Skin Deep

Dear Reader

It’s been a while hasn’t it? And, as one says in a tiresome amount of emails, I hope this finds you well. 

I know I said that I was retiring the Blog but I’ve decided to start posting again - lucky you!

 At the end of this year I’ll be turning fifty. Yes, I’m sorry to disillusion you, as you thought that I was thirty seven, but it’s all too true. 50 - a big round number. And, like many landmark ages, it’s making me take stock. I’ve had a bit of a breakthrough about something recently and I thought I’d share the love.

It seems appropriate to talk about this because at the age of fifty, many women are going to be preoccupied with their appearance. This might seem like an irrelevant detour, as it’s not about ageing or wrinkles, but it’s something that it’s taken me a whole lifetime to come to terms with.

I’ve found this enormously difficult to talk about and I didn’t think I’d ever write about it but actually, like ripping off a plaster, it’s probably best to get it out into the air. When you find out what it is, you’ll probably think - eh - is that all?

I was born with a squint, otherwise known as a lazy eye. It was operated on when I was a baby, I’m not sure exactly how old I was. The operation hadn’t completely fixed things and I used to have to go to a clinic with a kind lady with short grey hair, who made me do slightly odd things like ‘put the lion in the cage’, while looking into a machine. I also had to read pages of terribly boring text, with a patch over one eye. Even if I hadn’t attended this clinic, I would have known that I still had the squint as the kind children at school were more than happy to alert me to it. One of the things I’d been told was that there were no baby pictures of me, because of the squint. The person saying this had good intentions but the message I received (and remember that all communication is about decoding and applying our own meaning to things) was that I was ugly and deeply flawed. I grew to dread seeing pictures of myself.

Now, in the great scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. I wasn’t beaten, starved or locked in a basement, and I didn’t have a disability. But in terms of my psyche, it had a great effect.  I would fantasise about losing weight and somehow, I didn’t know how, having the squint fixed. I was very taken with the Ugly Duckling/Return to Eden fantasy, where all the woman had to do was get mauled by a crocodile, after her husband had tried to kill her, then have transformative plastic surgery and reinvent herself as a model. Seemed reasonable enough.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085079/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

Often, when I went for an eye test, the optician would point out the squint, as if they’d made a rare discovery and I hadn’t noticed it myself! It wasn’t until I had kids that I realised that there might be something I could do about it. A midwife who visited after I had my second child, mentioned that they used Botox nowadays, to correct squints. She brought this up because I told her that I was paranoid about passing the affliction on to my children. Long story short, the doctor referred me to the eye unit at the hospital. They did try the botox thing (very unpleasant) but it wasn't effective, so they decided to operate instead. At the age of forty I had the operation to correct the squint. The surgeon said he was very happy with how it had went but that the ‘brain was very stubborn’, which I took to mean that my stubborn, ornery brain would decide to sabotage me and the squint would return. (between the lazy eye and the stubborn brain I was on a bit of a losing streak) I also lost a lot of weight. So my childhood fantasy had come true - was I happy? Kind of but I also started to focus on the lines on my forehead.

A kind of happy ending, right? Well, last year I went to the doctor about some digestive problems I was suffering from. A G.P I’d never seen before said to me; “I know this is nothing to do with it (the digestive issues) but is that a new squint? Because if it is, that can be a sign of a brain tumour.” 

I was shocked and dismayed. All sorts of thoughts shot around - just how bad did the squint look? I could tell myself, from photos and the mirror, that my stubborn brain had chosen to reinstate it but didn't think it was wildly pronounced. But also, although I knew that it wasn’t a new squint, of course I knew that, what if I did have a fucking brain tumour!

I told the optician at my most recent eye test about this interaction with the G.P. She tutted and said that there would be other signs of a brain tumour, before the squint became a signifier. She referred me back to the hospital.

I waited several months for the appointment and recently spent a few hours at the Royal Eye Unit, at my local hospital. I saw two lovely women - one of whom took extensive measurements and gave me a test to see whether I could see things in 3D. The second person I saw was the consultant. They both told me that the squint didn’t measure that badly and certainly not enough to justify further surgery - which might make the situation worse. Because I don’t have double vision and can (sort of, sometimes) see things in 3D, it’s not really a problem. The consultant then conducted a few strange tests, including pushing against her hand with my shoulder and said; “There are no signs of a brain tumour.” 

I could have kissed her.

I came away from the hospital feeling massively alleviated. I was worried about wasting precious NHS resources but they didn’t treat me like a time waster. 

