It is hard to eat.
I know this statement seems vile and sad.
But that doesn't change its vouching. It is hard to eat because I am twenty-six and because I am a woman in western society. It is hard to eat because I have been immersed in the message: small is better since before I could digest it. It is hard to eat, also because I have heard this message on radios, magazines, billboard signs and moving pictures consensually and not on loop for longer than I can track. The screen attached to my hand and my eyes and your eyes too, controlled by men who never have enough control. And by little girls who are just women in masks with little waists, little minds and little dreams that seem to still pat the itch of men. But here is the deal: we all have the same skin. Women just polish the nails that scratch it.
This is a vulnerable statement I might soon regret writing on paper, but I have looked at one woman my entire life as an epitome Matriarch. Her beauty and talent have sparkled so high in my sky since I can willingly recall. At my root, I’ve always adored attention (I am aware of this. This is not an uncommon false idol.) And she has, in my eyes, always had the most of it. To myself and to millions of other girls, Taylor Swift has put into words and put on a cape of vulnerability; claiming her experiences with love, life and hurt in all its forms, her entire career. A sparkly cape wrapped the lightly meated marrow that is her body.
Taylor is two of the most lethal things a woman can be: smart and pretty.
In that order. And what makes her different from all the other role-modeled women I’ve been exposed to adoring is that she is a third thing: Self-aware. All great writers are. How can one be perceptive if they don’t first observe themselves? I think it bold of me to assume my unique talent in this life is through conception of words (actually… Bullshit. I think dormant misogyny wrote that sentence. Not me.) but so is Taylor's. Therefore it is quite unfortunate that the mind monster Hollywood was and is (we now just call it "the internet" for the most part) has separated being a great creative and physical attractiveness so far apart that when we see them together; we reject. Or criticize. Or both. I've watched Taylor win awards in sparkly dresses, have museums built after her, make headlines and sell out arenas. I've also watched her be scrutinized, burned at the stake publicly and humiliated by male (and female) peers. But always; somehow always, there was attention on either end.
Is all bad press good press in the mind of an adolescent girl?
I know even celebrities' lives are not excused from misfortune, but my little mind, from the very first time I borderline studied every Target-exclusive album lyric booklet, recognized that something in me matched something in Taylor. I looked up to her and her scarcely thin pen attached wrist. The disease already planted in my mind was watered by the image of this hand. Before I continue this train of thought, I must stop at the station of reality:
I am not blaming Taylor Swift for my eating disorder.
I do not know Taylor Swift.
I only have felt known by her.
I am blaming my eating disorder on
satan himself
And his minion called screwtape
whose many forms perch in places such as:
Hollywood pictures, the patriarchy and
the inherent facade
that validation equates love.
Which in my opinion are all synonymous.
As I write, I hope you as well can
identify the lies you’ve been living
in subject to your whole life too.
Slavery is a lot of work.
This work, I suspect will be one I deconstruct my whole life. I have formally studied the impact media plays in our lives as well as experienced it. The internet has been the most wicked and validating tool of these lies, yet somehow also helped me find and be found by doctors, therapists and peers who have aided saving the life of my body. Saving the life of my mind. Western mass media and the powerful men who have steered it to become it is up this new renaissance are the nucleus of women's perception of external and capital value. Little do most know though, that the system they’ve run, they are also enslaved to. My father would never consensually harm my psyche in a way so manipulative that it keeps his only daughter small and hairless everywhere but the bleached roots on her botoxed head. That it keeps his only daughter from eating.
But that's the thing.
Just because someone doesn't know the way their words hurt another, doesn't make the sticks less sharp or stones less heavy.
I am twenty six and, as cliché as it is, am in:
The great undoing. Learning on every first date
that men don't fulfill me and the idea of fulfillment from another person, a round of applause, a number on a scale is a mirage.
That small, skinny legs just keep me from enjoying my most sacred walks with my dog and are not a capable of holding up the trophies worth having. Medals of knowledge, integrity and respect for the earth suit that holds my mind. That eating a damn cookie or five doesn't mean I’ll be scrutinized or unrewarded for living. That the way a woman looks should have anything to do with the talent or success she obtains in her career. In love life. In her mind. In her masterfully self-produced documentary, Taylor made a statement regarding her recovery and rebuttal of Screwtape’s body-shaming narrative in her mind: "We’re not doing that anymore.”
So I guess this isn't an essay but rather a petition letter. Written by her.
Not me. This is my head nodding on a page:
“No. No we are not.”
the Taylor Swift effect: Episode 31