As a human, what truly feeds, sustains, and nourishes me is the amount of time that I spend engaging, interacting, and being with others (as well as other creatures/things).
I am extremely fortunate to engage with a community of dancers weekly, some of whom have been consistently meeting together for the past twenty years. In this milieu, and in this environment where a platform of non-verbal communication is agreed upon, I am provided the space to work through the crises and neuroses of my own everyday life. Sometimes, I even find dance partners who are willing to negotiate with me. My time spent here, twisting, twirling, and talking, ripples out in concentric circles into the other facets, compartments, and arenas, of my meager existence.
More and more, I have been enjoying stopping by Mario's coffee shop for my refill of daily java. Ever the keen entrepreneur, Mario's shop is staffed by a bevy of beautiful babes, a gaggle of gorgeous girls. This little fact does not always delight me. It isn't the girls, or the understanding that there is something about this dynamic that Mario really likes, in so much as it is about some of the customers. Usually men, more specifically, who ride on through with eyes sparkling of objectification. This drinking in of womanhood and distilling it down to simply sex and symmetry really gets my guard up. Why is this, - especially when I can so easily object myself? Hell, if I objected myself more often, then maybe I'd be more "successful" than I am today. It isn't it this, though.
What it is, is this: as woman, it is easy to believe that your power is situated in the amount of attention you accrue from members of the opposite sex (specifically, white men). It is so easy to forget the small things that feed you and to, instead, focus on the superficial, - on the hair cuts, on the cute shoes, and on the shopping at Target. On the glances that come your way, and on the men who want more, - a name, a number, a date, an opportunity for sex.
Sex is great, don't get me wrong. I'm not advocating for celibacy here. I'm just saying that my sex is only skin deep. And, when I forget this...
Case in point: One of Mario's employees, and friends, is super cute. At only twenty-five years of age, she has spent a short lifetime attracting the not-always- desired attention of males. With dark, olive skin and exotic features, her petite frame is fawned over. Men and boys, literally, froth at the mouth in their wanting of her, of her sex, of whatever fantasy her visual image conjures up in their small brains.
For the past few years, I have witnessed her sense of self wither amidst this unasked for, and even undeserved (after all, she really has nothing to do with the genes she was given at birth), absorption. She has spent too many days, weeks, and months, not eating, purging what little amount of food she did partake of, and then drinking excessively (given her weight and size). Desperately, she sought to retain control of this self-perceived "power." Naturally, she would always fall short of maintaining it. For, it was always just an illusion.
In her 'Reading Lolita in Tehran,' Azar Nafisi writes: “Dreams are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.” (page 144) Today, however, when I pulled my sputtering Volvo into the black paved parking lot of the coffee shop, I looked out of my windshield with glee as my eyes fell upon this same, young woman.
Today, she has filled in her hard edges with soft curves. Her angular body no longer has a strained, taut appearance. She looks comfortable, vibrant, and happy. She is in love, and she is actively working through the day-to-day of taking care, - of caring for both herself and another.
In Elizabeth Gilbert's "Eat, Pray, Love" (which I also highly recommend right along with Nafisi's book), Gilbert writes of her travels through Italy:
"I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late - through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures - into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamental human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist now more than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person - the magnification of one life - is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own." (page 115)
