When do you get to Stop Hating Yourself?

On bodies, mothers, and female artists

When in Kansas, we saw my grandmother on my mom’s side. She looked at me, standing there in a dress and said “you’re getting some hips.” She and her mother (RIP Emma) have said this to me every few years or so but every time I flinched.

I started restricting my diet when I was eleven. I had an iPod Touch and downloaded my fitness pal for the first time. A year later, my ballet mistress would tell me to stop eating bread after 11 a.m. and to consume mostly steamed proteins and vegetables. While prepping for Miss Teen USA, I was given this trainer who had me eat two scoops of protein powder with water and a single piece of toast for every meal. I dropped him after about a month and my Mother took over as my trainer.

Diet culture is not new (even though it sort of is in the grand scheme of things). We all had eating disorders, we all have them, we all are trying to enter a new age of acceptance of humanness and flesh while looking at mixed messages in media.

But this isn’t an eating disorder think piece because I feel like we could get so much deeper with this subject. I started seeing an actually good therapist at twenty-one. I knew it was time when I could not go to a restaurant without looking at the menu online beforehand, and not in a fun way. My ex tried to spring a surprise Chic Fil A trip on me once. I cried in the drive-thru.

My therapist asked a lot of questions. Helped me get down to the root of it. I was so afraid of gaining any weight because I was afraid that people would treat me differently. I was afraid they wouldn’t be nice and that I would somehow be less worthy of something. Two years of therapy with her and Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia helped me get over this (sort of), but over the past few years I’ve realized that this framework of thinking applies to a lot of stuff.

In My Mother, Myself by Nancy Friday (which I’m at the end of), she talks about stuff I’ve been screaming on this blog for a year now. Womanhood is often defined in reference to something else. To husband to boyfriend. To someone else’s desire. We are conditioned from such a young age to contort ourselves into something someone else wants us to be.

In Reflecting Men at Twice their Natural Size — which I caused an absolute price surge on with one TikTok last year (but you can find it online somewhere) — Cline and Spender talk about how women enforce this sort of stuff with other women too. We uphold the exact structures we want to rid ourselves of, most often and most viscerally through Mother-Daughter relationships. They’re complicated. It’s complicated. You give birth to someone. They change the very nature of your existence. You are now Mother and you must keep this thing alive and pass on your hopes dreams fears faults and so on so forth. I love the way

Rachel Yoder

writes about this in her book Nightbitch. I was watching Autumn Sonata with my father and a little bit tonight by myself and I think it summarizes the whole bit so well.

Mother and daughter are afraid to reject, to annihilate one another. Daughter is allowed to rage at Mother eventually in lieu of separation because separation is scary. Mother is not allowed to be angry with Daughter because there is too much guilt involved.

When you think about a beauty standard and your relationship to your own body, the people who have enforced it clearly and verbally have probably often been women, no? A ballet teacher? A pageant “sister”? A friend? A mother? A self? Sure, desire is a measurable way of how you are or are not measuring up to some standard, but a lot of the time, women give other women the rules and enforce them as well.

I think Autumn Sonata does a clear job of showing why so many female artists (including yours truly) are terrified of becoming mothers. Martha Graham opted out. Leonor Fini. I’m sure there are more. Being a mother takes so much selflessness, so much self-awareness, so much self-control. Being an artist takes so much selfishness. Perpetual loss of control.

For example, I’ve decided to finish my book this year. I’ve been flirting with half of a manuscript for about a year and I think God is telling me that it’s time to finish. I’m going to try to document the process, but even in the last week or so of consistent work on it, I’ve noticed myself becoming less present with the people I love. I notice myself canceling dates. Choosing silence when I shouldn’t. Ignoring texts from friends. It’s like I’m already the Mother in the film and I’m asking them to run along so I can have some quiet, and to shut the door on their way out.

Can you have both? Should you try? One thing that I do admire deeply about female artists is that they demand the respect. They give themselves to something that is not the desire of or relationship to someone or something else. Perhaps they lose themselves in something enough to forget the social conditioning of women to hate themselves. Perhaps they lose themselves in something enough to forget the sense of a self at all.

There’s this one woo-woo concept called Frame Technique or something like that. It’s all about existing inside of your own frame. Orienting yourself inside of yourself.

I was thinking about that scene in Clueless where Cher calls Amber “a monet” because she’s a mess up close (who’s enforcing the rules here!!!). I love impressionists, but I don’t want to be a Monet. I don’t want to be a Dali or a Picasso. Or even a Van Gogh.

I want to be a Fini. I want to be scary and feminine and surreal and lurking and one hundred percent my own.

Fini was blind for a little as a child. She told her family she was going to paint and they didn’t believe her. Eventually, she could see, and then she started painting.

I do have hips. I’m human. Every woman in my family has hips, I haven’t needed to squat a day in my life. But the most violent thing about commenting on someone else in any way is the risk of alienating them from themselves. Giving them an apple and then pointing out that they're naked. How do you avoid this? Isolation?

Regardless, I’m my own person, with my own standards of living in my own mind. My own body and my own body of work.

I think the only way you get to stop hating yourself is to claim yourself in the first place. Start from there and see what happens.

• Sweet wonderful literati

  Bri
  just wrote How To Not Let People Treat You Like Shit. I recommend.

• I also have an essay in my head of why and how the humanities should claim respect and financial compensation back from the world. I have this novel that makes some points and then this one non-fiction book I read when I was 17 that changed my entire world that I’m about to re-read. That will come eventually, along with a Hot Literati announcement for the summer, but first, upgrade to a paid subscription.

• I love writing, but I don’t want to perpetually write for free. Think of it as patronage as I finish this novel. You are my Medici family thank u xo <3

hailo