Pulling up my stretchy pants I bought from Old Navy years ago (you know, the kind with the thick waistband that nearly covers your belly button, but always rolls back down if you bend over too far), and I watch my stomach get caught on the waistband.
A muffin top that sends me criticizing everything about my body.
Wow, maybe I should stop eating so many snacks.
How much weight have I put on eating more carbs lately?
Gross.
Christ, look at my thighs. Why are they so fat?
Ugh, cottage cheese ass.
Rather than simply stopping, which is hard to do as I stare down, around, and across all my insecurities, I try to rephrase what I just said to be neutral.
I’m not at a point where I can say something positive about the way I look. I can only make neutral statements.
This morning, when I pulled up my pants and caught my stomach on the waistband, my first thought was, “ugh, I’m such a fatass.” I realized I was being an asshole to myself and rephrased it to, “You have a body. You have a stomach. You have an ass.”
Did it make me feel better? Fuck no. But did it get me to stop saying mean things about the extra pudge around my waist? Also, fuck no, but it did give me a brief respite from the criticism.
Honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever felt good in my body. I’ve always found things to hate.
The number one thing I hate and have always hated, are the moles on my face. I’ve never been able to look in a mirror and think, “Wow, Jessica. You look beautiful today.” The closest I’ve gotten to is, “I don’t look too bad today, “ or “I guess I look okay.”
Is it sad? Maybe.
This insecurity stems all the way back to fourth grade. A boy I had a crush on watched Austin Powers and decided it’d be funny to yell, “Moley! Moley! Moley!” at the top of his lungs to me in front of the rest of the kids going to school. Do you remember that movie? The guy was an “actual” mole with a giant mole on his face.
And people couldn’t wait to yell that at me after the movie came out.
I was once a bully in first grade (to fit in, I guess?), so I knew that if I showed that it bothered me, my soon-to-be-ex-crush and the other kids would keep doing it.
So, I did what any 10-year old would do: I acted like it didn’t bother. I walked away, chin held high, and probably said something like, “You’re dumb.”
Before the Austin Powers movie, I never put much thought into the moles on my face. I mean, I was 10. I think I was too busy riding bikes, writing poems, and being a kid.
My mom always told me how cute she thought they made me look. Other times, she used the word, “unique.” I never felt better being called “unique.” It was the “unique” kids who were picked on. Besides, moms are supposed to love everything about you, even the numerous moles on your little-kid cheeks.
And then in 7th grade, another boy wrote me a note that said the moles on my face looked like chocolate chips and that he wanted to lick them off. I was less offended and more confused over that one.
Word got around the “blue lockers” he wanted to lick my face.
“Did you hear that Luke says he wants to lick the moles on your face?”
“He said they look like chocolate chips.”
“Are you going to let him?”
I didn’t want a 13-year old licking my face. I never wrote him back.
All you wanted to do in 7th grade (and for really, all of my middle and high school years) was to fit in. I didn’t want to get made fun of. I sure as hell didn’t want to bring attention to my mole face.
I assumed my face was like a car crash, people couldn’t help but gawk over the “Orion’s belt” that was my face (another good insult thrown my way). I’d stare at other people’s faces to find moles, hoping they’d be in the same predicament as me and maybe they’d teach me how to deal with it.
When someone stared at me long enough, I thought they were judging my mole face. Thinking, “ew, what a freak.”
Finally, I told my parents I wanted them cut-the-fuck-off. After pleas and begging and crying, they agreed to take me to a dermatologist to see what they’d say. The doctor agreed to remove a mole somewhere off my body to see how my skin healed before carving away at my face.
I was so excited about the possibility of being mole-less. Like, maybe I’d finally like what I saw in the mirror, people wouldn’t stare at me, and by golly, I wouldn’t feel like the dude in Austin Powers.
The doctor did two different procedures to see how my skin reacted to both. One was a “cookie-cutter” method. It looked like a long cylindrical cookie cutter. This one was for the flatter moles where he’d have to three-hole-punch it out of my skin. The other method shaved off the top of the mole. He saved this for the moles that protruded out more.
And if you know how I look now, you’ll also assume how well my skin healed.
I waited for weeks, checking the healing any time I could take off my shirt in front of the mirror to peek at my back. The “cookie-cutter” procedure he performed on a “flatter” mole, much like the ones on my face, healed into an off-white, about-to-explode star. I used scar cream and massaged it, but it remained a noticeable star scar.
The other mole, the protruder, healed like a freckle, but not, like, a cute freckle or a “beauty mark.” It was clearly the offspring of a once-removed mole. And by choosing this method, I would have had 15 not-quite-a-mole moles on my face.
The dermatologist said the way they healed was how it’d look on my face.
I was shattered. I wasn’t going to choose to pay to make my face look worse than it already did.
Unless I could find tens of thousands of dollars for plastic surgery, this operation would never happen. And it didn’t. Obv.
It’s one of those things I’ve had to learn to just deal with. When I look in the mirror, the moles are neither good nor bad (okay, they’re more bad than good).
They’re a permanent feature on my face that I deal with and try to ignore. Just like I ignore the pain in my knees when I first get out of bed, or the baby crying next door when I’m trying to work, or the number of other things in life that we just have to deal with and choose to consciously look the other way because we can’t do anything about it.
Sure, I make sure they aren’t changing color or shapes. I make sure there aren’t crazy hairs sprouting out of them like my grandma always had, and I go about my day.
We all have something we don’t like about ourselves.
And look, we can all work to try to “love” that part, or we can just be neutral toward it. Like Switzerland. Choose neutrality. At least that’s not waging a war like nitpicking and criticizing and ridiculing does, as if it’s some kind of arms race to destroy our self-esteem the fastest.
We don’t have to love those parts to understand and appreciate the nature of it all. Nature’s imperfect. We don’t judge a tree by its speckled bark or how big or small its roots are. It’s just a tree. And we’re just bodies with a face.
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