughts
when I can hear you think aloud
when I can believe in you and that you trust me with your insides
oh universe, oh joy
thence comes wizardry.
And then I will call you, not acquaintance or bar-buddy, but
Friend.
** This rant has been brought to you by a caffeinated breakfast and the cold of outside urging me to delay heading out to plant the tulip bulbs.