My family tells me that I am always the last one to realize something about myself. My mother was the one who picked up the phone when I, collapsed in a patch of grass in Prospect Park, sobbed into the phone admitting that I needed help.
I know, she said.
Every Monday for three months, I sit on the edge of a brown nylon loveseat, sinking in enough that my knees buckle into themselves. I jam my hands, pressed together as if in prayer, between my thighs and hear my therapist ask versions of What Do You Want. I stare at my legs and see mirrored in this sandwich of denim-palm, palm-denim the exact pressure in my throat, like a stone lodged between the walls of my esophagus.
I don’t know.
They say that seeing is believing. I don’t see a path out of this moment because I need to see it to believe it. I’m starting to realize that if I don’t begin to really look at myself – believe – I might never find my way.
I learned pretty young that seeing isn’t so easy. My neighbor taught art lessons in her repurposed kitchen, so after school, my sister and I would walk over, lopsided from charcoal-crusted tote bags. Our first lesson featured a picture of a giant elephant, still streaky from inkjet printer.
Draw what you see, Ms. Ellis told us.
Peering over the kitchen island, lips puckered forward in concentration, I transferred the ballooned ear, the long trunked nose, and the delicate hairs onto paper. I peeked over at my sister, her elephant-shaped form also coming along nicely.
Let’s see how well you know an elephant.
We followed Ms. Ellis inquisitively to her adjacent bathroom and shimmied into what looked like a tiny police line-up. We were instructed to hold our drawings up to the mirror. What I saw reflected back both delighted and horrified me: a Picasso-ed monstrosity with cartoonishly large head, exaggerated ears, and oblong nose. As we snickered uncontrollably, our teacher explained to us what had happened.
The nose in my head wasn’t a nose as it existed in the world. It was the nose that I imagined, given all the noses I had seen, and what I thought was the nose-ness of a nose, which might not be nose-like at all. Turns out, sometimes believing could stop you from seeing. The work of drawing, Ms. Ellis told us, was to decipher shapes as they existed, resisting the default of placing a half-circle in the corner with lines and calling it the sun. The mirror gave us some distance, a distorted flip just strange enough to reveal the space between what we wanted to be true and what was actually real. Looking from her printed elephant to our patch-worked replicas, I thought of this third, complicating presence. Perhaps reality was something to be earned.
It’s funny that her antidote for distorted vision was a mirror, something iconic for showing you as you are. Perhaps that’s the trickery of icons, making things a little too easy. I wonder if there’s an age where you stop learning facsimiles as a fast-track to seeing the world, when you realize that all those standardizations did more harm than good. I feel like I’ll spend the rest of my life unlearning.
One time in middle school, my mom took me to Macy’s to try on some clothes. We used to paw through the rounds of sassy monkey tees and bedazzled low-rises to take a few treasures into the dressing rooms. Standing in front of the tri-fold mirror, it certainly did not feel like the harbinger of truth. As my hands nervously run up and down the sides of a nylon dress, I say the words every middle school girl has said, “God, I look so fat.” I slip my arms under the straps and shimmy out. When I’m safely wrapped in my own clothes, I unlock myself from the stall just as the neighboring one opens. An older blonde woman stands beside me and pushes her glasses atop her head to look me dead in the eyes.
“I don’t want to hear you say those things.”
There is distain in her voice as she shakes her head, and I feel myself shrink. To this day, I never said it out loud again because I remember the shame she made me feel. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. I guess I never thought about mine.
When did the worries of everyone else become my own? While that woman and I stood in adjacent stalls, looking at our respective mirror images, how did we come to feel the same proxy for beauty in there with us? And why, when we left disappointed, would we choose to blame each other?
I know that I care too much what other people think. I care too much about making myself loveable, which is perhaps another way of saying legible. I care that my hiatus from an artist’s life might make it seem like I wasn’t good enough. I care about making it seem like I don’t care about this. I’m chained to rubrics that might not have been mine to begin with but have long since been subsumed into my vision for success. I can’t get out of my own funhouse.
My therapist prescribed me with the practice of seeing. She told me that whenever I felt the stone in my throat calcifying – like my worries were wringing the air out of me – I was to lock eyes with each color of the rainbow. Red light. Orange scarf. Yellow flag. It was insultingly elementary. I was paying out-of-pocket rates to be told that the feeling of breathing out of a coffee straw could be solved with a simple mental coloring book. Of course, I resisted, claiming that doing so would just be a capital-d Distraction.
Distraction from what? she asked.