The thing is, my eyes will never look perfect (and I’ll probably feel happier talking to people when I’m wearing sunglasses) and the squint will never be totally fixed but that’s O.K. As someone who has tried to embrace body positivity I should have come to this conclusion a lot sooner but it was deeply ingrained. It’s O.K not to look perfect. My eyes are not perfectly aligned, my feet are slightly different sizes and one of my breasts is bigger than the other! So it goes. 

Thanks for reading, Babe! x

Swimming and the Body

One of the things that I love about swimming, particularly swimming in the sea, is that it is an activity which is not so much ‘how do I look doing this?’ as ‘Oh, I love this!’  If you’re someone who carries around a yoke of (probably mildly irrational) self consciousness with you, this is a very big deal. Not always imagining that constant, critical audience; ready to jeer at your every move. When swimming somewhere that’s not too crowded, looking out at the horizon, I cease worrying about how I look and merely focus on how I feel.

I’ve tried to evangelise about this down the pub; about not worrying how something makes you look - how sweaty you become or what it does to your hair, I’m sure I’ve sounded tiresomely bogus but I’m just trying to spread the good news. Swimming makes me feel marvellous; at one with the world and more at peace with myself, it could do the same for you! 

Marazion Beach

From a young age I waged war against my body; I cruelly seized bits of it between my fingers and wished it away, I pinched it and hurt it. I starved and berated it, ignored it and tried to pretend it wasn’t there and still it served me as all of our bodies do. My body served me well - carrying me around, healing wounds and nurturing the human beings who grew within it. Why are we taught to hate our bodies so much? To try and mould them into some kind of impossible faux Platonic ideal, when the goalposts keep moving anyway? When I was young the ‘fashionable’ body shape for women was a flat chested, half starved ‘waif’, at this moment it seems to be a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit, hourglass figure.
I read somewhere that wanting to lose weight was very rarely about wanting to be thinner, it was about being acceptable to other people. And that is probably true of anything we want to change about our appearance - the wish to be acceptable to others - that invisible audience again.  At the heart of this is wanting to be lovable. 

I recently entered a micro story competition, the challenge was to write a 100 word story based on a picture. The picture was of a lighthouse, with the sun setting on the sea. It was a peaceful image filled with soothing colours. The sea was calm and still. I tried to banish the prosaic reality of the function of a lighthouse being to warn sailors away from the rocky shore and write about swimming instead! The image reminded me of an evening swim I’d had at Marazion Beach in Cornwall, near St. Michael’s Mount. The water had been wonderfully cool and silky - not bracingly cold and I’d managed to get to that happy state of Zen-like contentment. We were all sticky from our visit to a tropical garden that day and a swim was a perfect way to end the day. 

Light on the Water

Nowhere to park in the whole of Southport. Trapped like wasps in our hot car. We get to the rocky beach at five and unpeel ourselves from sticky clothes. I wrestle with the shame of my bulging outline. 

Picking over the painful pebbles we run into the sea. I plough through the oily shallows; gentle waves tugging playfully.  The kids splash behind me and I pretend we're a family of seals. 

Cool water. I send a silent prayer to my body - I’ve been so busy absorbing the disapproval of others that I’ve forgotten to appreciate the pleasure it can bring.

I didn’t win the competition - maybe mine’s not a story at all and more of a poem or a vignette but I enjoyed writing it and I’m grateful to it for reminding me of how much I love swimming!

First attempt at capturing the scene in pencils

The Critical Gaze

This is a post about body image. It’s been a lifelong preoccupation of mine and something that takes up far too much head-space for many women (and men). As such, should I even be writing about it? I think, yes, because I believe that you have to examine something and explore it, before you can move on. I'm not writing this from the standpoint of someone who is totally at peace with their body, far from it. I'm just trying to challenge the way in which I/we view our bodies.

I started last month with the determination to lose some weight and my reasons were twofold. 1) I think I must be one of the only people who has actually managed to put on weight AFTER Christmas, and I'm seeing a worrying slide into the ‘overweight’ category of the NHS BMI height/weight charts.  2) A family party is imminent and, as I keep quipping to my friends, ‘there are going to be all these judgemental old, women, looking at my arse!’ Of the two reasons for wanting to reduce in size,  the second one is rather unsound. (Plus, I realise it’s a bit mean describing the guests as a group of ‘judgemental old women').

Watch any decent teen movie and the message is clear: be yourself, don’t try and fit in with the group, discover who you true friends are and don’t latch onto that insecure group of bullies/bitches. (Unless you watch Grease - which seems to be giving you the opposite message - take up smoking to fit in with your peers and put on some tight, silky trousers!).

How easy, though, is it to be your own person, without worrying about what other people think? We are social animals, tribal beings. Are we able to disregard the (imagined) mutterings of the wider community?

