there is a lot of stuff in my mind that wants to push itself out.. it's mostly uncomfortable, unappealing, sludgy stuff that i feel must be cleared out before i can feel 'free' enough to work on what i want to work on. i don't think it will ever go away, but i feel a need to see it in concrete form. i have already bored/irritated a lot of people with various parts of it in the past, and as i've written it all out it all seems so much less detailed and more moronic than it seems in my mind, it seems that i'm absolutely hopeless at trying to pin it all down, but i still feel a need to put it where i can see it, to the best of my ability, for now. possibly i will eventually experience all of it differently.
from the moment we're born, we are judged, tested, measured, observed in endless ways, and the reactions we perceive in others help to form us and our perceptions of ourselves and how we fit into the world.
what follows is a series of photos of my body all taken on the same day recently (including the photo above).. taken in different ways, in different lights. at first i had the idea i would entitle this diary entry 'body parts', and i wanted to chop my head out of all the photos. i was lying restless in bed when i had the irresistible urge to get up and work on this, and when i did, part of the issue was that i was too lazy to do anything with my hair, i didn't want to do makeup or anything, and i just wanted to do my body separately anyway. i pinned my hair up out of the way, and started photographing my body in different ways. as usual, i had only so much energy, and i took my energy as far as i could. in the last photo, my face is in the photo, but that was an accident, and in the end i decided to leave it in. i suppose that the conclusion could be that all the other photos are 'stolen' from somewhere else, or manipulated beyond recognition, and that only the 'fattest' picture is 'really' me. all i can say is that all of the photos are of my body, taken on the same day, and that i haven't attempted to alter my body itself, and that people can decide whether to believe me or not. i started off wanting to focus only on body parts, but the creative impulse is for me an uncontrollable thing, a thing lacking in direction or probably lacking in relevance to anyone (or is simply too boring for anyone) and i ended up wanting to ramble on about all sorts of things related to general appearance, not just my body.
when gk saw the above picture, his comment was that in real life, it looks like my stomach goes in more. i was glad he made this comment, because i thought that perhaps i was the only one who thought that, and that this was yet another case in which photos make me feel that my opinion of my appearance is inaccurate.. anyway, maybe the photo is closer to depicting stationary 'reality', while what gk and i have observed is an illusion created by motion. or something.
in the photos that follow, i am not attempting to say 'look how attractive i am', i am attempting to find a way to demonstrate how obsessed i am with my appearance, and how confused i feel about it. i could have chosen to focus more on flaws, but i think that one of the things i am attempting to do on my website is to find ways of looking at myself in which i have some small measure of attractiveness, even if i'm far from anyone's idea of ideal, and even though many of my photos would turn many people off. i realize that my website is somewhat pathetic.
what i have tried to do is to balance the scales somewhat. lots of people out there, mostly my family, have photos of me which i feel do not show any of the ways in which i am attractive. so many of them are far away, 'fuzzy', or photos in which i have no personality whatsoever, or photos in which only my flaws are apparent. i have always felt this was unfair.. it's something to do with how i haven't ever accomplished anything in life, it's something to do with feeling it's unfair i should look like a mousy, boring, unfocused, plain sort of person, feeling it is unfair that those photos should be all that's left behind when i die.. i've felt that there was so much more to me, in regards to my personality, and my looks, to my experience of life, things that most people maybe have never noticed or known about me. i will readily admit that i can see why i photograph often in boring or unappealing ways, but in my defense, i have seen things in the mirror that haven't been captured in photographs, attractive things, and i feel this need for fairness, a need to at least try to represent some of those things here on this website, to show more of the overall story rather than just accept that i'm unequivocally ugly, lay down and quietly die.
i had a beautiful mother. when people who knew her met me, i could see the disappointment or even sense repulsion or pity. 'you look like your father' is what i invariably heard. when i was born, my father's reaction was that i was the most hideous thing he'd ever seen, and that he couldn't believe that something so ugly could come from my mother and him. i think his reactions were loud, powerful, and that both my mother and i picked up on them. i think some of his reactions were related to his insecurities about his own looks. if i was ugly, it was his fault. but i think that i was hypersensitive in a sort of fatal way, and as i grew up, even though i seemed to instinctively sympathize with his insecurities (to the extent that i never seemed to be most attracted to males who were conventionally good-looking.. i always seemed to be more attracted to those who had insecurities of some sort about their appearance), i always found it difficult to look people in the face without very great effort.. i was always aware of my flaws. i learned the ways to make my particular features less grating, less annoying, to people. my particular features seemed to bring out stressed reactions in people, discomfort, and i found ways to relieve this stress, because it was unbearable for me to be a source of stress because i was ugly. it seemed to me to be a shameful thing for me to be ugly.
