I rarely send an illustration back to Edith with added suggestions, but I did so with the latest one you see above. Here was my initial pitch to her:
The next TSB is about low self-esteem and body dysmorphia.
Can you draw someone that looks like me facing a mirror but covering my eyes, with the skinniest, tiniest hairiest reflection staring back at me?
And here was my vague, possibly unhelpful note after her first two attempts: make it uglier.
I rarely look in the mirror anymore, not for an extended period, lest I set myself up for a full day of isolation on my phone, pondering the steps I can take to not despair over my appearance: Nose job? Jaw enhancements? Hair plugs? Teeth whitening? Intermittent fasting? That barbaric surgery where they stretch out your leg bones to gain three more inches of height?
And then I start calculating if any of those alterations are worth it. How many "good years" do I have left to not feel like an ogre anyway?
But I'll take the mirror over getting photographed a million percent of the time. I did an interview with Kathryn Jezer-Morton last winter and, since it was also going to run in The Cut, they needed a photo to accompany it. I sent over one that I'm halfway okay but it didn't fly with the mag's visual designer so I needed to take a brand new one. Having my wife take a quick picture of me was agonizing, but I tried to pretend that it was no big deal. I sent the new one in but that one also got rejected so they asked for ANOTHER version (one where my shoulder wasn't cut off). I almost backed out of the interview entirely because I was so mortified. I hated the one they ran, obviously. And the fact that my wife said it was a "good picture" of me made me feel even worse.
What's that Larry David line he said on this season's Curb? "The mirror is how you see yourself, the photo is how you're seen." Brutal.
I often wonder if anyone else struggles with this as much as I do, and I was delighted to find out that someone does. Ben Gaffaney, who writes one of my favorite newsletters called "Hopping Off the Bus to Abilene" talked about his own issues in a recent post called "I’m Ok. I’m Ok.”
I still wonder most days what it's like to have a body that's not awful. Body image was a topic in IOP (that's "Intensive Outpatient Program" for you fuzzy ducks who haven't gone to rehab), and I took the floor. I described how much I hated the sight of myself, how I defaulted to believing myself utterly loathsome, physically, and how I relied on attention to feel less so, if only for a moment. How I'd spent 24 years in long-term relationships in part to keep that ongoing drip of knowing someone out there wasn't revolted by me. There was a long silence. I'd gone deep. One woman said, "It's okay to cry."
I told him I was planning a body dysmorphia issue and wondered if this was difficult for him to write about. He agreed to a micro-interview to help me push this topic forward:
TSB: How did you feel when you put it out in the world?
BG: This was an easy essay to write for a not-great reason: I think about this issue all the time. That said, I could have never written about my discomfort with my body without years of being vulnerable in AA/SLAA meetings, and, much like sharing in AA, there's release and self-change in knowing your vulnerability can help others.
TSB: Have you taken any steps since then to work through it?
BG: It's about re-upping daily vigilance, which is where I lean on years of cognitive-behavioral therapy. Like: when I walk into a coffee shop, I don't look at myself or anyone to compare myself to, I look at the first red thing I find. That kind of short-circuiting of bad habits. It's a constant battle.
*****
I did a quick Google search on Body Dysmorphia to make sure I was using the term appropriately and the criteria for having it. It turns out there is a "Body Dysmorphic Disorder Foundation," and it offers a quick diagnosis via an online test. I scored 45/72, which, according to their metrics, asserts that I am "likely to have BDD" and should get a professional assessment. And what then? Will I feel less like taking a baseball bat to every mirror in the house?
But there's another factor that I've overlooked, which should give me more of a reason to get some help with this—my kids. Julieanne heard me criticizing a photo of myself, complaining about how ugly I was within earshot of our six-year-old, and she quickly admonished me. "Don't give him that," she said.
She's right, of course. I grew up in a household of parents who frequently shared very thoughtless opinions about my appearance, usually at the worst possible times when my self-image was already in the toilet. My father was adept at wounding me the most and took every opportunity to rag on me when he didn't like something. When I came home from college with hoop earrings, his way of discouraging me from wearing them was to attack my insecurities directly. "Well, they'll draw attention to your ears sticking out." He also got on me about my hair—its length, the color when I dyed it blonde. "No one will take you seriously with that hair." But I forgive him since he suffered from his own insecurities.
So, I'd love your help (to help others) for our next What's-It-Like installment. Do you consider yourself someone with body dysmorphia? Was this always the case or did it come on later in life? And—most importantly—what steps have you taken to combat it?
All contributors will remain anonymous (obv).
Hit me up here: ajd@thesmallbow.com
Subject: BODY STUFF
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MORE IN THIS SERIES:
This is The Small Bow newsletter. It is mainly written and edited by A.J. Daulerio. And Edith Zimmerman always illustrates it. We send it out every Tuesday and Friday.
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A POEM ON THE WAY OUT:
Beauty
by Tony Hoagland
*************************
When the medication she was taking
caused tiny vessels in her face to break,
leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks,
my sister said she knew she would
never be beautiful again.
After all those years
of watching her reflection in the mirror,
sucking in her stomach and standing straight,
she said it was a relief,
being done with beauty,
but I could see her pause inside that moment
as the knowledge spread across her face
with a fine distress, sucking
the peach out of her lips,
making her cute nose seem, for the first time,
a little knobby.
I’m probably the only one in the whole world
who actually remembers the year in high school
she perfected the art
of being a dumb blond,
spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab,
tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill
which was her specialty,
while some football player named Johnny
with a pained expression in his eyes
wrapped his thick finger over and over again
in the bedspring of one of those pale curls.
Or how she spent the next decade of her life
auditioning a series of tall men,
looking for just one with the kind
of attention span she could count on.
Then one day her time of prettiness
was over, done, finito,
and all those other beautiful women
in the magazines and on the streets
just kept on being beautiful
everywhere you looked,
walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance
in which you sense they always seem to have one hand
touching the secret place
that keeps their beauty safe,
inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it—
It was spring. Season when the young
buttercups and daisies climb up on the
mulched bodies of their forebears
to wave their flags in the parade.
My sister just stood still for thirty seconds,
amazed by what was happening,
then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head
as if she was throwing something out,
something she had carried a long ways,
but had no use for anymore,
now that it had no use for her.
That, too, was beautiful.
ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDITH ZIMMERMAN
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A.J. Daulerio, Editor of The Small Bow
Thank you for writing on this topic. Even with 21 years of recovery, I STILL struggle with this. <3
Glad you wrote about this. Thank you. I want to write about self image, aging bodies, et al + grief but haven't been able to yet.
So many of us were raised to understand life as a constant struggle to look like _____ on whatever TV show or movie. I hate that I spent all those years learning that, and that I might have to spend all the remaining years undoing it, even while my face distorts and bloats due to gravity and hormone loss and absent collagen and whatever else.
I love that you include reader entries --- it's just so great. Somehow it felt like all I could do this time was pitch this comment in. Thanks again for what you do.