My character, “Amanda”. Photo by Audrey Hotchkiss

I have a problem with love. I don’t love myself as wholly as I love others. This makes me a good person perhaps, but also a monster.

The soft circles I’m made up of fight to be more angular, and lose unless the pressure of hurt, pain, something to be struggled against which is larger than me is applied, something to be reckoned with. My brain sees its fears in every reflection. These ocular chambers cannot be trusted, will not be denied myopic resolve, nor be trained to react differently to the light.

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When I am working on a farm my body shines and glows, taking on sinewy shape and golden bronze tone. My back muscles seize. I am damaged and incorrectly proportioned for this labor. Old injuries surface and stop me in my tracks, but my fingers, delving into rich brown life are in love. My brain is terse that I’m not jotting the musings of each moment down (hands filled with hoe and weeds), but my heart speaks the language of plants and sighs sweetly.

When I spend days and weeks writing, out of body, sitting stagnant in a chair that must reek of me by day’s end, my heart is satisfied that it has spoken. My brain gives itself high fives and winds down with comforting, less exhaustive endeavors. My body, left behind stiff and unused but for fingertips, aches and grows less responsive, ornery, sullen, and complaining.

When I work in an office I fight with people. Bare teeth. Rue the day I was born on this planet of unremarkable moments, and wish the insidious poison I taste in my mouth from biting my lip wasn’t blood, but strychnine. I learn a different truth: I have no tolerance.

So are the well worn rounds of my desire, pride, depression, and shame broken down by occupation. Am I a body person, a heart person, or a head person? It’s about gender and it’s not about gender. It’s about my search for truth when there’s no truth to be found.

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He raised me to the hospital’s bright florescent nova and did not proclaim my life a journey for me to discover. Instead my vulva, fresh from the womb of my Mother was labelled “specimen No. 1” and I was degraded for the first time in my blinking moment of an existence. Degraded not because I was assigned “girl”, and to be “Woman” one day, degraded because I was proclaimed fractured, un-whole, because I was set upon a path of lists and checkboxes (illustrated with many points of power and mystery, but still), proclaimed belonging to a path that was not my own.

No path of lists and checkboxes is holy.

Discovery of my body henceforth was defined by predetermined conditions printed in millions of books, on billboards, and writ loudly on boxes at the breakfast table. Instructions dripped from the lips of all who spoke my name. Expectations and projected pitfalls were branded into the minds of every human I met on this bit of spinning rock we call home. I was promised to another in that moment. I was told to rut deeper in the furrow of advertised femininity, chained to a sex and a story brought on by the glance of a man who had cut my Mother against her will minutes before. He had flashed his knife blade, slicing it through her pelvic floor to bring me out at a pace which pleased his pressing schedule and desire to sew a straighter line. His comfortable manly rut. All the rage in 1978. Have we changed?

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I remember little hearts springing from my eyes the first time I saw a spiked mohawk and rivets, piercings, and tattoos screaming, “I AM ME! FUCK YOUR LISTS AND EXPECTATIONS!” Still, it took me years and shored up courage to shave my own hair from its scalp. I learned the starkness of nowhere to hide from my newly unframed face. No shield by way of lengthy bangs and curtains of hair. Each expression, every fleeting thought and emotion laid naked in the open, recognizable and bare. I was undateable except for the boy with blue hair and tan skin who also loved mischief and disposing of lists.

Acting school isn’t a place to challenge beauty standards, only emotional norms. Our range should be invisible but for the tremble of a lip, a single tear, staunchly empowered vocals, and the lyrics of our limbs. Pretty at first glance always. No “risk” of individual expression will be tolerated in this industry of uncreative creatives. To be popular with casting agents, director’s couches, and audiences painted with an expectation of status quo was our aim.

The week I graduated I pierced my eyebrow, threading spikes and arrows through that fresh hole in my face. I reclaimed the bit of flesh above my right eye in an act of defiance, satiating a starved desire to be myself first, and the “neutral” instrument of a bourgeois patriarchal entertainment industry no longer.

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I am neither nor. I am both and all.
I am whole.
I am whole.
I am whole.

I whisper to myself in throes of depression and anxiety. I try to convince myself of worth, but when will I be paid a living wage for the labor of gathering “likes” while helping others see beauty where no one else cares to nurture or hold? I admire others far more than I enjoy myself, but I am stubborn and selfish and I journey on.

I like the way I feel until I don’t. I love the way I create until I tear my work apart. The cycle of brilliance and demolition is a rut I am lost deep within time and time again… Raised to the artificial light I was ticked off “female”. Lesser than. Nurturer. Worth/less without a mask of make-up and willingness to wear heels five days a week. I resent this lie which is absolutely not a lie. I plod too modestly along.

I am overqualified, under-qualified, and angry about the paths which may lead me out of debt and constant struggle, and I have no tolerance for them at all. I do not accept social graces as other than the controlling violence I know them to be.

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A girl, size zero, ate half her yogurt cup in acting class and cried that she was overweight and we attended her, talked it out, held her pain and soothed her edges. I was terrified to exist in the room that day, so many sizes larger than a zero myself, having a body with substance and strength. I cried in anger and angst about the hell this lifetime is. There would be no return to acting class innocence, knowing others’ perceptions of me must be monstrous indeed. I would never be flat enough, tall enough, straight enough, whatever it was I needed to be enough of to work my way out of debt in this, my beloved industry.

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I do not wish I was less educated, I wish I was less poor. I do not wish I was built differently, I wish the world celebrated humans with bodies. Everything hurts. I am a toothfull thing, dark and mushy in the light, and I do not know how else to be. I am writer and an artist, truth-teller with no fact-check available for my version of truth. I am sensitive and sad. I am at moments wildly excited and hopeful, as only a creative knowing the uplifting fervor of might-be-attainable dreaming will be. I am flawed (oh so flawed) but my flaws are not measured by diamond commercials and lipstick shades, in skirt sizes and shaving cream standards of shame. My flaws are wrapped up in the fact that I have a problem with love. I don’t love myself as wholly as I love others. This makes me a good person perhaps, but also a monster.

This writing takes time, research, and consideration. It is my art.
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