Author Archives:

Check out my latest article to appear in the April/May issue of Viz…

Save a Child: Love Yourself

“Not So Pretty in Pink: Marketing Toxic Makeup to Young Girls” this is the headline of the article that catches breath in my throat. I barely take a second look at it, instead I feel the sarcasm roll through my head,

“What a shock. More carcinogens marketed to humans.” I think, “and of course more problems for women.”

It takes a lot of energy to muster outrage on a regular basis, frankly, it’s exhausting, more and more I pay less attention. I prefer instead to make change in the circles of life around me, to spread joy rather than cynicism. Yet, here I am with an opinion for you and it starts in cynicism, but don’t worry, it ends in love.

This is the synopsis of the article from Stacy Malkan, author of Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry. Makeup is being marketed to girls at younger and younger ages, hooks like candy lipstick, nail polish with jewelry attached, and spa services for kids, are on the rise. There is a trend in the cosmetics industry that National Cosmetology Associating (NCA) spokesman, Gordon Miller calls a “lucrative niche market.” My own sister, at the tender age of three, used to ask my mother for “pol-nailish” before she could get the words out straight.

The problem, besides the fact that this marketing means girls are learning at younger and younger ages they are not “pretty” without “products,” is that, like so many manufactured items, many of the ingredients in cosmetics, hair gels, pomades, nail polish etc. are hormone-disrupting chemicals and low level carcinogens. There is even scientific evidence that the use of cosmetics at younger and younger ages is part of what is leading to earlier puberty in American girls. There is a particular concern about products like hair pomades which are marketed to African American girls, and which contain particularly toxic chemical ingredients.

Luckily, according to the article, teens are becoming aware of this “problem.” Jessica Assaf, now 18, was using 15 products in her daily routine, exposing herself to more than 100 chemical ingredients including “several carcinogens and more than two dozen hormone-disrupting chemicals, such as parabens, and phthalates.” Now, assaf has turned her outrage into action, serving as the president of Teens For Safe Cosmetics. (www.teensforsafecosmetics.org). An educational and advocacy group which promotes “greener alternative choices in cosmetics and personal care products.”

Like many women in American culture, up until about four years ago, I smeared, pressed, poked, and squeezed chemicals all over my body—hair stained with blond streaks, neck and wrists sprayed with perfume, eyes painted with mascara, hair shampooed with a variety of smell-good ingredients, skin coated in fruity lotion. Were all of these concoctions cancer causing also? I’m certain some were.

Not surprisingly, cosmetic manufacturers quoted in the article “argue that each product contains only a small amount of any given chemical.” My lingering question is, if it’s a known carcinogen, hormone disruptor, or even a new ingredient with unknown side effects, what the hell is it doing being marketed to human beings in the first place? Let alone young girls.

I don’t know the vast array of products I used over the years, starting from the age of nine, until the age of 25, trying to look and smell sexy, grown up, beautiful, fresh. What I do know is that the response of Assaf and her teen coalition is not enough for me. Call me radical, but I don’t want to support a coalition of teens for safe cosmetics, I want to support a coalition of teens who question the use of “cosmetics” in the first place.

According to Random House Dictionary cosmetics are: “superficial measures to make something appear better, more attractive, or more impressive.” This is one of the first message girls get in this country: You, girl, to become woman, are not good enough. You need to “take measures to make yourself appear better, more attractive, more impressive.”

What a way to learn your place in the world! While I know that men are increasingly affected by low self-esteem, eating disorders, depression, and other issues related to self-hate, most males I know still don’t wear makeup, and don’t have plans to begin bettering their appearance in this way.

The issue here, is not that toxic make-up is being marketed to young girls, it is that makeup is being marketed in the first place. It is that make-up is one of the only rituals girls and women have left towards initiation into adulthood, and it is a ritual, not that makes us strong, confident, and powerful, not that teaches us to trust our beautiful bodies, and insightful souls, but which teaches us that we are inadequate the way we are, which teaches us we need to “make-up” for what we are missing.

