What plastic surgery forums taught me about my body

The internet is a strange thing, isn't it? One click leads to another click, and then what began as checking your email ends as looking at real estate in the Philippines.

One such click to click for me has happened recently and it led me to the intensely interesting world of plastic surgery forums. One of them is called realself.com and I encourage you to look at it.

Cosmetic surgery has always been something I've been for. I've never made any bones about the fact that when I start to sag and droop, I'll be first in line for fillers and freezers and anything else that modern medicine can give me to help me feel like myself. That's weird, right? Why can't my 'self' just sag and droop like the rest of me, rather than be stuck in some 24-year-old ideal that I will never truly be able to return to?

But before that, let's get back to why there's nothing wrong with cosmetic surgery. There just isn't. It's just like any other body modification that my generation has accepted with open arms: piercings, scarification, tattoos. I've engaged in all of them and it hasn't garnered more than a raised eyebrow. But when you talk to one of your peers about getting some botox, the response is surprising.

"You'll end up with a frozen face like Nicole Kidman."

"I don't know what you're talking about. You're beautiful the way you are."

When I get tattoos, no one warns me that I'll end up looking like Kat Von Dee, or tells me that I'm beautiful without ink. They see it as what it is, a celebration of, and embellishment upon who I already am. 

Now, to the forums. On realself.com, people post stories of their own experiences; before after pictures, prices, doctor reviews, etc. Now, I'm not interested in getting my lips augmented, or having a tummy tuck, or a breast augmentation, but I browsed through their stories anyway. Some of them had an issue with their bodies they were dealing with since their teens, others felt like they woke up one morning and they suddenly didn't recognize who was in the mirror. Some of them were doing it for what you might appraise as the 'right' reasons, and other for 'wrong' ones. Afterwards, you find that whatever the reason a person had for modifying their appearance has no bearing on how they'll feel about their results. Some are over the moon, and some realise that their unhappiness lay, not in their appearance, but in something deeper.

The before pictures, though, are what stick with me the most. Pictures of wobbly bodies with the heads out of the frame, wearing underpants and maybe a bra, maybe not. Some scowling selfies, and closeups of hands, knees, chins, ears. All with a (sometimes) imperceptable flaw. All is on the table to be 'fixed'. These are not the kind of photos that you share on facebook. They are vulnerable. They are people showing their most hated attributes.

But actually, they don't look that bad. Even grandmothers who stand in front of their bathroom mirrors and click pictures of their thighs that hang in twenty wrinkles each, rippling downward into dimply knees, all I can think is "yep, that's what you are supposed to look like." Without context, without history, they look very much themselves in these photos. It's in the after photos that you are jolted with the bizarre backwards movement of time, an illusion that is almost, but not quite perfect. The crepey skin is pulled a little tighter, the ripply thighs are gone, and the smooth, buttery paintbrush of youth obscures all.

After spending far too long absorbed in these people's lives, picking up lingo and pricing random and increasingly bizarre procedures, I dart off to the bathroom and shimmy out of my jeans and t-shirt and stand in front of the mirror. Reflected back at me is an image I've now scrolled through a thousand times. I zoom in on the stretch marks and saggy breasts, the love handles and the dimply knees. I lean in and scowl at my forehead in the mirror. I pick a zit. I lean back again, pulling and prodding at my flesh and letting it go.

I stare, hard. And all I can think is, "yep, that's what you're supposed to look like."

But I can't

Sometimes I feel like people think I live the way I do because of a choice I made. In a lot of ways, this isn't entirely accurate. I've been told to fall in line my entire life, and believe me, I've wanted to more than anything else in the world. For some reason, it just never worked out that way.

Just fall in line, they would say, in a patronizing way, teachers and parents and my teenaged friends. They pointed to parties where everyone was having fun, and classes where I was doing well. Friends tried to sneak rum in my milkshakes to force me to have fun. Teachers suggested my questions were me just trying to be difficult. I held my tongue, but I couldn't fall in line. I had no furniture in my living room. I had no respect for my teachers, who I imagined lead sordid and lust-driven lives as soon as they left the school grounds. My French teacher took breaks every half an hour to go smoke in her car, and my friend was suspended for doing the same.

Just fall in line, they would moan, completely frustrated. My own parents, my professors, my employers. They saw me as a potential worker bee who had not yet harnessed her ability to spend the majority of her life working away at something that was only vaguely interesting. I slept while they expected. I slept through it all, waking only for classes as each expectation diminished slowly into nothing at all. And I woke, and treading through the soft warmth of zero prospects.

Don't let them objectify you! They would exclaim, in my sociology classes and at feminist meetings. But I was young and pretty, and being an object is better than being nothing at all. I wanted the catcalls and the thinly veiled desire. I wanted the status of being an object.

