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The skin I'm in

January 02, 2005

Living in a body, any body, is an individual experience with an individual perspective.Living in my body is getting increasingly interesting.

I�ve always considered myself to be a very self aware person, though this was once something that worked against me. When I was younger, as I�ve written about before, I was a cutter and I had a pretty severe eating disorder. I still bear scars (faint, but I can see them and remember) on my arms from years of slicing my skin open with razors and watching the beads of blood smear on my forearms. My throat is still a little ragged from the years of throwing up whenever I ate more than 250 calories a day.

But something has happened to me over the past few years, and its something extraordinary and awesome. I�ve come to know my body in a new way, and a lot of this new knowledge has to do with smut, from two vantage points: viewer and (slowly but slowly) participant.

This weekend, I got out of New York and made a trek to Massachusetts to take my clothes off. Yes, I know, I can take my clothes of quite well here in New York but I was headed to work with a particular photographer and shoot an assload of photos (1000 of them, at final count).

We did some good stuff, variously involving me being naked near a waterfall (yes, I know its January), leopard print, being naked with candy, and my personal favorite, being naked with powertools.

I had these weird moments of self-awareness, feeling comfortable in my skin with a degree of awareness of what my skin looks like from the outside. And this looking out/looking in now actually feels like a realistic view, not one hazed by my self-hatred, which I seem to have shed almost entirely. From this vantage point, I understand better how my body works, I know what clothes flatter it, what poses work best, and how to tilt my hips just so that you can see my pierced hood from behind while I�ve got my hands against a wall.

This is an intimate knowledge of my body, one gained not only from practicing self love in the form of excessive masturbation, but actually through seeing my body more: in mirrors, in photographs, in videos. Am I seeing myself through everyone else�s eyes? No, there�s no way that can be accomplished. But I�m seeing myself through happy eyes, eyes that like me and the skin I�m in.

Posted by Dacia at January 2, 2005 06:13 PM