My own journey away from cosmetics began not in the aisles of a department store, or with the examination of ingredient lists on the back of products, but far from there, in the wilderness. I was walking on an ocean of rock in the middle of Utah, climbing up 800 feet of slick bedrock, with a 50 pound pack on my back. When I reached the top I stretched my bare legs onto ancient rock noticing that the color of my skin dry and tight, after days in the sun, matched their hue.It was one of the first times in my 26 years that I liked what I saw. Over the course of the 9 day backpacking trip things profoundly shifted for me. I saw clearly, what I had been trying to see for 26 years.

My thighs and stomach had always been the “parts” of myself I hated.I used to imagine having the ability to shave them down so that they would be “smaller” and more feminine.But in the desert my thighs were the part of me that carried me across thirty miles of slick bedrock fifty pounds on my back.At night I washed dirt and sweat off my face in a stream and cosmetics seemed a laughable idea.On the last day we had a brutal hike to reach camp and my body carried me, whole, not separate from my mind, all the way to the end of the trip.I stopped thinking of myself as parts.That night the shower water ran red with tiny particles of sandstone lodged in my skin.When I looked at my reflection in the mirror I was the most beautiful perfect human being I had ever seen.

This physical journey away from culture, and into the wild did not “cure” me of all the harm done to me by years of self-hate, but it was the beginning of my internal journey towards loving myself for the first time in my life. Loving myself not for what I look like, or what I think, or how I am, but because I am.

In America, according to the Eating Disorders Institute “80 percent of women are unhappy with their appearance.” Regardless of whether or not these feelings of “unhappiness” about appearance manifest into a diagnosable eating disorder, there is a cultural disorder evident here in the very fact that almost the entire population of women in the US is dissatisfied with itself. In the United States 10 million females and one million males have a diagnosed eating disorder. Eating disorders are the mental disorder with the highest fatality rate.

The desire to look and feel “good,” to alter appearances to fit images, to make [ourselves] appear better, more attractive, or more impressive,” whether through the slow poisoning of ourselves by use of chemical products or through the long drawn out process of a lifetime of self loathing, is literally killing us.

This is why my first reaction to Marketing Toxic Make-Up To Young Girls was cynical, because the article doesn’t go far enough, in fact it misses most of the main points. Where the work of stopping toxins from entering our environment begins, is at the roots. Not with the another campaign to “change regulations,” not with some lobbying group to make companies accountable for their actions, not with another march down main street wearing pink ribbons, searching for a “cure,” when the “cause” is smeared all over our faces, but with root questioning, new ways to support and love ourselves, and the creation of empowering rituals, initiations, schools, and livelihoods that help young women and men love themselves and each other without products, or gadgets, or new lines of “toxin-free” cosmetics, (like the ones being sold on the teens for safe cosmetics website). Our work is to stop the toxins coming from the inside. To teach love. To model new ways, which are actually old, of living life in a way that does not abuse ourselves, or our planet. But before we can teach anyone anything, we have to love ourselves.

 

I am susceptible at any moment to a flood of tears.  I’m blaming them this time on the dissolution of my marriage—the slow letting go of the man I’ve loved for 8 years.  I am impatient with myself, impatient with the fact that I’m still writing about tears… that “flood of tears” is the cliché metaphor which jumps to me at this moment…

 

I’ve written that word so often, “tears” that it seems           to  have little meaning.

 Let me explain, I want you to understand…

but truly I want to understand,

this is why I write.

           

I’ve written tears in my journals since the second grade.  Crying over lost pets, spilt beverages, confusing emotions. Tears, when in middle school, I would never be pretty enough for a boyfriend, tears in high school, when I “finally” had one and we did nothing but argue.  The boys names changed but the tears stayed.  The common theme amongst them: me fitting myself to what others wanted, the tears an expression of my true self leaking free. 

I think this now, suddenly, in a flash of realization.

The boys have been distractions from the reality of life, the truth of my own physical existence.  Finally, in my late twenties, this is what I’m facing:  What’s really here.  Who I really am.  What I really want.  It’s the first time I’ve ever asked myself these questions and been able to listen for the answers without the shadow of another. And I am terrified.  And I am elated.

            I am charged to discover what sits behind the hard surface of my body, behind the physical wetness of the tears which soak my skin.  Perhaps I will discover the true source of the restlessness that presses on my stomach.  Because, you see, in the space between the start of my ribcage and the flesh covering my back there is an ocean.

