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.