Exoskeleton

I’ve spent too many years, mostly in the half of my life spent at work, sitting with my legs crossed, and some of the many marks on them now attest to that. I hate them about as much as I hate all the other myriad marks on my problematic skin, and yet entering my thirties I am coming to accept that they will go nowhere, no matter how much I hate them, and I must simply do my best to — at worst — ignore or not see them, and — at best — learn to love them. I don’t love much about how I look, so this is a large task to ask of myself, but it would be irresponsible of me not to ask it, simply because it is unpleasant and difficult.

Summer is almost here; the time of year in which I can indulge most often in lovely walks around my neighborhood and my city, but in which I cover the least amount of skin, thanks to just about the best weather in the world, and this always presents a conundrum. I want to walk up the hill to the park near me that overlooks the city I love, I want to lie on the beach and swim in the ocean that I once took to like a fish; I want to stretch my long legs out in the sun, the grass, the water. I want to do these things unselfconsciously. I want to do these things without the back of my mind whispering to me — sometimes yelling — how much I hate the skin I inhabit. I want to not care. I want to be free of the vision of myself that is ugly, flawed, marked, imperfect. I want to ghost through the water and the air as freely as I did when I was young, before these marks came to me, before I realized, desperately and angrily and painfully, they would never leave. I want to believe that those who say I am beautiful just as I am are not keeping the exceptions to that beauty to themselves out of misguided kindness, that they mean what they say, that I am beautiful as I appear now, and not as I wish to. I want to no longer feel aching envy in my chest when I walk behind all those beautiful girls with their flawless skin who have no idea how lucky they are to not have to think of it at all. I want to walk and sit and be, and to like what I see when I look down and observe myself, which — as the late John Berger once so eloquently described it — all women must do, in some way, every moment of our lives. I wish I knew how. But summer is almost here; it will arrive whether I am ready for it or not.

It is a surprisingly late week of cold weather at the moment. It’s both a reprieve in that I can hide behind extra layers for another week, at most two or three, but it will end, of course. I am working on not seeing what is there, mapped on my skin, which no one has been able to explain the presence of, nor fully heal or erase. I am working on pretending no one else sees it. Eventually I hope I will no longer consider these marks a burdensome, ugly thing to carry; that they will simply be there, and I will no longer care.

Tattoos, in my life, have served as expression, reminders, declarations, and challenges to myself. When I think of them, all of which I have chosen very carefully, I see my body as a canvas. I’m trying to focus more on that, and less on the rest.

“Tugging at the darkness, word upon word…”

“I am beautiful/ Molding my own world/ The old me is behind/ I will march ahead anew.”