Letting Go of Perfection and Asking for Help

Lately, I've started several blog posts, only to abandon them when a couple days have passed and I've been unable to edit them--usually due to attempts at keeping the puppy out of trouble.  My need for perfection is standing in the way of blogging, so I'm giving myself permission to post sometimes without spending time editing and polishing my work. As my first therapist used to say, "Laurie, you can be perfect later." Amen.

That said, here's what's on my mind tonight.  After reading SARK's eLetter about asking for help and talking with my cousin, who's still on crutches after skipping a step on the same day as I did, I can't help thinking back to the last time I was on crutches and how hard it was for me to ask for help then.

This was in the spring of 2006.  I'd taken my very first spinning class and, not knowing much about the way the bikes worked, thoughtlessly took my foot out from the cage on the pedal and ended up having it whip around and do considerable damage to the front of my right shin.  An ambulance ride to the ER and many stitches later, I returned home on crutches with the fear that if I put weight on my leg, the stitches would not stay in place (to put it delicately).  I learned quickly that crutches leave you without any way to hold on to things as you travel from place to place, and they are not fun to use while climbing or descending stairs (I spent a lot of time bumping up and down on my butt!).  At the time, I was happily unemployed, but I felt the need to prove my worth by doing far more with each day than I had while working. I honestly don't know what felt so urgent to me, or why I was so stubborn and prideful (my mother would say that's my natural state...), but my determination to deal with the situation on my own and avoid being a burden in any way not only made things much, much harder for me, but caused a great deal of consternation for my caring, considerate, thoughtful husband, Sean.  He tried to help me in every way possible, and he never made me feel bad about the situation, even though it meant more work for him, regardless of my rejection of his help.  My reaction to his offers of assistance was downright surly, and left him very confused.  Within a week, he'd stopped offering to help, and I felt bereft and angry at myself.  My internal critics jeered, "Well, now you're stuck doing it yourself. You can't go back now and ask for help after you convinced him you're fine on your own..."

I remember thinking (when I was alone and no longer under the spell of the green-eyed monster who seemed to control my tongue) that rejecting Sean's help felt a lot like my experiences as a child: I wanted to be able to do things on my own, even if I failed. Not being able to do a task felt better, at least, than the failure of having to ask someone else to do it for me. I believed this even though I also believed--at the same time--that my injury was God's way of forcing me to slow down my pace after I'd ignored fifty less dramatic messages from Him.  Why didn't I take advantage of the experience to slow down?  Why did it matter so much to prove that I could still make dinner from scratch, even if I had to scoot around the kitchen in an office chair to do it?

It seems I spent most of my days feeling terribly alone, crying in frustration at what I couldn't accomplish, and cursing my body for being unable to do what I needed it to do.  Nevertheless, I turned away offers of help from Sean, my neighbors, and my friends.  I wish I had a pithy After School Special ending to this story, but I don't: eventually my body healed and I went back to my usual schedule, convincing myself that the experience had taught me to move at a slower pace. In many ways, I did learn that lesson: I became aware that it was possible for the world to go on even if I wasn't controlling every minute particle of my environment.  However, I didn't learn the most important lesson of all: asking for help, especially when you need it.

Even though I know that giving a friend the chance to help you can sometimes do more for your friendship than anything you might give or do for your friend, I still find it terribly hard to let others help me.  My therapist has guided me into asking for assistance more, and I've learned some new things from those experiences: not only do people appreciate the chance to help, sometimes they even find it fun!  For instance, every year before our big holiday party, I invite my female neighbors and close friends over to help me make food for the party.  We have the best time!  I feel guilty about it every year, but those who come truly seem to enjoy it and look forward to our time together.

I have a long way to go towards feeling comfortable asking for "more and more" as SARK encourages in her eLetter, but I have hope that I'm moving in the right direction. Hopefully you're doing that too...or maybe you've already learned how to accept help!  If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences and advice on how to get there.  If you're working on it, let me know what you have learned and what you hope to do in the future. 

Let's work on leaning into the support others offer us, just like we did when practicing "trust falls" at camp, where we yelled out, "Falling!" to let the others know we were about to lean back, trusting them to keep us from hitting the ground.  I have faith that, if we let ourselves fall into their offers of help, our friends will catch us.

"Falling!"

Bad Boys?

After years of wondering why I’ve never found bad boys attractive, I finally have an answer: I only like the canine ones.

He can sip from my drink any day...

