Overcoming the Space of "Meh"

I don’t really write/talk a lot about body image, and the reasons for that are fairly boring.  First of all, I don’t think I have much to add to the discussion: I feel like we should all love our bodies, but I understand why we often can’t, and I’m reluctant to contribute to the guilt people feel for failing to cultivate a healthy body image.  This array of feelings makes me the world’s most indecisive cheerleader, “Love your body!  Unless you can’t, which is understandable because of the oppressive onslaught of images the media throws at us and the way we all judge and punish one another for failing to fit into unrealistic confines of ‘beauty.’ So if you can’t, that’s OK!  I wish you would, but…What?  Oh.  Sorry.” And someone then would take away my pom-poms and megaphone, and rightly so.  I don’t really know, in this hypothetical, who was foolish enough to give me a megaphone in the first place. 

The other related reason I don’t really discuss this very important issue is that I have no wisdom to pass on to those suffering from a bad body image.  If I can shamelessly generalize for a moment, people who talk effectively about body images are often people who either really hate or really love their bodies.  I fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of body love/hate, in an area that, in my psychological and sociological expertise, I will label “meh.” I don’t experience the perpetual self-loathing that becomes disease which so many people have bravely fought through, but I also spend exactly no time celebrating how I look.  I spend a lot of time actively not thinking about my appearance, but I don’t do this out of an evolved sense of humility, I do this because I want to avoid that perpetual dissatisfaction.

Don’t get me wrong, my body is a good companion.  It doesn’t get sick very often, and when it does it knows we still have to get things done, so it very seldom requires a lot of doting.  It has worked despite quite a few sprains, torn ligaments, and out of place joints, and only emits muffled complaints on rainy days and cold mornings.  It has learned that coffee is amazing, and, whatever “experts” say, this magical beverage actually has its own level on the food pyramid, and we should revere that.  So I appreciate my body on a functional level.  I’m healthy, and that’s fantastic.  I could totally teach a class on “Listening to Your Body Except When You Don’t Want To Because You Have Papers to Write Or Other Things That Need Done,” but I did not think I could write a blog post about “Loving Your Body.”

And yet here we are, so what happened (you may rightly ask, as you wait for me to get to a point)?  Well, this happened, and that happened, and it’s almost summer, so I keep running across articles telling me how to get a bikini-ready body, when all it takes to have a bikini-ready body is buying a bikini you like and putting it on your body.  In other words, my people, shit is going down, and I am not amused.

I’m not here to warn you about the scary, nefarious Media.  We know the media doesn’t particularly care if a size ten girl is sadly perusing a magazine where the models are so thin it’s like an inadvertent game of Where’s Waldo.  I think the people who point out the flaws in advertising do very important, necessary work, and I also think that we as individuals need to acknowledge that there’s more work to be done that only we can do for ourselves.  There have been many times where I have doggedly deconstructed a commercial’s harmful portrayals of the female or male body, and then spent the rest of my afternoon dodging mirrors because I was having a fat day.  Really, “meh” is not an empowering place to be, and as fun as tearing down the media is, we need to do more.

I’m going to sound like Oprah or maybe the Dalai Lama for a second, so bear with me: The work we need to do starts inside, and I believe it starts from a place of gratitude.  Maybe we do start by being grateful that our bodies actually work for us, that they fight off disease, and that if we ask them to run a marathon for us, they might be like, “Seriously? Why? Will this cut into our Game of Thrones time?” but ultimately agree as long as we provide cupcakes afterwards.  It’s unlikely we’ll ever live in a world where appearances don’t matter, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  There are a lot of beautiful people out there, waiting to be appreciated.  But, that’s sort of my point here: we are the beautiful people, and we need to stop waiting to be appreciated.  We can’t afford to wait any longer for the media to change or for standards of beauty to be adjusted.  We need to find a place for ourselves in the world we have now.

If we can be happy with the things our bodies do (maybe you have great eyesight, maybe you have horrible eyesight but that allowed you to get kickass glasses, maybe one time in second grade you were the only person to make it across the monkey bars without falling the humiliating four feet into the dirt), that could be the secret to cultivating a thoroughly positive body image.  For example, I trip very seldom for a person who is often thinking of potential revisions to papers while walking instead of paying attention to my surroundings.  Perhaps gratitude for this will help me eventually garner appreciation for my legs. 

But on a more sincere note, a few days ago I was playing Space Monster with my five-year-old friend Liam. At one point, Liam enthusiastically tackled me, and I was able to catch him and purposefully crumble to the ground with a surprising amount of grace and dramatic flair.  I’m really grateful to have a body that allows me to do that. 

I guess I’m just asking that we approach this really complicated issue from a simple, pragmatic standpoint.  Let’s not start from “How do I look?  How do I not look?”  Let’s instead start from “What can I do?” I think that’s a more powerful place to begin, and I believe that will make our journey to healthy body images more meaningful. 

Degrees of Separation

Most of us have had the experience of walking away from a conversation, knowing exactly what we should have said.  I, personally, am always about 300 times cleverer in those imaginative alternate realities than I am in real life.  We rehearse these conversations that we had somehow botched originally, struggling restlessly with the knowledge that if we would only have another chance at that exact same conversation, we’d be so devastatingly ready that redemption would surely be ours; and our would-be retractors, those unworthy victors of the original exchange, would realize just how awesome we truly are.  Usually, though, those conversations never happen again, and we’re left as the sole believers in our undiscovered wit.  Really, hindsight and too much free time is a tough combination for everyone.