            It is an ocean, which has been storming for almost three decades, without release of energy.  On occasion a few drops leak through the cracks, but these are grains of sand in a universe of particles.  Imagine, if you will, a sea held inside a glass dome, gaining strength and losing it. Pounding its liquid body against the edges of existence. 

********* *************** *************** ************ ***********

I grew up “internationally.”  Perhaps this is why it has always seemed to me that anything I do must have global relevance.  Perhaps this is why it is hard to justify sitting in silence with a pen in my hand re-living the past, re-imagining the future.   

By the time I was five, a blond girl with pigtails and a grey and green wool uniform, I had met people from all over the world at my international school in Brussels Belgium.  By junior high our playground games had transformed into quiet nationality wars, between “The Americans” and well, “the rest.”  Even surrounded by colorful images of multi-cultural harmony, we were not immune to the nationalism of snickers bars and video games.

            “America’s the best!” I can remember friends—mostly boys—declaring loudly during lunch period, sure that others would overhear.  In the classrooms our teachers, from all over the world, taught us about globalism and tolerance, but we had TV.  We knew the truth.

            In fourth grade social studies class we read the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel.  The images of international catastrophes in the song did nothing to help my already growing anxiety about a violent and complex world of which I wanted no part, but was part of nonetheless.  The music and lyrics stirred my soul.  I didn’t want to be an American, but I was.

            The teacher wanted us to sing along with her.  I jumped in.  It was perhaps the first time I loved poetry.  Halfway through the first stanza I was horrified to find that I was so lost in the words I hadn’t noticed I was one of the only students participating in the sing-a-long.    

Certain I had already been labeled “dork” by all in attendance, I scaled back my enthusiasm, hiding my disappointment behind a head hung low.   

A few drops added themselves to my ocean. 

 

***************** ******************* *************** **************

It used to be that I’d have to be awake for a while before the tears would find me.  The morning used to begin freshly, life would have to lead up to crying: An angry word from my father, a cross look from my mother, an exasperated sigh from a teacher, perhaps not even directed at me, an argument with my younger brother because he was teasing, or “hogging” the Nintendo, or because below it all I sensed myself alone in a world where my “sensitivity” did not fit.

            I always thought I’d get “better” with time.  Perhaps this was am idea implanted, unintentionally, by my parents with their repeated commands to “grow up,” “be more mature,” to stop making things into such a “big deal.”  But the command to control something which came like rain from the sky, unexplained and dependent on the forces of nature, was futile.  I thought growing up meant a steady progression away from tears. I didn’t know that suppressing them was filling an ocean inside my chest. 

Now, when I wake, the ocean is here.  There is already a salty taste on my lips and a crust building around the edge of my eyes, they are the names of babies I might never have,  the feel of a new lovers skin next to me, full of life, yet last night I imagined, after we made love, what it might be like to see him in a coffin.

Soon, my ribcage will break open—a clean tear from the force of rushing salt water, sea urchins and foam spewing forth:

Those star fish from the tide pools I loved when we vacationed in Holland. 

The Rainbow Parrot Fish from the Minnesota zoo. I visited him faithfully each time we went, his bulging eye unblinking from a tiny tank.

 The entire North Atlantic, over which I shed tears upon tears, each time we moved overseas.

 The Pacific on whose edge, as an adult, I could find no peace—first in Australia looking for purpose, then in Northern California with a heavy backpack and a storm pushing me to the ground. 

Finally, on my honeymoon in Hawaii, the beginning of a short marriage, where on the edge of a five star resort, I decided once and for all that oceans are not peaceful, they boil up inside me and stir things that I cannot understand from the bottom of the sea floor.

Grief Goodbye

 

Doug is home and he is leaving.  Leaving for good.  I keep remembering when I would leave him, during graduate school, for ten weeks at a time.  The days before the leaving my breath would catch in my throat at the thought of parting from this man I loved, this man who was my whole world.  He has supported me so, for many years. 