Even though I was relatively young when the Star Wars movies were in the theaters, they loomed large in my peer group.  All the girls wanted their hair wound into danishes on the sides of their heads like Princess Leia, thought the Ewoks were adorable, and were in love with Han Solo.  That’s where I found myself adrift: I could get on board with the danish hairdo, had no trouble finding the Ewoks cute, but did not get the attraction to Han Solo.  He was rude, dirty, messy, and worst of all, he constantly broke the rules. The horror! In short, he was a bad boy, and I couldn’t figure out how that was attractive.  Personally, I found him annoying and didn’t see why he had to be in the movies at all!  I may have been the only person watching Star Wars who was devastated to find out that Leia and Luke were siblings, because it meant they couldn’t be together. I thought Luke was perfect: he was kind, humble, clean (check out that white outfit that had nary a spot despite trips through garbage compactors, deserts, and weird bars!), and, most importantly, he was good. He didn’t break rules (or at least, he didn’t do so without a lot of consternation and thought), and he did the right things, even when it wasn’t fun or easy.  I was truly perplexed: who would choose Han Solo over a guy like that?

Sadly for me, I found that my friends’ fascination with bad boys wasn’t a childhood folly: as we passed into our adolescence, I began to see that this was a central theme to almost every girl’s attraction to boys. Though the level of “badness” varied, running from rakish pranksters like Kurt Cameron, Sean Astin, and Mario Lopez’s “Slater” to the hard party boys like Corey Haim, River Phoenix, and Emilio Estevez, it seemed like every girl I knew had a crush on guys who either misbehaved or played characters who did.  Meanwhile, I found guys like Wil Wheaton’s character on Star Trek: Next Generation attractive: clean cut, thoughtful, conscientious, and good.  Of course, the very fact that I was watching Star Trek might have given me a clue that I wasn’t likely to fit in, but that’s another story…

Obviously, I was odd woman out when it came to being attracted to bad boys. This has been true my whole life, so I’d pretty much given up on ever understanding my friends’ attraction to roguish boys when I finally experienced it myself.  It happened on a cold, snowy day in upstate New York, and from the moment we met, I knew that I’d adore him, no matter how cheeky he might become … and probably because of it!  My husband and I were traveling with our dog, Angel, to check out a possible companion for her. When his foster mom introduced us to Otto, a St. Bernard mix with springs for legs, I fell instantly in love.  His naughty tricks only made me find him more attractive: stealing toys to play with them in the snow after his mom told him no, standing on his back legs to snuffle along any surface he could reach and grabbing whatever was there, doing a play bow and expecting the rabbit to fetch, jumping up to eye-level from a standing position right in front of us, shaking ice and mud everywhere…I found all of it utterly adorable and amusing. Somewhere outside myself, like in one of those dreams where you watch your dream self behave in odd ways but are powerless to stop it, I realized that I should have been dismayed by Otto’s behavior, but I just wasn’t.  I thought he was such a catch and couldn’t understand why Angel wasn’t running after him with her tongue hanging out and hearts in her eyes.

Who needs a laptop when you have a cute puppy boy?

When we got home, having decided that Otto wasn’t the right fit for us (mostly due to my husband’s clear head), I rationalized my experience, figuring that this was a one-time happening and had nothing to do with misbehaving males.  After all, Otto was fixed. How could his sex have any impact on my finding his behavior adorable, even if he were intact?  Oh, how I underestimated the allure of the bad boy!  We went on to meet several other dogs, some female, some male, and while I enjoyed the girls (who were, in general, very well behaved), it was the goofy, unruly, adorable boys that I found myself yearning to bring home.  I’m sure that’s part of the reason that we ended up adopting Cody, a 10 month-old Chihuahua mix, to be Angel’s companion.  What I find darling, she finds obnoxious, so I doubt we based our entire decision on her response. No, I’m pretty sure that the enthusiasm both my husband and I had for Cody had a lot to do with bringing him home… and with the reason our house is now turned upside down!

Cody has the cutest grin you’ve ever seen. You often see it right before he tears through the house, growling, rolling on the floor, and trying to rip the slipcover off the couch. He can jump several feet in the air and even do acrobatics while he’s up there.  He loves to give kisses and will sometimes sneak in an inappropriately intimate exploration of your mouth when you aren’t looking. We found out on the first day he was with us that he enjoys leather.  I’m not talking about a fetish for jackets and chaps, I’m talking about leashes.  Cody finds them extremely tasty, and managed to chew through two of them before noon.  Did any of this bother me? Of course not!  It seems the more he misbehaves, the more adorable I find him.  I even thought he was especially smart to have chewed through the handles rather than the middle of the leash. What a cutie! 

