My Fairytale

Oh hey there! How's things? I'm just over here in my sweats riding the dregs of a caffeine high. I do not have a plan for this blog post. Just gonna shoot some sh+t out into the internet void. Let's see...what do I want to talk about? Oh I know! Yesterday I posted one of my stories on Instagram. This is what it looks like:

The photo is not great so here's the text: 

Once upon a time...

...there was a woman with incredible super powers:

Number One:

she was incredibly thin

Number Two:

even though she was tiny she could do karate so well that she won every single fight

Number Three:

she was beautiful and delicate like a model but also interesting

Thanks to all three things the woman was happy and safe.

She never felt scared or weak because she could fight back.

She never felt sad because she was beautiful and she never felt lonely because she loved herself.

She never felt like an outsider because she had beautiful clothes and amazing skin. 

The End. 

I wrote this after Sheldon and I went to see The Batman starring Robert Pattinson and Zoë Kravitz. I loved the experience of watching the movie in the theatre. We sat next to a young boy who was both the worst and the best possible person to sit next to. The worst, because he talked and ate popcorn the whole time and got up to use the bathroom thrice.

But the best because he was loving every minute of that movie. He was bouncing up and down on the edge of his seat (literally!) during the car chases and when the thing was over he sighed, "That was the coolest movie. Ever."

It was contagious. His enthusiasm helped me go along for the ride instead of nit-pick the things about the movie that I thought were stupid, like the fact that it was way too long and the end was super cheesy and seemed like some weird nationalist propaganda. 

But the thing that stuck with me the most was Zoë Kravitz's Catwoman. She was  everything you want from a good Catwoman: rebellious, super-duper sexy, fierce and bada$$ yet vulnerable and loyal. I was riveted by her story and wished the whole thing could be about her. But of course it wasn't. 

The other thing Catwoman made me feel was inadequate. The actress playing her is everything I am not. She has a teeny tiny body. I am tall and thin but by no means tiny. I am not good at martial arts or cat-burglary. I do not have an awesome wardrobe of leather suits and thigh-high boots. My skin is not fresh and clear like a mountain spring.

But I wish I had all those things. I wrote the above story in the moment when I connected to that desire. It's such a familiar longing for me. I have been telling myself the same fairytale for so long that even though I had never written it down before the words felt like lyrics to an old song. 

Catwoman isn't the first woman I've seen on screen and thought: I wish I had her life. If I could change a couple things about myself to be more like her I would be happy. 

Ariel from A Little Mermaid. Mia Thermopolis from Princess Diaries. Violet Baudelaire from A Series of Unfortunate Events. 

Clear skin is something all these ladies share, but which I have never attained. Writing my little fairytale helped me zero in on the thing that that underpins my desire to be petite and pretty: The desire to be safe, loved and to belong. Somewhere along the way I picked up a recipe for getting those things that hinged on a very specific brand of physical beauty. 

Happiness and thinness are linked in my mind. As are clear skin and safety. In my experience the world has seemed to offer more of its precious gifts to the women who are possessing of those traits and its crazy to realize how young I was when I began to understand that. Even typing out those words is scary because of how wrong they look in black and white. But those equations reside so deeply within my being. 

Writing my story felt like a way to confront that part of myself and give her compassion. It felt healing to tell her, "You feel like you can only be loved and safe if you look a certain way, don't you? That's so hard. I'm so sorry."