Just fall in line, they now shriek, my neighbours, my children's teachers. They wring their hands and shake their heads. Well-meaning advice becomes venom if given more than twice. And now that I'm in charge of the rearing of other members of society, concern becomes threefold. FALL IN LINE! Teach them about computers, buy them an ipad, and DEAR GOD HAVE YOU STARTED THE FLASH CARDS YET??

But I can't. I want to be an object of desire. I want to listen to people who aren't hypocrites. I want to do the things I enjoy, like a goddamned hedonist. I want to fit in without compromising myself. I want my kids to be an example that society can be un-fucked. 

It's probably not possible for me to fall in line. Every time I try to get closer, I end up farther away.

Killing bugs and why we're not all astronauts

Meaning gives us purpose. Purpose, ideally, spurs us to action. And the fruits of action? Well, sometimes it can be bitter fruit indeed.

Sometimes, the meaning-purpose-action-result cycle can be incredibly demoralizing. I mean, here we are, all built up as small children to grasp onto meaning, and let it guide us in to purposefulness. So we reach for things that are familiar: we say we want to be lawyers, because we want to enforce rules we believe keep things in order; we say we want to be doctors, because we want our friends and loved ones to be well; we say we want to be astronauts, because earth cannot contain the limitless nature of our curiosity; we say we want to be soldiers because we want to be strong and defend our country.

As we enter the world, this concept of world-saving becomes blurry. Our meaning becomes a little more self-serving, a little more about status. We want to be lawyers for the money and the fact people will think we are smart. But we're not all smart. No, we're not.

We're not.

...some of us are. But most of us aren't. Sorry. Some of us are fucking stupid as bricks. Some of us can't grasp the human language to the extent that we can form a coherent sentence, let alone utilize that language to represent empathy for our fellow man. We simplify. We boil it down life to its core elements.

Survival. Reproduction. aka. Murder. Sex.

Am I getting too dark for you? Maybe I'm just in a dark mood. But let me continue, because I've still got more left in me.

So our meaning becomes a little more dire, and a little more realistic as we age. So what? That's fine. We need realism to continue on. We can't all be astronauts you know. No, we can't.

My meaning comes and goes. It waxes and wanes, and mostly is found in other people. So my purpose then, is their sustenance. My result? It can feel like I'm just treading water. The people I sustain don't know I'm doing it. I didn't know anyone was doing it for me, when all I wanted was to be a doctor to take care of other people.

This perhaps, will be known as one of my most incoherent blog posts. I've had two tall cans of cider and sat in the sun for two hours while my 5 year old played games with other 5 year olds. They were funny and brutal. They killed bugs and laughed heartily as they threw arms around one another and chuckled.

I imagined the scene would have been the same 1,000 years ago. 2,000, even. The camraderie of little boys and its brutality is timeless. Their brutiality, hard wired for leadership and Machiavellian mobility may not even have a place in the future. What will I tell my son about meaning then? And the fruits of his action? What if my sustenance, my own meaning, gives him an undesirable result?

So, I try and find my meaning in other places. I write. I try (and fail) at starting a career that is a ghost of the high-minded ideals I had as a child. But I also try and instill a varied sense of meaning in my son. It's not all about killing bugs and saving the world. No, it's not.

Okay, maybe it is.
 

Being a mom isn't a good thing...or a bad one

Because I am a huge hypocrite, I am going to write about the thing that I said only two days ago I was going to steer clear from. I gave a really good reason too; that this blog was going to be a place to explore my thoughts outside of this one task that I performed on a daily, hourly, second-by-second basis.

Yup folks, I'm going to blog about being a mama. No, this does not mean a slow decline into mommy blogging.

The reason I've come to this, is a conversation I had last night with my mother and her partner about motherhood being difficult, and even, not fulfilling for a certain type of woman. My mother claimed that for some women, it was completely fulfilling and for others it wasn't. My argument was that this completely fulfilled woman is a fiction. People have many components to them, and being a mom (basically, caretaker) is not enough to fill every need that a person has. It is a part, but not all.

But what struck me was how offended I got when my mom used me as an example of someone who wasn't entirely fulfilled by the task. I mean, here I am claiming that no woman can be completely fulfilled by motherhood, and at the same time being offended that someone could identify me as being part of their numbers. It doesn't make any sense.

We talked about how mothers throughout history haven't really seemed up to the task, or even interested in it, let alone enjoying rearing their children. I wondered why that was. I mulled it, and slept on it.

What I've come to this morning is that motherhood isn't supposed to make us happy. That is a preoccupation that is modern. It has no place in the primal, millions of years of mammalian motherhood. Like any task it has its terrible moments and its wonderful ones. But it shouldn't be a list of pros and cons. We shouldn't be looking for personal gratification on a daily basis from our kids, because we won't find it. It will make you bitter. Kids aren't built to appreciate what they have, so it seems kind of backwards that we should be expecting them to.

