exfoliate

Saturday night was prom night--not mine. It's been 10 years since I went to the prom. It's that time of year and Saturday night was filled with kids outfitted for a night of faux, formal adulthood. I was out with friends at a restaurant filled with girls in overconstructeded up-dos and formal gowns with the bulges and lines of control-top pantyhose showing through. The prom makes high school girls think they need to suck it in. I think I weighed about 120lbs in high school and I remember wearing pantyhose like that, even after skipping breakfast for weeks before. I couldn't stop watching those girls. I'd like to think it's because that time feels far off; that I'm so opposite that place now. Frustratingly, I think the reality is I am still there with them, in a silky gown, eyeliner that I practiced putting on for weeks before, and wondering if he was wishing he hadn't overlooked me. It was even more frustrating because that morning had started strong. I woke up early and exfoliated. The clean face somehow made me feel more open to the world; more sure of who I was in it. Sometimes what I need most is the symbolic gestures. I rode the Max to the downtown farmer's market and bought chard, green garlic, lettuce, asparagus, rhubarb, pork chops, and a bunch of purple irises--treating myself to the things I wanted. I felt great being me and with nothing "put on." I felt like the woman I imagined I might become back when I was eighteen.

Then, Saturday night I realized (again) how much of my own history hangs on. Seeing those high school girls reminded me of how deeply I was carving who I would become back then. Or, more truthfully, how firmly I still cover myself in the same identity, even though it's outdated, unnecessary, and not me anymore. Something of that time in my life became the stuff I still can't scrub off. The he who helped me feel like I wasn't enough; the girls whose bikini-ad stomachs forced me buy the control top hose so I might measure up, the self who believed their invisible judgments. Those days were just the beginning of something I still struggle with. Sometimes I can say "fuck it" and other times I find myself in the same pit of self-doubt. It feels like that--a hole, but one I've climbed out before. I know a few ladders, but they usually involve getting someone's attention and approval and I know where that leads. But this time I know I don't want to use any of those old routes. I want to take myself someplace different.

I've had hard times holding myself in the uncomfortable moments before--lying lonely without reaching out, resting in awkwardness, admitting my own ugliness instead of disguising it. I've been having those moments recently. But now I am scrubbed down and it feels like an opportunity. I want this time to be different. I want to be different.

I heard once that all your cells, from skin to blood to brain, regenerate at least once every seven years--you are literally a new being every seven years. I guess it's just the memories that hold it all together to make a lifetime (for better or worse). It's easy to say you've stopped caring about what others think of you and how they see you; I find it's much harder when it's inexorably connected to how you've always seen yourself. Maybe it takes more uncomfortable, exfoliated moments than I've let myself have to stop caring about how you appear--that what you need is to just wait it out until the truer self can carve something new. For now, that's what I'm trying because--although it may have taken me ten years to realize--I'm definitely done with those fucking hose.