I have tried to write something about my experience of shopping for a wedding dress for months. It ended up being a fourteen page essay that will ultimately become a part of my memoir. I have tried over and over again to pare it down to be the correct length to fit in an instagram post, and failed. So, here is my best attempt to summarize some of what I have been feeling for the last several months. If you want to read the missing ten pages – well, I guess you’ll have to buy my memoir when it’s published. 
xoxoxoxo
A little while back, I spent a day with some of my favorite people: a friend, my fifteen year old son, and my seventeen year old daughter. We set out to find my wedding dress. I was so happy to be celebrating this milestone with these wonderful humans. But in the midst of joy, a weird thing happened.
I tried on dress after dress and looked in the mirror. I struggled to connect with my feelings and have any opinion at all about each dress. I focused on my lumpy belly, my unfit arms, the cellulite on my lower body. I tried to judge my appearance based on the reactions of my friend and children, more so than my own. Then, my friend showed me a little video of the dress I was trying on and when I looked at the video, I thought to myself – that looks amazing on that woman and she is much more beautiful than I am.
And I said, “How did you find that so fast? On the internet?”
My friend said, “What? That’s YOU!”
She had just been taking photos and videos of me. My brain broke. ME? There is no possible way that the person in the video was me. Somehow I managed to completely overlook the background of the video – which was obviously where I was still standing, and my own face. The image of myself in my head was so different from my friend’s photos and videos; it just didn’t make any sense at all.
I thought about this moment a lot over the next few months. I realized that I do a less obvious version of this all the time, although I wouldn’t have recognized it before the dress shopping experience. I go into shops, try things on, take a bunch of photos of myself, then leave. I am completely incapable of looking in a mirror and accepting how I look. I do look in the mirror, but there, I only see flaws. I count the ways in which I’m not good enough: I’m not thin enough, my hair is frizzy, my arms are jiggly, my belly is poofy… on and on. I need the distance from the mirror that the photos allow me. I go home and review the photos, then I go back to the shop and buy what looked good in the photos IF I feel worthy of the price tag after much deliberation, which I often do not. If I’m in a rush, or at a consignment store or at a sale that won’t last, I will take the photos and then text them to my daughter and ask her opinion.
Me: “Is this terrible or OK?”
Daughter: “IT’S SO FANTASTIC.”
Which, of course, I dismiss, because she is my daughter and is therefore required to think that I am fantastic. I don’t feel fantastic. I struggle to accept that clothes could look fantastic on me. Sometimes, when my daughter approves of my texted photos, I will buy the clothes. Often, I still feel the need to go home and think about whether or not I’m worthy of the expense. Mostly, I don’t buy myself manyy new clothes because this process is obviously tedious and painful.
I know how this happened to me. On some level I’ve known it my whole life. But I’ve also gotten comfortable with this feeling. It didn’t occur to me that my self image was so bad until that day in the dress shop, and the days after when I considered how I’ve been living a whole life while so out of touch with my own body. So, how did I get here?
When I was young, I went from loving school and my family to being bullied and feeling abandoned. I developed body image issues and an eating disorder that ultimately landed me in the hospital, more than once. I was tormented by people I once called friends. I was confused by the dichotomy of a perfect life lived as a trophy daughter versus being a trophy wife. I wanted to be a doctor or a pilot. But I also wanted to be a perfect mother and wife. I bought into all of the societal ideals. I struggled with relationships. I had crushes on the nice or nerdy guys, but I always dated the assholes – because they were the only ones who ever asked me to go out with them. I was treated badly, cheated on, and ultimately ended up in a tumultuous twenty year relationship with an abusive alcoholic. My spouse literally told me that I was unworthy, undesirable, and unwanted. After years of denial and living in normalized chaos, I finally found the courage (with a lot of help from my friends) to leave. I started a path to healing, but there are so many bumps along this particular road.
After all that I had been through, I didn’t feel ready for a new relationship when I met Jason, but Jason changed everything. From the moment I saw him, I knew something great was in our future. He makes me happy in ways that I never thought were possible. He is everything I dreamed of, but what takes my breath away is all of the little ways that he is perfect for me that I never even knew were possible – things that were so far outside of my realm of possibility that I could not have dreamed of them no matter how hard I tried.
By some magic, I have found someone who treats me well and works every day to provide a safe space for me, my kids, and US, but often when everything feels so perfect, that’s when all of my trauma becomes apparent. The residual energy leftover from years of living in constant survival mode has nowhere to go. This energy bursts out of me now in the most inconvenient ways. Sometimes in the most embarrassing moments, when my pain wells up as anxiety and I melt into a full-on trauma-induced tantrum. But also as revelations, sometimes quiet, sometimes fiercely explosive. Some of my frequent revelations about abuse are expected. Others leave me blindsided.
