will have done the right thing, because she begins saving herself.
But for now…
Jill stands in front of the bathroom mirror, turns to the right, places a hand on her stomach and stares. She turns to the left, places a hand on her stomach and stares. She turns forward, places a hand on her stomach and stares. At no time do her brown eyes rise to look at her face or her thinning, dark-brown, feathered hair. She does not look at her legs as her dress hangs to her ankles. The light pink dress sags on her shoulders and the thick white belt she cinched around her waist has two homemade punctures, so it will tighten farther than it was made to tighten. During this trip to the bathroom, she does not look at her arms even though she could because the sleeves cap her shoulders. She does not notice anything other than her waist. She does not notice me watching from my bedroom. I get up from my bed, stand in front of my mirror, turn to the side, place a hand on my six-year-old stomach and stare, because that’s what my aunt Jill did.
*
We don’t all wind up with eating disorders—I didn’t. But, we do almost all wind up picking ourselves apart and/or wishing we saw a different image reflected back from the mirror, myself included. We learn to disgust ourselves. We leave the safety of toddlerhood to find that our inadequacies are many and that the skin we once felt so comfortable in is foreign and unforgiving. We learn how the measurement of our hips is too large, or too small—not proportionate to the size of our waist, which is also the wrong size. We learn that a tiny hourglass shape is the shape of all shapes and somehow we will never quite attain it. We invest parts, if not all, of our self-worth into our ability or inability to force ourselves into that mold. And each time we fail, we come up with ways to justify ourselves in any fashion that does not involve the acknowledgement that we are fine just as we are.
We convince ourselves that the dress that is two sizes too small is ugly and we would not have worn it anyway. And yet, we order equipment from infomercials at three o’clock in the morning with the promise of rapid results, spend copious amounts of time evaluating and reading nutritional information, contemplate the safety risk of swallowing pills, find workout buddy after workout buddy, because we want to wear that ugly dress. We struggle to both renounce and become the image we see projected on the big screen, small screen, paper