At the airport I would sob through security, forcing myself not to turn back around and run to him as I waited for the plane.  I am terrible at goodbyes.  I always chocked it up to the many moves I made as a child, the goodbyes I was forced into by my father’s promotions at work.  But now as I contemplate this final goodbye to this man I’ve grown into adulthood with, as I say goodbye to knowing him in the way I have for eight years of life—a long enough time to forget there is anything else—I wonder if my painful goodbyes have more to do with my own lack of self, than missing another.

Who am I without this man who has defined my life?  Who am I without his presence in the morning, his ears to hear my thoughts, his stories to fill my evenings?  This is a question I delve into while he is away on business for a month at the beginning of this talk of “divorce.”  It is a trial period to be sure we are sure.  While he is gone I ask myself the question over and over again, “who am I?”

 I am frightened, not so much by the answer as by the not knowing, the emptiness.  The whispered response in my head, “I don’t know…”

I am frightened by the vacant-ness of waking up morning after morning alone.  The lonely sound of my feet on the floor through the house of no concern to anyone but me, the sight of a mouse under my bed and no one to share the absurdity of it with but my cat, who finds it exciting. No one to help with dishes, or lawns, gardens or dirty floors.

 

But did he ever help with this while he was here? I’m not sure anymore, our relationship, now that it is ending, has become a blank space in my memory.  Long ago fights visit me in the darkness, merging with a dream-world.  Did he say that? Did I do that, no it can’t be, I don’t remember it that way.  Did it happen at all? Does it matter? 

It is the week of his return when I get the phone call from Boston which tells me he is really leaving.  The conversation we have started is going quickly from this slippery word “separated” to the hard consonant of “divorce.”

I knew it was possible that he would leave Colorado, where we moved because I longed to be back amidst the rock and sky of the west.  I knew this was a possibility but I imagined we’d start out as friendly neighbors, then slowly shift to long-distance friends.  “Maybe, even,” I thought, “we could live together as roommates.”

On the phone he says,

“I’m moving back to Boston. I’ll leave when the lease is up.”

“I know.” I reply, because I do somehow. 

1,000’s of miles of wire phone cord  between us and I feel our separation more final than any paperwork could signify.  He is leaving in February, six months from now, and then there is a friend who needs a roommate in September, six months earlier than the end of the lease, but it makes sense and I understand what it feels like to live in a place you no longer want to inhabit, so I tell him, “Go.”

 

During the phone conversation it all seems rational, bearable.  Somehow it seemed like all this “understanding” and “rationale” that we had brought to the situation, all the analysis, and “sense,” and logic all the of course’s:

 

“Of course you should move, you aren’t happy here.”

“Of course, we aren’t in love.”

“Of course, you want to be in the city.”

“Of course, I’ll be fine.”

 

would have prepared me, or stopped me, or prevented me from grief.  I thought actually that all the tears and screaming at myself, at each other, at our parents—who just didn’t understand how two people who are so lovely could possibly want to get a divorce—I thought all that was the grief.  I even said it, to myself in the mirror, to friends at the bar, to strangers I met at coffee shops,

“I’m just grieving the loss of this person in my life, I need to take some time.” But I wasn’t taking time I was postponing the inevitable.

When he comes home from his business trip we meet coincidentally on the front lawn.  He is stepping out of a blue shuttle bus, I off of my bike.  We embrace.  And then I realize that both of us are searching for a flicker of something, a moment that might signify we’ve acted too quickly, a feeling that might flare up from the bottom of our groins, passion, or love, or…  But when we look in each other’s eyes, each of us scanning for that flame and finding nothing, we know this is real. 

 

He walks in the door with his suitcase and says,

“I don’t even feel like I live here anymore.”

I nod, I know. Because I felt the same way every time I returned from my graduate school trips to our tiny Cambridge, Massachusetts apartment in central square.  I didn’t mind the apartment.  It was the location.  The bedroom window opened on to a dumpster and a white steepled church where every morning before six the sound of trash compaction woke me.  Sometimes, on those rare occasions that we were having sex I stared at the white steeple of the church while I came.  I do not identify as Christian but somehow, I felt a white bearded God staring at me through the pure white paint. Did he approve? Or was he just observing? The urbanity, filth, and noise of Cambridge was a struggle for me from the start, and so I knew the look that Doug wore on his face when he walked through the door,

“I live here?”

