memory work
I was a serious draw-er back in first grade. Not an artist, I never deserved that title, and I didn’t sketch either, or paint or do anything in the visual arts that warranted an official title. But I drew, and I drew with conviction. I drew with pride. When you’re in first grade, you are defined by what you do, and during the hour-long section of class devoted to arts and crafts, I, still a mere Alexandra, was a draw-er.
One day I sat in the back corner where four desks had been pressed together into a tidy square. The walls were decorated with redundant information -- their bright backgrounds were tacked with bold-lettered reminders that two plus two equals four and yes, A is still followed by B and C. The letters had faces on them, smiling down on us while we colored. My surroundings were all peripheral mush at this point though, for I had taken to the paper with a writing utensil and was busy working on my newest piece. Inspired by the recent Summer Olympics, I drew thoughtfully, my pen pressing onto the printer paper with purpose as my tousled brown hair hung like curtains on each side of my face. My hands were small, my focus big. Eventually my vision began to be realized and as I pulled back to regard my work a now-forgotten boy who sat next to me that particular day leaned over and said with a certain air of disgust,
“Why is his arm so fat?”
I stared at my paper. I had drawn an Olympic swimmer in mid-stroke, smoothly coming up for air. My curvey-pointy waves of the water obscured most of the swimmer’s body aside from his face and left arm that reached up and over the water to complete another freestyle stroke. His arm. His “fat” arm.
To my horror, it really was fat. Not just fat, but tumor-like. The kind of arm you are appalled by on medical anomaly television specials. The arm towered over the swimmer and the water like a gargantuan mass of flesh ready to smother whatever it landed on and there was nothing I could do about it because I’d drawn in pen.
And, the more I looked at my drawing, the more the swimmer’s left hand was beginning to resemble a cauliflower and I hoped the boy didn’t notice that additional flaw.
Why was his arm so fat? I was offended that the boy had even asked, who was he to criticize my work? But, mostly I was offended out of personal confusion because I truly did not have an answer, I just didn’t know why his arm was fat. This arm could not have been consciously drawn by me -- perhaps I had blacked out during my creative process? -- yet there it was on my paper nevertheless, completely unrealistic and shocking in proportion. I didn’t respond to the boy’s question and tried to rescue the integrity of my drawing with a reshaping of the arm, but it was fruitless - the drawing was a waste and an embarrassment. The arm’s size, the boy’s implicit criticism, and my throbbing sense of self-doubt emerged victorious. I retired my pen and sat quietly for the rest of art.
Several years later, I was on the middle school physical education yard and my social senses could tell that something was awry. The day before I had hand-written a letter to my soon-to-be former best friend about how I thought she was unnecessarily mean to me. I passed it to her during the end of English on Thursday.
On Friday I would pay.
“Have you checked your P.E. locker yet, AJ?” one co-conspirator asked under the guise of innocence.
“No, why?”
“No reason.”
Panic set in.
When the class period began to wind down I made a bolt across the blacktop for the locker room before anyone else could shuffle in, my royal blue gym shorts clinging to my legs in flight. I reached the locker room and knelt down, winded, and turned the combination on my locker. The small metal door swung open, revealing two folded notes lying on top of my belongings, evidently shoved in earlier through the locker vents. I unfolded them, already sensing their content.
On college-ruled paper were scrawlings of me, scrawlings about me. Poorly drawn depictions of my body, messy arrows pointed at my chest, remarking that I, or at least the drawn version of me, was “flatter than a wall.” My lower-half was disproportionately large, a pear shape taken to the extreme, and in darkened ink I was pronounced in sloppy handwriting to be a fat-ass and generally ugly. My cheeks burned as I hovered over the cold locker room floors.
