blooming

I pretend that I don’t exist below the neck. I look at myself in small hand mirrors, bisecting my head from my body. In the right light, I can see a sharper jawline, a moustache, a hint of hair like tiny thorns on my cheeks and chin. My eyebrows are thin, so I fill them in. Accentuate my cheekbones with bronzer. My hair used to sit at my chin. I wrestled with that for a while – long hair can be masculine, right? Yes, of course. And yet, I would often hover my scissors along the strands, feeling the urge to snip. I eventually got it cut professionally.

Why do I focus so much on my face? Well, my body, out of sight, could be anything. If I’m wearing the right clothes I can be weightless, transcendental. If I look away from the mirror and dissociate for a while, I can forget my face and float up into my mind’s eye. I look so different there. I spend so long in that world that sometimes I forget who I am, really. When I do catch myself in my full-length mirror, or see myself captured in a friend’s photograph, I feel an urge to bolt. I used to think it was fairly normal. Nobody likes to see themselves in a candid moment, after all. And yet, nothing could alleviate my discomfort. No amount of dieting or exercising or new clothes would make it go away. It wasn’t just the look of myself either. It was the feeling. The way that I couldn’t cross my arms ‘properly’, the movement of my chest if I ran, or climbed the stairs too fast. The way that my body dipped in and then out again, instead of tapering in from my shoulders like a triangle. My skin itched and crawled, and I would scratch and pull at hunks of my flesh. It began to dawn on me that this wasn’t entirely ordinary, this level of obsession with how I looked, this level of discomfort. 

I told my therapist that I felt like I was full of eels, writhing in murky waters, waiting to explode out in a mass of flicking tails and bared teeth, detonating my life. Why eels? they asked. Why not a rose garden instead? This is when it finally started to click. What if this feeling inside was not something terrible breaking loose, but seeds pushing towards the light? What would happen if I allowed the thorns pushing against my ribs, the petals filling my lungs, to unfurl and grow? Maybe the writhing inside was not a warning, but a signal: something is trying to live here. 

Read the first part of the story: part 1