The first time I counted crimsons, I laughed out loud on Bleeker Street. Red. Orange. Yellow. By the time I got to purple, the rock had dislodged long enough for me to return to my body – notice my breath, slow my brain, trace the shape of my arms, legs, lungs. It’s okay. I’m okay. It was like Ms. Ellis holding my drawing up to the mirror, revealing to me that I had it all wrong, except this time, I was the mishandled artwork. Was I so concerned with being someone I thought I should be, that I avoided looking at myself? Standing on the cobbled streets, I’m left with the question: who am I when I’m not dotting lines to everyone else?
There are two instances in my life when I most potently felt those ties break, if only momentarily. The first was in college after I had won a grant to study with a famous flutist over the summer. The administrative office that distributed the award wanted to put out a press release and asked each of the winners to come take a headshot. I put on a cute navy polo with these adorably exaggerated buttons that I thought gave off the right balance between quirky and professional. The photographer, a slightly balding man with gentle eyes and a thick squared-off mustache, instructed me to tilt my head just so. I tamped my smile a little since my mother said it crinkled up my eyes too much, and I felt a flash wash over me. A week later, I got an email with the final shot.
It took me a second to register what I saw. Not only had the photographer smoothed my skin so that it was almost glowing (I have a combo-dry, sandy complexion with freckles), it looked like he had slanted my eyes, widened my smile, and chiseled my chin down. I asked politely in my email back if there was perhaps any photoshopping done, whether – and sorry if it’s too late! – they might send me the original.
Viewing the two versions side by side, I was confronted with the image of myself as someone thought I should be, so grossly mismatched with how I actually was. I felt erased. Maybe it was just a single click, but I saw in that doctored photo an affront to the unique curves of my mother’s eyes and my father’s jaw. I quickly emailed the photographer back and wrote, “Thanks, the original is great!” All I could think about was how that morning, I had run my fingers down my face wishing my skin was a bit smoother.
The second instance came at the end of my college years, on a flight back to Boston from a flute concert in DC. Squeezed into the aisle seat, with time to burn, I was intent on reviewing the concert’s footage. Balancing snaked cords from camera to computer to headphones on the flimsy tray-table, I apologized to the older woman sitting to my left with a sheepish smile.
Watching went as it always did. A few cringes at mistakes, pride at moments well done, and mental notes for next time. As the first half ended, I realized that I never asked the stage manager to pause the recording during intermission. The camera kept rolling through the rustle of coats and programs drifting to the floor. As blurred forms moved across the screen, I recognize a crowd of young Asian girls. I smiled remembering them lining up after the show, one by one asking for a photo and detailing for me their musical aspirations. In the video, they are encircling their teacher, an older brunette woman, and teetering with chatter. I watch as the instructor gathers them closer, audibly lowers her voice so that their heads lean in. I hear her say,
“You know, she probably only got into Harvard because she plays the flute.”
I’m not sure if the woman to my left heard my breath shudder. If she also felt like the plane had dropped a hundred feet. I wonder if she had ever felt like she would spend her entire life filling a hole carved out of her.
I watch as the girls shrug off the comment. One asks if the teacher would help her with her college applications next year. Another looks off to the side. Within the small release of her narrow shoulders, I see an insidious seed planted. One that might soon sprout. Years later, when success wriggled between her fingers, would she be the one to water the weeds that would choke it out?
Looking back, what hurts most about these two instances is not even their perpetrators. It’s that what was said to me – what’s been done a thousand times in a thousand different ways – had long ago decoupled from anyone else. Their voices had become my own, and it was why, for the last three months, I couldn’t breathe. If I’m being completely honest, I probably have a pretty good idea of who I am and what I want. I’m just afraid to look. Because if I conjure my own image of happiness – without the distorations of who I’m supposed to be – what if I don’t like what I see? Who in the dressing room next door will there be to blame?
I know it’s time to rip these weeds out. Time to stop reacting to this image of myself inside of someone else. I need to look myself in the eyes and pledge to exist in positive space. Say what I wanted to say to those students. And be brave enough to believe it too.
There’s a funny story in my family about my sister. When she was maybe four or five, my grandparents had come from China to the states to visit. Learning of my sister’s recent obsession with Hello Kitty, my grandfather scoured the mainland stores. When he reunited with his enthusiastic granddaughter, he unveiled the toy. My sister screamed, “That’s not Hello Kitty!”
My grandfather, dismayed that all the store’s dolls seemed to have an incomplete face, had sewn on a black smile. I imagine him the night before the flight, pulling out his sewing kit, annoyed that a store could be so lazy to have forgotten a mouth. I imagine my sister, dreaming nightly of this iconic cat, seeing it bastardized with an errant line.
Yesterday, I find myself musing on this incident, and I look up, “Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth?” I learn that her designer purposefully eliminated this feature so that her fans might be able to project their own feelings. See in Hello Kitty a mirror of their own inner selves.
I never had a Hello Kitty phase, but I laugh thinking about how a mouthless cat might know herself better than me.