Letter from Inside Your Skin
Recently, one of our class assignments was to write a letter based on Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail." We had to choose an audience to address our letter to, and I thought it would be fun and enlightening to write to myself (I did a similar assignment based on a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, but it's even more embarrassingly self-reflective than this, if possible.).
I think this is something worth sharing, because more people need to hear this. In my attempts to convince myself of the message, I hope I can persuade others to believe in its validity.
As much as this is a love letter to myself, it is one to you, as well.
Dear Me,
I’ve seen the way you see. I’ve seen the way you look at the mirror and rip and poke and tug and tear. I’ve seen the way you burn your gaze into the buffering red numbers before three digits pop up, while you hope someday, they can miraculously become two or one or just disappear, in a poof. I’ve also seen the way you refuse to see. I’ve seen you avoid eye contact with your own reflection because you can’t bear you anymore. I’ve seen you ignore the numbers printed on a black-edged label on the back of Costco food packages. I’ve seen you tear your eyes away from the flutter of delicate legs, the stretches of taut bellies, the neat angles of tidy jaws and elegant arms. As the consciousness inside you, who has been with you through hardship and heartbreak, I believe it would not be unreasonable for me to ask you to stop, and see me and you as we are.
Let us repeat together, “there is nothing wrong with you.” There is nothing wrong with you. Maybe you could have eaten more vegetables as a kid so you would be taller, maybe you could have skipped the fifth snacking session you’ve had on those coconut chips so you could forgo the extra pinch of softness on your sides. But that is in the past, this is a part of you, and your family and culture has helped you develop and cherish a core belief that food, especially sweets, is one of the most blessed pleasures to derive from living. Every dedication to a belief comes at a trade-off. In this case, you trade off beauty standards, a number competition, for an extra burst of happiness on your taste-buds. How could you shame yourself for that? And how can you shame yourself for needing to study or to take a nap or to eat a snack to recharge, and needing to miss a day of working out? Your occupation is not one of a model or celebrity or workout guru, but of a student.
I understand how you cannot face this truth, the truth that you are still worthy of living even if you don’t think you look perfect enough to be worthy of living. I understand why you bemoan how you are still binge-eating to deal with stress, and when you complain how other girls can eat twice as much as you yet still look like bikini models. I understand, because self-control is necessary to live a dignified life, and self-pity is inevitable when genetics bestows faster metabolism to the chosen few. Nevertheless, I know there is a kind soul inside of you, and that you wholeheartedly believe in the authenticity of others and in embracing the differences of everyone you meet. You loved, love people for their ideas, their imperfections, their words, their minds, their hearts. Why can’t you do the same for me, for yourself?
The dizziness of sweaty ecstasy after your self-imposed Pilates sessions; the spew of words from your head that map themselves into mosaics; the exhausted grin you manage after hours of cramming facts into your brain, when you realize you have fought tooth-and-nail for a grade, and won; your friends’ whoops of encouragement whenever you do anything, even something as silly as solving a math problem; the stream of music notes twinkling in your headphones as your heart croons back to you; the tender warmth on your cheek when your sister presses hers against yours; and, the one spring Sunday afternoon where you joke with your mom and dad, unfamiliar tones rolling in your mouth, and point out the cute turtles in the pond as the fountains sprinkle faint rainbows into the sky; I ask you to remember. Because that is what you will say, at the end of a long day, is you, is us.
As the inhabitant of your skin, I’ll be around for as long as you are. No matter what we look like, together, we’ll always be a strange little universe on this planet. Let’s love us, nurture us and encourage us, so we can bloom.
Your companion,
Vanessa
