Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Text 9
Text 9
OK, it sounds like I should be asking you to get out the violins. It's
not a sense of adolescent whining I'm trying to convey, but instead
to give a sketch map of a real issue for a lot of girls and women (and
maybe for men as well, although I imagine it would be slightly
different). How is this different from worrying about weight, for
example?
For one thing, weight is (for better or worse) a topic the culture has
supplied with a large vocabulary; giggling or weepy girls trade diet
stories the way boys trade baseball cards.
The only girls who ever drew attention to one of their facial
imperfections (a nice way of saying "zits"), however, were the ones
who had skin like Glenn Close, just as the girls who usually shrieked
about putting on a pound were usually the ones wearing the
skintight jeans and looking good in them.
And, yes, it is both true and tragic that eating disorders can destroy
the lives of some young women, while in contrast few people have
died from acne. But when it's your face you're trying not to look at,
the pain is deeply real.
When did it get easier? My husband Michael made all the difference
in the world to me when, very early on in our relationship, he
wanted to stroke my face. Gently but unhesitatingly, I pushed his
hand away and told him not to touch my cheek because I felt too
self-conscious, too uncomfortably aware of my own unloveliness. He
asked again, and kept asking, telling me he loved how I looked. I
told him I was ashamed of the scars, and he told me that it wasn't
scars that he saw, that whatever scars I was talking about were the
ones left inside, from a long time ago, not ones facing the world
every day.
Not to sound too corny or anything, but I took him seriously and
spent time looking at what inside wounds needed healing and what
inside work needed doing. And I started to be able to look at myself
a little more steady and to face the world.
--reviewed and revised from an earlier essay