“How?”

“ Really?”

We went out for dinner the night he returned “home” for the last time.  We discussed rationally and matter-of-factly the details of his move, the discoveries of his trip.  We laughed about the divorce party we might throw.  All the talking was painless, it felt good even, to plan.  Together we’d always been great planners but somehow, terrible actors in our life together.  The planning anchored us in reality, in each other. When the waitress came inquire about desert we both declined. We were running out of things to say.  “This isn’t so bad.” I thought.  “We’ll make it through without too many scars.”

Then, in the middle of the night, or the early morning hours, or only a few moments after I had gone to bed, in the pitch black of night, I felt it come and sit itself down in the middle of my chest and I could not breathe.

 I couldn’t see it, but I knew what it looked like, grey and colorless, brooding and senseless, a figure you could get lost inside if you stared too long and I did, I stared at grief, I looked it in the face crouched above me in the dark. 

Panic coiled in my chest, fear, loneliness, loss.  All I had accomplished while Doug was away forgotten, had I accomplished anything at all?

“No, I am a mess without him.  I haven’t even eaten a proper meal in a month.”

“Don’t go!” I wanted to scream into the black of death, into the confusion of life that doesn’t make sense in the middle of the night when you can’t remember daylight.  But I didn’t mean it. 

“Just go now.” I would say instead when the sun came up, but I wasn’t ready for this either.    

“This is grief.” A voice said from deep within.  “I am here.”

“No, no. I’ve already done grief.” I replied. “I’ve been crying for months!”

“There is more.” The voice came back.

Over the course of the next days the grief stayed where it started, sitting in the middle of my chest between my throat and my lungs.  Looking up at me with vacant eyes that said “I’m sorry honey. I’m here, and you don’t get to decide when I leave. I do.

I resisted. Of course I did. Surely this was a senseless emotion.   

“This is what we both want, so why am I so sad?  Time to move on!”   

My body succumbed despite my fighting mind.  I got sick. A hacking cough and pleghm for days.  I sniffed and cried and whined, and finally accepted what grief was telling me,

“You have to let him go,

            let him go,

                        let him go

let him go.”

This was the grief that I hadn’t yet felt, the grief that was the reality of the thing, the grief that meant I and this man, who was truly the only person in the world who could look at me and “know,” the man who had seen me crash and fly, fall and break, over and over again, the man who had helped me through the most torturous years of my life confronting my past, my family, the man who had held me night after night, morning after morning, hour after hour as I cried.  This was the man who had worn costume after costume, wigs and mustaches, who had made me laugh, and scream, and come, and breathe.  And this was goodbye.

This was goodbye to the man who made me food when I was sick, lunches when I was healthy, who made me laugh when I cried, and laugh when I was happy, the man who had helped raise two kittens to cats, the man I made love to on the floor of a hotel room in front of a full length mirror in Australia, on his teenage bed at his parents’ house in Chicago, in the bathroom on our honeymoon in Hawaii, in every bedroom of every apartment, we’d lived in, the man who watched me rage against the “injustices” of the world, the man who helped me find my voice again when it had been thrown deep into a dark well of depression. 

This was the grief then.  Here it was.  The reality of the thing that means it’s over sitting in the middle of my chest and not moving until I faced it full on. 

This was goodbye at the airport but I wasn’t leaving this time, he was, and instead of forcing myself to wait for something to take me away I had to stay with the decision, I had to feel every inch of its weight.

This was grief saying, in a few months he will walk out the door.  You will stand in the front lawn and watch as the man you have loved more than anyone on earth walks away into his new life, which doesn’t involve you.  My sick body made me feel it.  I couldn’t leave the house, or distract myself with exercise or meetings.  We were housebound, the three of us, me, my husband, and grief drawing it out, my body the sketch pad. 

I woke for a week with new aches and pains, new depths of coughing.  In the mornings I felt like I’d run a marathon my muscles aching with the letting go, mind fuzzy with the details.   The sickness lasted seven days.  With every bit of phlegm rising from my chest, I could breathe a little more.  He stayed with me through all of it.  He made me food while I wept, he helped wash dishes, mow the lawn.  I cried in his arms just to feel him there.  We tried to kiss, to touch, but as soon as we felt each other’s lips we knew it wasn’t right. 