i think that my mother secretly wished she could have been an actress or model, or something similar. i think she was often told she could have been. she was a responsible mother, but i think she suffered greatly from depression, and that if she could have done things over, she would have chosen a different path. when she became pregnant, perhaps her dreams shifted to dreams for me, and when it became obvious i could never fulfill them, it was another secret blow, and added to the depression. when growing up, i remember having thoughts, wishing to be over 5' 8" (my father was tall.. i often wondered if she had had secret hopes her children would inherit her looks and his height), and wanting to be 'discovered'. at somewhere from 7-10 she gave me a little booklet that listed caloric values of foods, and that specified what my weight as an adult should be for my height. the values were much lower than what is currently considered medically ideal. i started my first diet at that time, eating something like 600-700 calories per day. it didn't last long.
we're all aware of the sorts of features that are most pleasing to look at, and the body types that are most ideal, although personal preferences do vary a lot. there are certain things that are photographed most often, and the eye has become more and more trained these days to spot these things. photographs, movies, videos.. we are more and more desensitized to average attractiveness, and even ideal attractiveness. it takes more all the time.
women are not insane to feel despair over their lack of idealness. self-consciousness about looks is not 'silly', nor should it be dismissed as irrational. with the bombardment of ideal images, men become desensitized to average attractiveness, and also get a mistaken idea about how many possible mates are out there for them to choose from, and about the attractiveness level of the potential mates for them, and feel less satisfied with the attractiveness of normal women. it may be that these men have no real chance of meeting fantasy women or making them part of their lives, but it will always remain a possibility that a more ideal woman could at any time take the place of the average woman in their lives, or in a man's mind at least be considered more attractive, wanted more. men can 'hope' for longer, even if their hopes are unrealistic. and hope is pretty much the basis of life. what i mean is.. if men's attractiveness to women is based mostly on success in life, men can still hope for much longer than women can. there is still scope for some feeble hope in men when they're well over 50, while age in women is the passion-killer, the hope-killer. a woman's time is limited, and there is nothing she can do. some women are strong, and deal with aging like warriors, but they know what the deal is, and they know that they've got to try, that they've got to maintain a positive attitude, that they've got to struggle to hold onto every possible shred of attractiveness, and focus on it and make it obvious, even if that means giving the impression that one is calm and not affected by all of this crap. a man has the possibility of being 'first' with a woman even without success, looks, youth, etc.. because the psychology and biological makeup and history of women is different.. women can become sentimentally attached to an imperfect specimen, when they've got the right opportunity, because it's in their biology to do so. whereas with men, and the need to spread seed everywhere, a man really just doesn't have as great a need or potential for ultimate commitment as a woman in the first place, and he has a lot more time to decide.
some people think they are above the usual programming. i thought i was. but when people pair up, it seems to have far less to do with shared ideals than with compatible backgrounds and life situations. usually couples have the same skin colour, similar level of education, similar religious ideas, the man is a bit older than the woman, the man is a bit taller than the woman, the man makes more money than the woman. they meet because of compatible life circumstances. it's like some heavy- duty computing goes on at unconscious levels and we all give out information unconsciously that turns out to be more essential than what we think our ideals are, and having compatible insecurities seems more important that having compatible ideals. like we have very little control at all. when something unconscious determines that someone is a good match for us, we overlook so much, we find ways of coping with so much that with careful deliberation we might never consciously choose. i'm just saying that we're all influenced by factors we're probably not consciously aware of even if we think we're not. over time, the patterns in our relationships emerge, and if we still don't see it, then we're blind.
i have heard so many men say that such and such a person, their mate, is a lovely person, smart, fun to be with, etc, but that she just doesn't do it for them sexually or in an ultimate romantic sense. part of it is probably just boredom, lack of challenge that comes with familiarity. they forget that they once were probably somewhat overwhelmed by their feelings. maybe they don't like their mate's body, maybe something about her appearance was never really what they were looking for, what they felt they were entitled to or deserved, what society teaches them they deserve. or for whatever reason she just doesn't make a man feel his specialness - and this could be because she is not genetically gifted enough in any sense to either help him achieve something that would make him feel he has fulfilled himself, or to inspire him in some way to help him claim what he secretly feels is his proper place in life.. and this usually only becomes clear after the spell of initial attraction has faded and lives have been linked in ways that are hard to unlink.
my personality is such that if i don't have the chance to come first, to be the ultimate mate, to be desired sexually as well as cherished in other ways, to be an object of obsession, i inevitably just want out. and i think it's possible i'm the 'type' that can only inspire a kind of mild, average level of attachment.