Self Image

I am completely schizophrenic when it comes to my self-image. I hate having my picture taken because I hate the way I look: long nose, thin mouth, chicken neck and all. Sometimes I catch myself thinking that if I were just a little better looking I wouldn’t have to worry so much about it and could focus on being a better person (just like Madonna and Angelina Jolie—not!).

Yet at the same time I find myself outraged that anyone would dare judge me on my looks and I plow ahead through the forcefulness of my personality to do what I want, say what I want, and expect results. I rarely let anyone get away with anything against what I think I can effect. If, as society has conditioned us to think, our physical appearance matters as much or more than our character, where does this chutzpa come from? I recently came across this passage in a Joanna Trollope book: “I do not long for beauty, she told herself resolutely in the glass in the hall coat stand, but I do require some significance. I am not in any way ready or prepared to be rubbed out. I do not agree—or submit—to being invisible merely because my outward self, lacking the required drama for contemporary life, gives no indication of what is going on inside.”

My mother always thought I was wonderful and could do no wrong, but my father, who was emotionally crippled, belittled me (and my mother and my two sisters) about my appearance and behavior but bragged about my supposed IQ. He insisted that somehow he’d gotten the results of the IQ tests they’d administered to my sisters and me at school and that they were grand. I knew I wasn’t particularly brainy, just that I had to do well in school to get my ticket out of Colorado Springs into some less provincial world where I’d be a “professional,” whatever that meant. In the meantime, I had to deal with a plain face sometimes broken out with acne that would never land me a spot on the cheerleading squad or a position in school government. Of course, I was always disdainful of these social networks and longed to be one of the jet setters, which is what we called the kids who were just beginning to become the potheads and day trippers of the late sixties and early seventies whom I would join in college.

Was this disdain sour grapes or was I somehow able, from a very young age, to see through the crap and know what to value? My parents helped me along this path by joining the Unitarian Church (she’d been raised an assimilated Jew, he a Methodist, and neither were believers) where LRY (liberal religious youth) turned me on to sex and drugs and rock ‘n roll. And I didn’t have to wait too long after high school to see what happened to the cheerleaders and student council members who got married young, divorced young, and stayed, as the Dixie Chicks sing, “in the same zip codes where their parents live” (in other words, banal suburbia).

Of course, not many better things happened to many of the pot smoking, LSD dropping jet setters I emulated. Some over dosed, some ended up in dead end jobs, and some eventually found God. I ended up dropping out of college, never even getting a bachelor’s degree, and never becoming a “professional.”

So what did I become and how did I become so full of it? I became not so much something but an amalgam of some things: a house builder, a gardener, a writer, a partner, a mother, a community activist, a publisher, an acequia commissioner, and a buen vecino in a tiny little village in northern New Mexico. In other words, I learned how to get along with lots of kinds of people, how to sustain relationships, and how to fend for myself. It was an attempt to be whole in the postmodern world increasingly fragmented by specialized work and paying someone else to take care of your necessities. Becoming whole builds assurance, and so I acquired mine. Or at least enough to weather being relatively poor and anonymous except within a small circle of those folks I care about. I’m never going to publish a best selling novel and I’m never going to get a humanitarian award for devoting my life to a cause. But I figured out a way to live with the choices I made, which in and of themselves define my character: kind of schizophrenic, but defiantly so.