What’s worse, though, is when those conversations actually do recur, and you never manage to cultivate a comeback. 

As a graduate student studying English Literature, I get asked the same question over and over again (sing it with me fellow liberal arts students): What are you going to do with that?

And, to a point, it’s such a fair question.  Genuine curiosity doesn’t offend me.  It’s the tone, it’s the follow-up questions, it’s the look of distrust and suspicion, as though I’m going to prowl the town with Derridean flair and start systematically dismantling street signs because there is no way they can ever truly represent the signified. (I’ve taken a lot of theory this year)

People don’t really ask me what I want to do with my degree, they ask me why I’m still pursuing an education, and there are a few thoughts implicit -and sometimes explicit- in this inquiry:

Why are you shirking your responsibility to be useful in society?  What are you afraid of in the “real world”?  Why are you wasting your time/money/ heretofore undiscovered musical talent and/or modeling potential?  OK, no one ever asks me about the last one, but I won’t pretend to know for sure that’s not what some people are wondering.

And I never know what to say.  I always smile politely, reply with something benign and meaningless, then toy with saying, “You are not worth another word, else I’d call you knave,” but quoting Shakespeare at people in this situation seems sort of counterproductive.

However, I recently finished my first year of graduate school, and I’ve been pushing myself to really explore the symbiotic relationship between Academia and small town life.  I think even if a foray into Foucault wouldn’t interest a lot of people who were not sitting through a theory class (and, to be fair, a lot of people who are sitting in a theory class), there are still a few things I’ve learned from my first year as a graduate student that transfer to life outside of Academia.

Work while confused.  Try to work through your confusion, and, if you can’t, learn to use your confusion.

This is where I admit that I totally understand why people think literary theory is ridiculous.  Sometimes you read sentences that are half a page long.  People make up the craziest words, and you’re just supposed to go along with it.  And then you have the theorists who tell you that words don’t really provide stable meaning anyway, so good luck ever knowing what anyone is talking about.  I spent about 50% of my time confused this year, and there was many a moment when I considered throwing text books across the room, but, alas, they were generally too heavy. 

The secret to making it past those moments of frustration is, perhaps, just accepting them.  Yeah, someone’s making something up right now, and, OK, this person could probably make an effort to be clearer, but maybe something this person is saying could add to your life.  You could actually walk away being more than you were before you started participating in this exchange (because, never doubt, it is an exchange). And if, at the end of the sharing you’re still confused, look at what’s confusing you and make sure that you communicate your own ideas in a more efficient manner than what you just witnessed.  It’s OK to not understand.  It’s never OK to shut down because you don’t understand.

Be around people who get you, and also be around people who don’t.

I first really clicked with one of my friends in the program because we’d both earned a B on the same, minor essay, and were disproportionately angst-ridden about it. Even though we ended up having more in common than our unrealistic academic standards, I still get a lot of comfort from having a person around who knows where I’m coming from when I scowl at a 19/20, because I really was aiming for that 100%.

I also have a few friends in the program who will unabashedly tell me to chill the hell out and watch a movie or get a drink.

In life, you need people who will reinforce your drive and understand your slightly neurotic tendencies – you need those people who will assure you that you aren’t crazy.  You also need those people who will tell you that you are definitely crazy.

You do not need to prove that you are the smartest person in the room.

Grad school is very competitive, and even though our program is not as cutthroat as others, there was still occasionally the sort of tension that derives from two or more people heatedly debating an irrelevant point in order to see who would prove themselves Smartest Person Sitting in an Uncomfortable Desk. I’m not sure what you get for winning this award, but if the prize was cookies, I really regret not participating. Next time.

Anyway, really, when we’re so concerned with showing off our intelligence, we tend to tear other people down instead of trying to discern how to add to the conversation before us.  And, you know, sometimes the best way to add to a conversation is to just stay silent.

It’s great to know what you want to do in five years.  It’s necessary to know what you have to do to get through the week.

Things get busy in graduate school.  Things actually get so busy that you start to long for the days when you thought you were busy as an undergraduate.  Adding to the atmosphere of preoccupation (that smells slightly of fear and coffee) is the fact that there’s basically always something you could be doing – another project that needs completing, a paper that needs revising, etc.  Believe me when I say that to-do lists are helpful, but also rather frightening things.  It’s easy to be in the middle of one project, and then accidentally start to think of all of the other projects you may never get to because of old age. 

Despite what you may have surmised based on stories of adrenaline-fueled individuals lifting cars off of children, panic is not conducive to an effective working environment, at least not long-term.  As much as you can, focus on one task at a time, if for no other reason than you will actually experience joy when you finish one thing, instead of anxious dread because you thought you were on a journey to Accomplishment, but you’re really on a treadmill with a carrot dangling in front of you.  And you don’t even know that you particularly like carrots.

Unapologetically spend time doing what you love.

OK, so, after all of that, I still don’t know what to say to people who don’t get my degree, but I do know that my first year as a graduate student has taught me that I don’t need to apologize for the joy and sense of purpose I get from being a part of Academia. 

I truly believe that the world is a better place when we’re doing what we love, if for no other reason than we’re happier. 

As for what it means when I’m saying “better” and “happier,” and who I’m actually talking about when I say “we,” well…Those are questions for some literature students. See how much you need us?