Not our dog, but isn't he cute?

When we met him, we noticed that Cody likes to dig, using his foot long legs to make quick work of whatever pile of snow or dirt is in front of him.  Of course, I found that darling.  He’s been with us for two weeks now, and I’m already wondering if they make crate pads that are indestructible: he’s dug through at least one bed and is working on finding China on the other side of a couple others.  It’s not the fact that I’m totally nonplussed about this digging that really lets me know how far gone I am, though: it’s my total inability to get upset about Cody’s aim.  Obviously, I’ve never had a male dog before.  Although I wasn’t surprised to see that Cody squats when he has to “do his business” rather than raising a leg, I was a bit surprised to see how poor his aim is, as far as most humans would see it.  Cody continually manages to hit his front left leg whenever he pees.  You’d think this would gross me out or, at least, bother me a little.  But I think it’s hysterical!  I joke about it with my husband, and I don’t even fret when I realize I’ve forgotten to wipe off his leg after coming inside.  I’ll even cuddle with him in spite of knowing where his leg’s “been.” 

Perhaps it’s not so much that I’m attracted to mischievous male puppies that makes me adore our Cody already.  He’s incredibly affectionate and loves to snuggle.  When he’s sleeping, he looks like a little angel.  A former puppy mill dog, he’s been through a lot in a short time, and it’s clear that he’s still learning to trust that things can be good in his life. The need to protect and comfort him runs strong in me.  But the way I respond to his crazy antics, in spite of my usual need to control the universe, tells me that something is definitely different with this one.  I guess I’ll have to admit it: I’m attracted to bad boys…just as long as they’re canine.

Binary Categories

"[When we try to subject people to binary categories]...we call into question the very ground beneath their feet. Gay or straight? Men or women? Male or female? Transgendered or intersex? We know the reality of the situation.....that every time you draw a line, it slices through someone's tender flesh."

-Raven Kaldera

"Wouldn't it be wonderful to take all the evil people and put them over there, then we wouldn't have to deal with them. And all of us good people would stay right here. The problem is that the line separating good and evil cuts right through the human heart."

-Alexander Solzenitzen

When I read the first quote (posted in March on Facebook by a woman I respect greatly, Robyn Ochs), I immediately thought of the second, which has been my friend Lianne's signature quote on our diet board for what feels like years. I think "the line separating" us into one thing (gay, female, etc.) from another (straight, male, etc.)--if it even exists--is just like the line separating good and evil. It "cuts right through the human heart." It's a lesson I learned early on in my journey into myself.

As I learned more about the T (Transgendered) and I (Intersex) members of our LGBTI & Q community, I discovered that I'm not the only one who feels safer when everyone can be categorized into a little, labeled box. In some sense, all of us are a bit "OCD"--we want everything to be black and white. We feel more comfortable believing that everything is binary and there are only two options. You are either one or you are the other. Period. No grey. You are either a man or a woman. You cannot be both, and there is certainly no "other" category. Or so we want to believe...

Of course, human beings are no more easily categorized as "gay" or "straight" than they are "good" or "evil." It takes time to come to understand that--to realize that whether we're comfortable admitting it or not, we all lie at some point on a spectrum, and that point can move (sometimes more than once) during our lifetimes. I believe our sexuality is fluid. To some extent, I believe our gender is, too (though our sex is not, at least not without help...). But it is certainly on a spectrum. There are those that take femininity to the max (I'm thinking RuPaul here, personally. ;) ). There are those that take masculinity just as far, and then there are those of us in the "middle." The tomboys, the metrosexuals, the butches, the femmes, the genderqueer, the slightly masculine women, the slightly feminine men. (For more info, check out these interesting charts comparing the western gender spectrum and the gender spectrum present in some other cultures. You might also find this article from the NY Times interesting.)

Though the concept of gender being on a spectrum like sexuality was new to me, that wasn't too hard for me to accept. I have super sporty girlfriends who are very masculine in appearance and personality, and I certainly knew my share of guys "in touch with their feminine side" in drama class. What was a bit difficult for me was the idea that one's gender doesn't, in fact, have anything to do with your sexuality. When I think about it, it does make tons of sense--while there were a couple of gay men in my drama classes (some of whom didn't come out until well after HS), most of the guys who were "in touch with their feminine sides" exclusively dated women at the time, and are now married to women. I can't tell you what they believe their sexuality to be, but I figure they lie more towards the heterosexual side of the spectrum in spite of being somewhat "feminine" in their gender expression. I've now come to embrace the reality that those who express a gender outside the norm are not any more likely to have a sexual interest in the same sex as those whose gender is inside the norm.

