There is never a time I attempt to choose my words more carefully than when I am talking about physical appearance. I can name no other scenario in which I fight more intensely against my urge to please people and tell them exactly what they want to hear. And oh, I know what they want to hear. I know when I watch wives call out their husbands’ weight loss, their faces lighting up as they gesture toward their spouse and say, “Doesn’t he look great?” like they’re not even in the room. I know when someone says, “Man, I look old,” or “I feel fat,” or “Do I need Botox?” or “Does this filler look weird?” I know, like all of us do, that there are expectations here for how to respond to all of this and pretty much none of those include the phrase, “How you look isn’t really important,” even if most of us would say that that’s something we believe, too.
I also know exactly what it’s like to so desperately need someone to confirm that you do, indeed, look different — but not too different, not so different that you look fake, or sick, or too young, or too thin, or too unlike yourself even though the whole point of changing whatever it is you changed was, of course, to look different. I’ve asked all the same questions myself, and I continue to. I try to do it privately now, though. And I try (and fail and try again) to be aware of how I engage in conversations about all of it. But I really want to underscore how much try really is the key word here, because let me tell you: It never really gets easier to work through the intense awkwardness that comes when someone expects praise for their weight loss (or their spouse’s) and you respond with, “I love your shirt!” or “Are you happy?” or simply “Oh!” Every time I face this dilemma, what I want to say is: You look great but I don’t mean that in the way “you look great” usually means aka you look thinner, but because you are you and you were you before, too, and you were ok then. You were good then. And I refuse to give you a reason to wonder later about all the people who you now know saw you as slightly worse-looking before. But I don’t say that, of course. Instead I usually just smile awkwardly and say, “You look great!” anyway, even if I know all the implications.
It takes a lot to rearrange how we talk about appearance. It took me a solid five years to (mostly) rid the word ‘flattering’ from my vocabulary, and it still pops out of my mouth every now and then, anyway. I catch myself complimenting people about looking younger than their age all the time, and yet am somehow still surprised when, with every passing year, I suddenly find myself more worried about whether I do, in fact, look my age and if I don’t, how I should fix it. Like doing nothing and letting time pass would be some kind of a failure. Perhaps that’s the best example of the ways that the things most of us would probably brush off as unimportant, as meaningless parts of our daily lexicon, actually matter. Just yesterday I was writing something on stories about a makeup product I like and I said something along the lines of: “It makes me feel put together,” and as soon as I wrote it I thought… as opposed to what?
I thought about the ways we put ourselves together and pull ourselves together, the way we smooth down the flyaways and hide the panty lines and make the outlines of our stomachs invisible and highlight this and conceal that and pluck and shave and brush and work and work and work. I suddenly had this visualization of a million different parts of me strewn about the house, me rushing to find them all and plug them in in just the right way before some invisible timer went off, at which point I’d have to walk out my door and face the world, as if the only way I’d survive it is if I put all the right pieces in all the right places in the nick of time. It’s no wonder it’s so easy to feel like we’re constantly in need of fixing.
I know there are more harmful ways to talk about appearance than others, of course. Take the phrase “I feel fat,” for example, something that takes a physical descriptor that would apply to more of us in this country than it wouldn’t, and instantly equates it to negative, ugly feelings — laziness, discomfort, insecurity. To ugliness itself. I can think of few other examples that better illustrate how the way we talk about appearance has directly impacted implicit and explicit biases within our society.
But again, changing how we talk about things is hard. I think about this stuff all the time, and I’m glad I do, but I still fall into old habits, still follow the rabbit hole all the way down until I’ve convinced myself that maybe none of it matters. Every time I do, though, I recall the moments I still think about when someone commented on my body and I obsessed over it for weeks or months or years. The first time it happened, I was maybe 15 and I can still remember exactly where I was sitting, what I was doing. I can still remember what happened when I gained the weight back and wondered if they noticed that, too. This is what I think about when I know people want the praise, that explicit validation that they look different, that they look good, that they look better. That they’ve put themselves together in just the right way, a perfect balance that pleases both themselves and the rest of the world, never knowing which part is more important. That’s me, too. But I keep digging in my heels and trying to do something different, anyway, because I’m curious. I’m curious about what it looks like if I stop trying to put myself together, stop looking for all the parts of me strewn across the house and figure out what I’m left with without them. Maybe it’s not so smooth anymore. Maybe it’s less clean lines and proportional curves and instead, something a little less uniform. Maybe it’s pricklier or angrier or messier. But maybe it’s more interesting, too. Maybe there’s that to discover still.
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