Of course, I am as guilty as the next mama, grumbling and exasperating over who am I now that I'm a mom. Sometimes these children seem to have sucked out what makes me, well, me, and I'm left with nothing but exhaustion at the end of the day. Realistically though, I never knew who I was. I was always in an existential funk, and these kids are now just along for the ride.

Motherhood is just another phase of my life, like adolescence. It's neither good or bad, it just is. Its a means to an end, it's the logical byproduct of sex being pleasurable, of having more love to give than I know what to do with. It was something I wanted to do, because my curiosity is stronger than my caution.

So, when I talk to women who are contemplating motherhood and they tell me that they aren't ready to be a mom, or they're not sure they're going to like it, I can only agree. You probably won't. But you probably won't like whatever comes next, because signing up for humanity means a lot of shitty days are laying in wait for you. Whether you decide to share that with the fruit of your womb or not, the essential fact is that no life will move forward without blandness, heartache, and sorrow.

There's good days too, some ecstatic and others quiet and warm and cozy, but I'm a glass half empty kinda chick. And those good days will also come, regardless of your status as a parent or not.

I love my little people, I love my life. Right now. Ask me when I'm in the car, and my daughter has been screaming bloody murder for two straight hours, and my son keeps telling me I'm the worst mom in the world because I won't share my coffee with him, I may give you a different answer. So, am I fulfilled? Maybe. Is my life hard? Definitely. Was there a path I could have taken that would have made me feel otherwise? No.

I guess my mom was right after all. I am a certain type of woman. I'm the type that is always curious, always begrudging the things that go wrong, and searching for the next thing that could make my life a little more complicated. I'm an adventurer. And so are you.

The late life punk

When I was a teen, I read Vogue religiously. I wore platform shoes and glitter gel adorned my eyelids. Never mind that the platforms made me fall, or that the pineapple scented glitter gel made the skin around my eyes break out in a finely spotted rash. By all appearances I was an average white girl, doing a good job of fitting in to the status quo of 1999. Being a punk was never an option in my rural high school.

Oh, sure, I saw them on Queen street, their patchy legs outstretched across the sidewalk. Their blue mohawks attractive to the corner of my eyes only. Admitting their aesthetic appealed to me was a non option. Their world seemed too far off from mine, too foreign.

I was deluding myself.

In fact, me and those kids had more in common than I knew  From the broken home that spoiled me on the concept of mindlesy fulfilling capitalist consumption to the anarchist world view. The only difference? I was ashamed. I didn't want to be different. So I kept bashing the square peg into a round hole until it splintered and chipped, and kind of fit, but not really.

Later in life, I've come to know a lot more punks. Even, when feeling honest with myself, identified with them a little. But it feels awkward. Like I missed the punk bus, and now I'm a little too old. A little too domestic. Even my husband scoffed as I tentatively claimed my anarchy. Punks don't get married and send their kids to Buddhist preschool. Anarchists don't own homes. It's an imperfect distinction.

So I think of myself as a late life punk. I'm almost 30, a mom of two, but I really don't have time for bullshit anymore. I like cramming studs onto my clothes, and listening to (some) punk rock. I think society is untenable. Sometimes I'm too aggressive for polite conversation. Sometimes I bake gluten-free muffins for the school bake sale and stress out that they're too ugly. I get tattoos and take terrible care of them when they're healing because my kids are sick. I teach them about police brutality and inequality. I begrudgingly buy them some (not all) of the plastic crap they ask for.

Punk's not dead, it just couldn't find a babysitter.

Confidence, and why I'm going to kick ass and take names

I've been traveling, so pardon my silence after a bout of blogging enthusiasm.

Because I've been traveling, I've been reading magazines such as The Atlantic, which had this very interesting article about female confidence. The basic gist of the thing being that while women usually have the same abilities as men, we are much less likely to ask for raises, go in for promotions, or generally believe in our own competence. And when we don't believe in ourselves neither do our employers. This, says the author, could be the explanation for the ongoing wage gap between genders.

And it's also a double-edged sword. Women who are confident about expressing their ideas are perceived as 'bossy' or 'bitchy'. 

It brought to mind a recent interview I had for a design internship. It was probably one of the single worst interviews of my life.

"What do you hope to gain from this opportunity?" The interviewer swivelled wildly back and forth on his chair, glancing intermittently at his laptop.  Immediately I felt rushed. Unimportant.

"Well, I think it would be great for networking." I paused, realising that this may sound too much like I was a soulless climber. "But really I would love to work with someone so that I could improve on my confidence to express my design concepts."

He stopped swivelling.

"Confidence?"

"Yes."

"Do you think that people are born with confidence?"