We fought too, and remembered why we were doing this.  “We” were over.  “We” didn’t exist anymore.  I coughed us up, one centimeter of grief at a time.  And finally on the eight day I woke up and knew that my body was telling me: I would be okay without him. 

I lay in bed watching the sun light on the mountain ridge.  I took an unencumbered breath.  The grief slipped so quietly out the door, the greyest, wispiest shadow, I almost didn’t see it go.

The Overwhelming Experience of Living

 

And             you             will               be        okay

And       you               will           be

okay?

you        will         be

o         kay….

 

Be okay

Be okay

Be okay

 

I’m tired of okay.  When will there be more than this?  Oh I know presence and all that but seriously, I’m not okay.

 

The “overwhelming experience of living” it was the title of a painting in a coffee shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and all I could think were of the meaning of the words:  overwhelming to be alive?  But then what is there besides panic?

 

My life is unraveling at the seams… it seems.

 

And this is what I asked for, the title of my larger work: Unwinding Myself Whole, yet I’m tired of bits of thread, I want the whole ball of self.

 

Overwhelming indeed.  The kitchen is covered in dishes, there is a mouse living under my bed that the cat chases, only after midnight.  Last night I slept in two different rooms to avoid the noise.  Stacks of magazines pile up unread.  I’m working for myself and still there is no time, that boss lauding over me far deeper than 9 to 5.

 

It is summer.  Can it be summer already?

 

The cottonwood trees are shedding their seeds and people say they hate cottonwoods with their fluff stuck in all they touch, that varnished brown porch decorated in delicate stuff.

 

I catch cottonwood seeds in my palms, I want them in my mouth, summer snowflakes.  Lie on your back and watch them fly.

 

My marriage, what is called a union between two people, is ending.  My husband and I are radically separating ourselves from one another’s lives.  This is the definition in the American Heritage Dictionary of divorce: A complete or radical severance of two closely connected things.

 

And you will be okay.

 

Whisper it to yourself in the mirror, in the shower, on your bike when your foot slips off and bleeds, on your job application when you get to the line: Emergency Contact Information and cannot breathe.

 

Whose name goes here?

Whose name goes here?

 

Somehow it feels better when I touch my skin.  I reassure myself of my body.  Here I am, edges, and walls, where also there are none.

 

A push up or two serves to remind my muscles we exist—together we are an entity of life, overwhelming or not.

 

When I got too overwhelmed I to the gym to calm down.  I punch a bag to feel something real, something physical while I am swimming in emotion. 

 

Why are you doing this to yourself, I ask my reflection.  You know you will be okay.

 

And you will be okay.

 

But on the street when I want nothing more than to break down, to fall down to the sidewalk, at the grocery store when I want to scream, when I am as alone as I ever am and no one knows, no one knows I am unraveling,

 

I just keep asking, where would I even begin this story were someone to give me the chance?

 

What kind of world is this where we live, where all around us lives are falling to pieces, threads are being pulled, and we just keep on going.  We just keep on going, we just keep on going…

and no one comes unless you ask for help, but all the help I want is someone’s arms around me, to hold me, to give me a wall of comfort, some boundary which is more than my own skin, more than my own mind telling my beating out of chest heart.

 

Be okay.

Be okay.

Be okay.

Be okay.

I am sick and tired of okay.  I want to be underwhelmed.

Transition

 

My life has irrevocably shifted,

 

at times it seems even my vision is different, the physical world more vivid, too bright.

 

And my mind tells me, “this is the nature of transitions, of change.”  

Right now Paige, you are like a shifting landscape, your body a volcano, a mountain born from earth.

 

Your body is an ocean, an island springing forth from depths you did not know you possessed

 

Your body is a coastline, a barrier island reforming its shape.

 

Your body is a village ravaged by a hurricane, but finding again the sun, the dryness, the land.

 

But my body feels only the movement, the mountain knows not her heights as she is thrust from rock, the ocean knows not her deepness when solid floor breaks into bits, the land knows not the shape he will become as the water shifts and moves, and the people know only panic, when the storm begins to rain down.