I was struck, when I read Stephen Fry’s autobiography - More Fool Me, Michael Joseph, 2014, by the fact that whenever he talked about any of his creative projects, he always imagined a (hypothetical) hyper-critical, scathing review from Time Out magazine. This impacted on me because I often imagine a hectoring Greek chorus of censure and criticism accompanying anything I post on social media. It was strange reading that someone so successful could also be so insecure. Of course, Fry’s mental health issues have been well documented but I imagined (perhaps naively) that in his professional life, he’d be more confident. Maybe everyone does that - imagines a hostile and unkind response, to anything we've put any effort into. In this frightening age of the Twitter troll, perhaps this isn't such a paranoid notion. But the right thing to do would be to pay it no heed - right? Just carry on regardless.

Do we also imagine a critical, hostile audience judging us for the way we look, too?

I stumbled across this article from The Elephant Journal last year:

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2015/04/loving-our-bodies-in-the-face-of-fear/

The basic gist of the article is that we can’t control what other people think of us and that when we focus on our supposed flaws, we magnify them. If we get can them ‘fixed’, our insecurity simply moves on to another focus point (seen in people who are addicted to plastic surgery). What we really need to do is reach a level of self-acceptance.

We may have received a lot of criticism for our appearance when we were growing up but I’d be willing to bet that, as an adult, our harshest critic is ourselves. Just think about what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror - do you ever throw a barrage of abuse at your reflection?

We spend far too long worrying about what is ‘wrong’ with our bodies and not nearly enough thinking about all the positive things it does for us; recovering from illnesses, carrying babies, winning races, taking us along charity runs, taking us up the stairs!

Our bodies are so much more than how they look.

I wonder if all that sounds too abstract?

Around 5 years ago, before I had my first child, I suffered from an ectopic pregnancy. (A pregnancy that is not in the uterus. The large majority (95%) of ectopic pregnancies occur in the Fallopian tube.) We had been ‘trying for a baby’ for a year and the day I discovered that I was pregnant - with a very faint plus sign in the pregnancy test window, was the same day that I started bleeding, and it was discovered that it was an ectopic pregnancy. I was devastated, I grieved but I also felt a deep sense of guilt and shame. It was my fault, or, specifically, it was the fault of my defective body!

‘You must stop blaming yourself and your body for what has happened to you’ - One of the moderators from the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust told me, in response to one of my posts on their website. Easier said than done.

What usually happens with an ectopic pregnancy is that the fallopian tube bursts open, leading to excruciating pain and the woman having to have emergency surgery to remove the tube. My case was slightly different in that the pregnancy dispersed on its own and my hormone levels were closely monitored for a few weeks until they went down enough to indicate that the pregnancy had gone (this treatment is called 'expectant management'). I had to go to the hospital every two days to have a blood test and was told to call an ambulance if I suddenly suffered excruciating pain! I bled, heavily, all that time, it was a grim, painful and drawn-out process but what happened was that, eventually,  my body effectively healed itself. I wouldn't wish the experience on anyone but it did prompt a sea change in the way that I viewed my body. With the help of some therapy (yep, that again) I began to see my body, not as a faulty, unreliable (and grotesque) machine but rather as a highly efficient mechanism that, when things had gone wrong had saved my life (E.P can be very dangerous). It had successfully dealt with the unviable pregnancy on it’s own, without need of surgical or medical intervention and I felt grateful towards it. The only other time I had felt anything approaching this was when I was training for a charity run, years before. Look at my long, efficient legs, I’d thought, running away! (yes, I know that sounds a bit bizarre and narcissistic). I’d never felt like that before.

So, I just want to reiterate the need for us to focus on when our bodies served us well, and be less preoccupied by how they look. Yes, I wrote a blog post about losing weight:

http://msmuddles.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-weighty-issue-part-two-goal-weight.html

But I believe that before you can make any sort of major change in your life, you have to come from a place of happiness and acceptance. So, paradoxical as it may sound, if you want to reduce your weight, you have to approach it from a point of feeling kind of happy and accepting towards your body, rather than filled with loathing for it.

As I said, I'm not writing this from a pinnacle of Zen-like forbearance but I'm hoping to get there one day ;)

So, going back to those (hypothetical) judgemental, old women* that I spoke of earlier; perhaps, of the two motives for wanting to lose weight, it would be better to concentrate more on the desire to slide back into the ‘healthy’ section of the BMI chart than to appease the imaginary critics.

*I should also note that the 'judgmental old women', whilst being based on past experience, are actually a collective figment of my imagination and embody my own feelings of insecurity. Just as Stephen Fry's 'Time Out' critic was a projection of his own feelings of self doubt!