I am much more blindsided by the reaction of my brain in places like the wedding dress shop. In these moments, I am not afraid or angry. I am not retreating or confrontational. But I am dissociated from my emotions, unable to comprehend all that is happening around me, and in disbelief that I might be beautiful and loved. In the midst of my greatest joy, I find my greatest sadness. I am so very happy to be shopping for wedding dresses again. It is a rare opportunity to feel so special in this way. To be beautiful and accepted and loved. To be preparing for a celebration of love and the magic of two people discovering that they are perfect for each other. I felt all of the joy. But alongside the joy, I also felt confused. I felt dissociated. I felt left behind by my emotions. I was stunned that I was living in a body that I didn’t even recognize when a friend showed me a video just seconds after it was taken. I’m standing in the same place and yet I don’t recognize myself.
I don’t think about myself all of the time, but when I do, I think I’m just ok. Mostly I think I’m pretty blah. I cover most of my body most of the time in ways that may be viewed as professional, but conservative. I do enjoy looking put together and professional, but I see that as a reflection of my style, not my body. It is a facade, not my true self.
I’ve also become more aware that I often feel heavy, tired and unattractive. But when I see a photo of myself, I sometimes don’t believe I actually look like that. I think that by some luck, it was a good camera angle, perhaps a filter. But outside of that photo, I don’t appear that way at all.
I know now that people like me are all around. I have curated my social media to (mostly) celebrate the beauty that is in each of us, dispelling my previously held beliefs from media and society that only a select few (mostly unhealthy) bodies are beautiful. The supportive posts that turn this idea on its head still feel like a revelation to me every day. The process of dispelling old harmful ideals is challenging when they are so deeply rooted in my brain from forty years of living in this world, this family, and may never be complete. But I am grateful to be somewhere in the middle of this process.
The weeks that my kids and I spent at the domestic violence shelter when we finally left our home were some of the most healing of my life. Even though it was the worst of times, it was also the most accepted I had ever felt. I let go of my ideas about myself and the other residents at the shelter. I let go of stereotypes of the class, gender identity, race, and sexual orientation of the typical victim. There is no typical victim. The victim is me. The victim is you. In the generational cycles of abuse, the victim is all of us.
I have learned that there is support all around me, spending countless hours receiving support from institutions and individuals, in heartfelt conversations with other women and in the places where the next generation is growing and learning their own self-worth. I frequently feel like an example of what not to do, but I’m ok with that, because in many ways I’m learning my own self-worth right alongside my children. I know now that at times my children can be better teachers for me than my elders. Many of my family and friends are on the same path that I am, in the process of flipping old ideas, learning to let go of unhealthy body ideals and self-loathing, and striving towards acceptance. My children, through some mix of their nurturing, education, and media, are so very much more aware than my generation. My desire as a mother to raise my children to be better than myself, will only go so far. As parents, often in the midst of our own healing journey, most of us can only see through some small portion of the normalized toxic behaviors we’ve grown accustomed to. But, if that is what we change in the future generations, we will achieve incremental progress. That combined with seeking out the most inclusive education for my children has increased their awareness. And the media, as much as I fought their exposure to it for so long, has helped. I believe that they and their wisely chosen friends are able to primarily curate a positive experience on social media. It’s certainly not all rosey, but I am so proud of my children’s ability to spot and call out negativity, racism, and misogyny in the world. The family life that I created for my children was fraught with all of the struggles of including an abusive alcoholic in our lives. I have a lot of regret and guilt about how this affected them, but it has also given them great lessons in life. I would have preferred these lessons to be later and less close to the heart, but that was not entirely in my control. Through it all, though, they have become some of the most wise individuals I have ever known. The combination of all of these experiences gives my children the ability to call me out on my own internalized misogyny, self-worth and body image issues. It also allows for us to have the most amazing, open discussions about important issues in the world that I’m not sure I could have had otherwise.
The process for me (and so many others) is to somehow move from victim to survivor. Accepting myself as a victim of domestic violence proves to be just as difficult as accepting the body I live in. The parallels of the journey of domestic violence survivor and living in our culture are apparent and these paths are intricately intertwined. To me, this process often feels like trying to meditate and breathe while a boulder rests on my chest. But in the end, I can dissolve the pressure on my chest with focus and kindness. I can dissolve my self-loathing. I do need to learn my beauty, but that still feels really difficult. For now, the absence of my negativity will do. There is a song about the enneagram type one, by Sleeping at Last, that describes me so well: my longing for perfection and my journey of healing and letting go and maybe someday finding grace. I encourage you to read his lyrics.
The empty space of nothing might be just what I need to let a little hope and acceptance in.
