Zoé Saurais Empereur
Our self-image sticks to us more than ever. It sticks to our skin, to our look, to our brain. How many mirrors, cameras, screen returns, photographs bring us back to our own reflection?
For the youngest generations – those most plugged in – how much time do we spend looking at ourselves, happily deformed by a filter on Instagram or Snapchat?
How much time do we spend mulling over what we would be like once we’re smoothed out, slicked down, botoxed?
In this modern age when appearance is at its climax, how many people live with the uneasiness that comes from thinking they’re ugly; and how many barracudas around them take advantage of that?
The number of souls looking to be operated on for “cosmetic surgery” is ceaselessly democratizing, increasing. Young people show up to their appointments with a photo of them that has been retouched with a filter, to show how they might be able to look more like a model.
Advanced technology now allows for so-called temporary operations, which snuffs out the fears that an irreversible operation may go wrong.
Some suffer from narcissism (drowning in a reflection that they despise), matched with those who enrich themselves in their poor and potentially lucrative vision of reality.
What bothers me, beyond what the cosmetic surgery industry engenders on bodies and hearts, is the distress of those persuaded they have to pay and disguise themselves to become beauties, to get what they fairly deserve.
The idea of a sanitized, symmetric and universal beauty is the exact opposite of my relationship with beauty.
I can rely on my own experience. I wasn’t conscious of my own physique until the outside world verbally abused me to take a look at myself.
Insults
I was 13, with a face young and thick, and a nose that seemed as if it would not stop growing. My body was in places thin, in others chubby, if that’s even possible. The feminine curves that puberty is supposed to bring never arrived. I was large, cold, and shapeless.
That’s the age at which I first suffered humiliating insults, cruelly thrown my way in the middle of apathetic prepubescent mobs. At first, it was only at school, where a simple nickname was enough to condemn one. The funny students passed it on, until the nickname cooked me. I was done like a dead rat until graduation.
And then it started on the street. Walking along, I was peppered with comments. At first I could hardly believe it.
One night a group of guys advanced on me. One asked if he could touch the end of my nose. Another time, a car driver stopped and honked at me. With his window lowered he hurled insults and ridicule at me. One afternoon it was someone on the opposite sidewalk who mimed that his nose was growing, all the while staring at my pain, my discomfort. To my great joy I was accompanied during all of these incidents, since my stories would have been difficult to believe.
Within me, all of these incidents nurtured both unhappiness and anger. I hated the world and the gratuitousness of its meanness. There was also a hatred of my so-called ugliness, and hatred against my parents for having created me. At home I railed against my mother. I promised her that when I became an adult I would redo my face and become likeable, even loveable.
The more I accepted insults, the more my rapport with my image deteriorated. The greater my malaise with myself, the more I felt awful. My self-loathing became palpable. Venomous people caught hold of me like a ball in mid-flight. Somehow I was stoking the fires of their venom.
And then I began to change my way of thinking. Watching my tormentors and how they acted, it was they who became despicable. Was I going to have carpentry performed on my face, break the bone that determined my strength and my character just for these shameful people? My opinion shifted. I’d submit to an operation, yes, but it was my way of looking at things that would go under the knife.
Heroes
I started looking for people with the same facial characteristics as my own. French singer/songwriter Serge Gainsbourg was the first. But there was also the French actress Camille Cottin, and the American actress Sarah Jessica Parker, the Spanish actress Rossy De Palma, and the singer Barbara Streisand… They were all sources of inspiration, beauty icons who blew me away and consoled me. If I found in them an undeniable charm despite their oversized facial feature, why couldn’t I also be the same way?
I looked at myself in the mirror with kindness, at every angle, and repeated to myself that I too am attractive. Through repetition I believed in myself. I found myself beautiful, because I had chosen to be support myself. I chose to go forward with this physique that my soul had chosen to express itself through.
I couldn’t minimize my schoolyard bullying by burying it all in a pile of common experiences. Yes we all get tormented a little bit at school. But it went beyond the school days, the years when this sort of insult is normal and, dare I say it, tolerated. It was also people who didn’t know me, who had simply crossed my path somewhere, who hadn’t had the pleasure of seeing me humiliated at school. It was in the street, unpredictable and constant.
And one day, it just stopped.
From a day that I can’t precisely date, the insults ceased. The transition was so dramatic that it almost shocked me. Nothing had visibly changed on the outside. It was the same city, the same citizens, the same young woman, the same nose. I asked myself why for the longest time.
My conclusion seemed obvious. What had changed? I had changed, deep inside. Violence had forced me to repair what I had been inflicting upon myself without even knowing it. Unconsciously, I was drawing a reaction from others which I thought I deserved. Hurts, slurs… rejection.
Needing to assert myself and love myself, after repeating to myself over and over again that I was valid from birth and that I didn’t need to pay good money to an industry that would rejoice in my desolation, I let my inner light shine.
There are a lot of savages out there. Injured people for whom those who lack confidence are a source of catharsis. They avenge their own violence by punishing people who are sick like them, but exude their hurt in the way that they carry themselves. These sickos aren’t interested nor moved by the light. But those who are internally stable are indifferent to the comments of the world. There’s nothing left to torture inside of me. I’m no longer a good target.
Progress
The value of the progress that I’ve made is huge. It testifies to how the way in which we think of ourselves inside affects the outside. It’s proof that, in some ways, we build our own reality by feeding self-beliefs that can be benign or toxic.
I tell my story because I have had these negative thoughts, and a desire to redo everything; thoughts which evaporated when I reconnected to my inner self. I defend this process because it’s a road to love, love of self, love for what is, love against violence that we can invite ourselves to believe, to nourish us, to grow.
I defend this because beauty through diversity is transcendent and powerful. Plastic already pollutes our oceans, our islands, our rivers, and we shouldn’t have to endure it to express the sensitivity of our inner beauty. We shouldn’t have to break our bones, rearrange our ribs, and displace our organs. That whole process implies breakage and chemistry, insinuating that we aren’t enough. We are sufficient. Life puts things in their place with a subtlety that mankind isn’t up to equalling.
Loving ourselves is time-consuming and sometimes demanding, but it’s worth it.
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