Standing Naked in the Field
Between my parents, my ethnic background, and my PCOS, I’m holistically genetically predispositioned to have a lot of body hair. My mom used to tell me that she and my dad would joke that their child would surely turn out to be a gorilla.
I was raised in the 90s and hit puberty in the early aughts. A tough time for a fat, hairy girl. My parents were super-fit-health-conscious types: my dad has been on the Atkins diet since it was in its beta version and still goes to the gym at 81 years old, and my mom was a former bodybuilder, disco queen, and print model. A tough time for a fat, hairy girl.
We are the products of our environments and I never felt like I fit in with my environment. This belief was reinforced over and over again through my schoolmates, media of all sorts, passing comments. But perhaps most impactful was how I saw my parents treating their own bodies. My dad would spend hours in the gym and always felt so far away. He would never indulge in a dessert claiming that he didn’t have the willpower to stop once he started. My mom would sit in front of her wall-sized mirrored vanity and painstakingly pluck every hair from her face, shave her legs daily, and was on the first wave of laser hair removal and electrolysis. She would comment on her body and compare herself to the version of her that fit into the tiny pink belt she kept in her closet.
It all taught me that I had a simply unacceptable body: ugly toes, asymmetrical eyes, uneven skin, unsightly and excessive body hair. And if I have this fat body I'd better make sure it’s as acceptable as possible.
I’ve spoken to my boyfriend, Matt, before about my body image stuff and he’s always received me with deep love and care and empathy and he tells the little girl in me how perfect she is and always has been and that she never should have been made to feel that way. He tells me he loves me for and not despite my body. He tells me that he loves me unconditionally and certainly body hair will not be the surprise condition.
Since Matt and I are in a long distance relationship, when we see each other it’s like playing house for a few weeks at a time. I use the off times to take care of all of my shamey stuff including tearing every possible hair out of my body by way of tweezer, epilator, or sugaring. I canvass for ingrown hairs with a flashlight. I get the calluses sheared off of my feet and my cuticles trimmed off of my nail beds.
This time we’re spending several months together, which has been amazing and an incredible opportunity for us to deepen our relationship and experience of intimacy. And I’ve been sweating over my secrets being inevitably exposed. How will I sneak in a daily facial tweezing or an epilation session? How can I possibly track and extract every ingrown hair? The truth: I cannot. And it never occurred to me to try anything else.
One afternoon, Matt went to take a shower and I immediately got out the epilator to go to work when I heard the water running. Earlier in the day I had mentioned that I needed to epilate my legs and thought this would be the perfect moment to get to one of the other spots that needed tending to. I turned it on and the familiar buzz announced its awakening. A minute or so later I heard Matt’s voice: “You got started without me.”
Commence shame spiral. I was mortified, feeling totally caught red-handed and so embarrassed I thought for sure I’d die on the spot. Waves of icy hotness flowed outwards through my body and I felt both frozen and buzzing with spiraling movement. Through bizarre, panicked laughter I told him to go away and some other words I don’t remember fell out of my mouth. He took a few steps toward me and I literally recoiled, curling up on the bed and praying I might just disappear if I made myself small enough. He knelt down on the floor in front of me and pulled me toward him as best he could given my resistance. Finally, I was sitting on the bed facing him and it was all even worse because his face was directly in front of my naked belly. I felt so exposed, in every possible way.
When I’m talking about how it feels to be vulnerable (which I define as doing something emotionally risky in front of someone else), I use the phrase “naked in the field.” Well, here I surely was naked in the field. What I came to understand though, is what it’s like to feel free instead of terrified when you’re naked in the field.
Matt held my hands and looked me in the eyes and said some beautiful things that I will keep just between us. He kissed me all over the shame spot and told me all the things he loves about it and me and I tried my very best to let it all in. I willed myself to believe him and see what it would be like if I could just open myself up to being loved like this. Could I live in a world where I am hairy and lovable?
What I’m learning now is that I already live in that world. I will never invalidate the ones in me who have kept me tweezing all these years, and I have been the perpetrator of the story that we must keep doing it at all costs or no one will ever love us. Someone already does.
How. Fucking. Freeing.
I don’t want to clam up when Matt touches a part of my body, for any reason, ever. Certainly not because I worry about him running his fingers across some stubble where it “shouldn’t” be. I don’t want to live like Jillian Michaels. I like buying two pints of ice cream because we can’t agree on a flavor. I like living in pleasure. I like enjoying my life as the person who I am right here right now and not as the person I was trying so hard to become because everyone said I should. The perfect image I have been chasing my whole life is one conceived of by a wounded, scared version of myself. And I do not choose to live as her anymore.