"Um--"

"Work on your skills. Confidence will come later."

I was pretty crushed. In my opinion my skills are at the level of many other designers who have held that same internship. But after reading the article in the Atlantic, I'm struck that maybe what turned off my interviewer was my lack of confidence.

I hate that this is an inherently female quality. I always noticed in university that women would apologize before they made a comment in class. We called it the "I'm sorry but" syndrome. What were they sorry about? Sorry that they had an opinion? Sorry that they had made a noise? Don't be sorry! I wanted to shout. I'm glad you have something you want to say!

But it would seem my smug position of authority wasn't real. I too, am guilty of the confidence gap. I can think of a number of positions that I've convinced myself I'm not perfectly qualified for. In fact, I wanted that internship to bolster my confidence. I wanted to watch a person (preferably a woman, in all honesty) doing the job I wanted to do, at the level I wanted to work at, and performing it confidently. I wanted to see a designer that wasn't being bullied, and didn't shrink away when the banter at the production meeting got a little tense. A woman who knew her worth. Still, design positions are dominated by men. It may be many years before I break into the career that I want. However, instead of being afraid of seeming the upstart, I think I should probably be a little more obnoxious, a little less afraid of stepping on toes. Maybe being remembered for being 'bossy' is better than being forgettably agreeable?

It's a wake up call I'm glad for. I've been concentrating for a long time on my skills, which will never be perfect and will always be improving thanks to the positions I apply and am hired for. What I need to square is my confidence. I think my interviewer was absolutely and completely wrong. Confidence is a component of success, just as much as skill.

So there you go.

Working out sucks and I hate it

When I exercise, I get really red. I get so red that people whose job it is to make sure you don't die whilst working out get concerned. I'm not dying, though, even though I feel like I'm going to. I'm just working out. And it sucks.

My hatred of working out began at a young age. As an awkward, tall and gawky teenager, it only increased. I loped slowly around the track, wheezing and clutching my side that was exploding in pain. The term “cramp” seemed woefully insufficient as I collapsed in front of my PE teacher. She would roll her eyes and grunt that I had to do another lap. I still hold a prejudice against a woman wearing a sweatband around her head. The presumption in itself that you will break a sweat just at any point without notice irks me.

I always assumed that I would inherit the svelte physique of my mother, who has bulging biceps and a trim waist even now, in her fifties. With the benefit of hindsight, I see we are not made of the same stuff.

I am prone to being fat. It distributes in my middle, but also settles in my face, making me look like a happy baby. I get fat when I'm sad. I get fat when I'm happy. I get fat after having a baby. When women tell me that breastfeeding made them just shed pounds like crazy, I want to punch them in their faces. Not really. Mostly it makes me want to cry. Being fat makes me emotional too, like the fat molecules are crowding the part of my brain capable of toughing it out.

So, faced with a lifetime of potential obesity, and having a vague interest in extending my life for the benefit of my kids, I have tried several different forms of exercise:

1. Fitness Class
   This initially worked because it was highly scheduled, which made me more likely to attend. I didn't like that it seemed like everyone in the class was more fit than me, though. Also there was a complicated system of chits that never failed me, but always made me paranoid I wouldn't get a spot. Eventually I got bored of cycling to nowhere to Ricky Martin.
2. DIY Gym Attendance
   I went to the gym religiously for an extended period of time. I did eliptical and stationary bike and circuit training for increasing periods of time. I lost no weight. It made me eat more, and it seemed like a crazy investment of time for very little payoff. I stopped going because they got rid of the lady I liked at child-minding and replaced her with this shitty half-assed 21-year old that made my baby cry. Next!
3. Yoga
   I love yoga, I really do. But something about it just feels like a fashion show, doesn't it? There's always a few chicks that can do downward dog like badasses and have a new outfit every class. You stare at them while your legs shake uncontrollably, judging yourself for the pills on your yoga pants that smell kind of funky because you're afraid to wash them. I prefer to think I've taken a hiatus from yoga, rather than abandoned it, but I'm not sure I can afford the attire I need to perform it comfortably.
4. Kickboxing
   This is my most current past time, and I can not say enough about it. Punching things as exercise just makes so much sense to me. Seeing as whenever a fitness instructor tells me to push it to the limit I want to punch them, this is a perfect solution! I even get to kick and punch a rubber dude at the end. It's great.

I'm pretty sure my love of butter will keep me constantly in peril of heart disease, so I will continue in my quest for enjoyable exercise. In the end, I know it keeps me more balanced. Exercise is a really great component to the treatment of mental illness and prevention of relapse. Meanwhile, I'm hoping to instil a love of exercise in my kids as well. I don't want them to find it the painful chore that I do. Maybe one day they'll be those alien folks I see at the gym who look like they're truly enjoying themselves! Who knows!