In truth, the drawings were far more detailed but I can’t seem to remember much else. In the graying locker rooms my mind blurred the event while I squatted between my small metal locker and the slim wooden bench that ran down the dimly lit locker aisle. My memories of the notes, their biting words and mortifying drawings, consequently remained vague, a fuzzy kind of defense mechanism for my reacting mind. I didn’t want to remember, or at least not entirely. I scanned the pages that Friday morning alone, flipping them over to see that the backside had drawings as well.
Multiple people’s handwriting. Multiple, uncreative ways of calling me ugly. Multiple ways to strip away my social life and everything I found comfortable in the frightening world of sixth grade. Multiple ways of pre-pubescent hurt.
And then, to make up for what my mind could not entirely do, my eyes began to well and the pages blurred instead.
In my grandmother’s ornate bedroom, a now seventeen year old version of myself flipped through pages of memories captured in crisp, Kodaked detail. The unavoidable Christmas dinner fashion faux-pas or moments of youth’s awkwardness were not simply remembered and then slowly forgotten in my kin; those moments were photographed, printed and placed behind a protective plastic sheath in a leather-bound photo album for other family members to ogle during future gatherings. At my workstation in the master bedroom were several stacked envelopes of photos, awaiting their categorization and captioning. I opened up blank pages of a new photo album and began to sort the four-by-fives (glossy, always glossy with my grandmother) into sections - Fourth of July, Boat Parade, Hawaii 2004…and then I stumbled upon it.
It was me. Just me in a pair of unassuming black pants and a salmon colored racer back tank top. It was just me on my grandparent’s boat one summer when I was about fourteen, poised for a picture with my hair pulled cleanly off my face and tied up into a ponytail. My lips don’t give a hint of teeth, they are pursed together yet curled up. I can tell something is quietly bothering me. It was just me.
I set the picture aside and hurriedly flipped through the rest of the envelope, searching for more photos of me from that day. None however matched the intangible intrigue that the first picture had. I could have slid the photo of a younger me into the photo album and left it there to mingle forever with other memories, but I instead hid it under another album and snuck it home later that day.
Some girls find thinspiration through magazine cut outs or television shows, but I found my ultimate thinspiration hidden in a stack of old pictures of my family. It was me, but several pounds lighter, a person unfamiliar to my self-loathing mind - a stranger. The girl in the picture has a tiny waist, lean legs and delicate arms. The girl in the picture looks so effortlessly beautiful. I was jealous of her as I looked at it back at home that night. I wanted to be her. I was her, yet in every way that mattered at seventeen I was not. In that photo she was everything that I had never thought I ever was, or could ever be again. It was a glimpse of a dream unknowingly realized, it was glossied hope.
Ironically, the fourteen year old AJ that posed on the boat years back, the AJ that woke up that day and chose a pair of black pants and a salmon colored tank top to wear, would end up journaling at the end of that summer day that if she lost just five more pounds, then she would be happy. Her lips are pursed yet they curl up in the corners. Just another pound or two. She would stare in the mirror and turn to the side, taking in her profile. Lose more and then it’ll be okay. Then this tank top won’t tug right here at the arm pit. Then this reflection won’t be so frustrating.
At seventeen, I taped that photo to my bathroom mirror and aspired to re-become myself.
I never did become fourteen again. No amount of exercise could undo what hormones had created during my later teenage years. But down the line I grew to realize the complicated nature of how we define ourselves as people -- the balance that occurs between the facets of what we put out into the world, what the world gives back, and how we understand the resultant image of ourselves. I stopped drawing after eighth grade but began writing more seriously soon thereafter. I let go of the cruelly exaggerated drawings of me and grew a set of A-cups that would make walls jealous. And I eventually retired that picture of me from my arsenal of things I’d like to become and began to accept the girl (woman?) I already was.
That’s not to say it was easy, or that it will ever be easy. I cried quite a bit along the way, and I’m pretty much guaranteed to cry about it in the future. Writing, though, helps sort out the complications of these memories, even if it means producing a Fat Arm equivalent every once in awhile. I think it’s a risk worth taking.