It's sometimes a lot to take in--the concept that things aren't black and white. I have a really hard time with it in my life in spite of the things I've learned. Some of my friends have personal interests that are anathema to me, yet I adore them, which is a big challenge for me. My affection for them forces me to learn to accept these friends as they are and admit that I can love someone who does things I think are bad. It stretches my soul and my capacity to love, and I think that's a good thing.

I think it's beneficial for all of us. But if you don't feel ready to do some soul stretching, please keep in mind that your desire to keep things in binary categories just might "slice someone's tender flesh," and act accordingly.

Sexy?

   I recently came across the following photo, which features Victoria "Posh" Beckham, posed to sell Armani lingerie.

Sexy? More like "scary!"

   I found the photo in an article entitled Victoria Beckham bends over backwards to look sexy in another smouldering Armani lingerie ad. Obviously, the marketing team at Armani believe that Beckham looks the way one would want to look while wearing their lingerie, since it's hard to sell clothing by featuring someone wearing it that looks awful. People tend to buy clothing that looks beautiful and sexy on others in hopes that we will look just as good, simply by putting it on. That fact, plus the title and copy of the article, lead me to believe that more than one person finds Posh attractive in this photo--some even find her "smoldering."

   Count me out. I find this photo incredibly disturbing. After I noticed the lovely contrast of shadows on her skin, the shocking realization hit me: those shadows were caused by the incredibly deep hollows of a human being's emaciated body. I immediately thought of the black and white photos I've seen of concentration camp victims during the holocaust. And of the body of one of my dear friends, who has battled anorexia and won, but still has trouble with feeling okay in her own skin, in spite of the fact that her wrists look like they could be snapped by a stiff breeze. In a word, this photo is scary.

   I shared it with a group of women I respect deeply, with whom I had bonded over a common dedication to losing weight in a healthy, slow way. Since we've expressed similar views on health being far more important than one's weight, I felt sharing this with them would mean sharing it with like-minded people. Much to my surprise, while some found the pose itself to blame for Posh's razor-like hip bones, the majority felt that the photo was not scary, as I believed, but very sexy. Some even expressed that they wish they looked as she does. This was enough to have me sobbing in my nutritionist's office...sobbing for me, for my sisters, for the young girls who are being influenced by this even now, and for these women, who, even in their dedication to health and feeling good about themselves, have been unable to exorcise the demons of media-defined beauty.

   Please know that I'm not saying that I find thin bodies ugly. Naturally thin and healthy bodies, such as my friend "M" has, are both lovely and sexy. I know M well enough to be fully aware that she eats regularly and healthfully, and that her thin body is a natural shape for her. She's an avid runner, and this ensures that she's usually very slim. M radiates health and peace from her willowy frame.

   I think, frankly, that there's beauty in every frame. As Eve Ensler said, we all need to "love our tree," whatever the shape of our trunk and branches. I don't want even Posh to feel bad about how she looks. But I find it difficult to believe that Posh's shape is a result of healthy living. I think, instead, that she's suffering from an eating disorder, and the media has chosen to glorify the results as the pinnacle of beauty. It's a standard which few can meet, and most who try will find themselves ill or even dead as a result.

   I am trying my best to feel good about who I am and who I will be when I reach my goal weight. I'll have hips--juicy ones, at that--compliments of my Eastern European ancestors. I'll have high cheekbones and chubby cheeks. I have large "curves" above and below. And though I'll have hipbones, they are unlikely to cut like a knife. I'll have thick, powerful legs with defined muscles, and my arms, though slightly flabby underneath, will be muscled too. I'm almost there in some areas and still working on it in the meantime. But I hurt when I think about how others feel about their own bodies as a result of photos like this one of Beckham. I wish there were some way for me to flood the industry wth images of beauty that show women's shapes in all their glory. Here are two images that do that...though the first is more inspirational (the second is just funny...):

Nike "Big Butt" Ad

Curves "Motivational" poster

   What do you think? Are you able to escape the media's definition of beauty? How can we deal with this issue? I'd love to talk about it!