Beauty and the Beast

Unsurprisingly, this is a post on beauty; and Beauty and I have a rather strained relationship.

I can be beautiful, I know that - I can make myself so, I can pull myself together, I can focus my mind and I can seem that way to others, if I just focus enough, if I'm having a good day.

Beauty is an effort I make, a mask I put on, but it is not my natural state.

I feel like a monster underneath, hideous, inappropriate, crudely sensual in all its repulsive glory and glorious repulsiveness.

I feel that if I'm not careful, if I relaxed too much, that natural state would come through, would break its way out to the exterior.

I feel that sometimes, when I don't look into a mirror for a while, my features begin to shift without my constant scrutiny - the edges sharpened and the angles blunted, the brows protruding and the chin receding, the eyes sinking deep into their sockets - and then, when by chance I catch a glimpse of myself in a darkened window after nightfall, I look like a Gargoyle, I have turned into something dangerously close to what nature intended me to be.

It's in my body and my mind - the monster is inside, but it would also be outside if it got even the slightest chance.

My body seems to be straining, constantly, to transform itself into that monstrous form against my desperate and ever-more-exhausted attempts to restrain it.

My limbs, my fingers, my feet, seem straining constantly to develop in a crude and gangly fashion, to stand off at odd angles and curl up into themselves, my joints are straining to grow gnarly and repulsively swollen, my back is straining beyond belief to arch itself into a hunched and croony form.

My skin is straining constantly to break out into festering pustules and ulcerous pimples all over my body, to grow hair that will cover me whole, to hold on to any kind of filth and stain that might come its way.

My flesh is straining to expand, to break out in masses of fatty tissue obscuring the form of my skeletal frame underneath.

That would be me, I feel, if I wasn't careful, if I didn't take any pains to hide it - a monster, winged and horned, with huge gluttonous lips smacking in delight over a greasy, pimpled chin.

And every day I try to make believe, I bathe, I shower, I scrub, I shave, I run, I restrict, I clean, I push; I do my hair and I treat my skin, I cover with makeup any pimples or redness, I dress my body to hide the fat that is pushing to the surface, I push my body to its limit in order to burn it, I paint my lashes, adorn myself with jewelry and a false smile, I open my eyes wide and I purse my lips in an appealing fashion.

I do everything to hold onto the last vestiges of self-control, to become prim and proper and clean and neat and pretty, everything that society smiles upon and would wish a human being to be.

While in truth - I am meant to be a monster, I am fit to live in a cave and scare away small children with my unashamed hideousness; heck, I am probably fit to eat them.

I don't want to feel like this all the time, on the verge of breaking into ugliness befitting a creature of gruesome legend, of gluttony and hideousness meant to be cited in cautionary tales.

I don't want to go through the motions everyday, straining to make myself appear as if I had any business at all in the realm of beauty.

Still I do, because the alternative seems ever more terrible, and I am not ready yet to let the Beast win - despite the monstrosity that I feel underneath, I am not willing to give up on beauty.

Skinny Love: Natalie Portman and some stunned observations

It's incredible - I just can't do it.

I cannot do the ABC right now.

It is incredible because I used to be so good at this, at starving myself.

And now, apparently, I am not anymore.
Half a year of carelessness and unfortunate events was all it took.

What's so funny about it, is that "normal" people, people concerned with my health, would probably say I got better.
I used to be good at something that is considered "bad", considered unhealthy and disordered.

And now I am bad at that very same thing, that badunhealthydisordered thing, which must in turn me that I am - healthy.
With a BMI right in the lower-but-by-no-means-alarmingly-low half of the normal range, it must mean that I am happy, happyhealthynormal surely, in better order than before?

That's not what it feels like to me, though. I don't feel better, I don't feel "healed".

All that I feel is weakness, a failure of willpower is all that I see.
A failure of willpower is all that it is, to me and that never silent inner voice.

And I am not the happier for it, more carefree, quite the contrary - I am feeling So. Much. Worse. than I ever did when starving successfully.

Huh.
I'm trying to overcompensate with frequent and vigorous training for the time being, running and weightlifting twice a day until I have figured out who I am and how I feel and where I want to be.

In the meantime, I bring you another episode of Skinny Love:










Natalie Portman.

She's my ultimate ideal of beauty, I think. I could gaze at her stunning features for hours on end.

She's an outstanding actress, I love virtually every single movie I've seen her in (with the notable exceptions being A) those Star Wars I - III atrocities, they do rather fall into the category "guilty pleasures", and B) V for Vendetta, it was a bit of a disappointment as compared to the the original comic, but that was by no means anything to do with Portman's performance).

Her extraordinarily memorable performance in Léon remains unforgotten, of course...



(I love that movie to pieces, on the whole.)

... and many a great and entertaining movie followed, Closer, Garden State, Mars Attacks!, The Other Boleyn Girl and so on.

From what you can tell through interviews, through her commitment to various social causes, she seems like a wonderful human being on a personal level, too.

Also, she happens to be very skinny - tiny, elegant, graceful.

Yet, there is seldom to never any harping about her weight in any of the tabloids - other celebrities get the heat for being too skinny all the time.

Still, despite her being just as thin as other actresses (oh my gosh, look at those stunning claviculae - do want!) - despite her shoulders being as bony, her collarbones as protruding, her waist as narrow, her chest as flat and her arms as tiny - her thinness isn't subject to a lot of debate.

Which seems graceful too, in a way, as being skinny is very obviously not her only defining quality - there is more talk about her talent and her movies than her weight; she simply is skinny on top of that without ever raising a fuss about it.

Again with a quality I would so like to emulate.