I took some more photographs of myself today, frontal and side. I might still upload them but they didn’t turn out very well. I mean that in a technical sense. Things are not stacked up in my home office in the same way they were at the beginning of July, and I’m having a hard time placing my camera such that I get good mostly-full-body shots.
I do have a full-sized tripod and I couldn’t tell you why I didn’t just drag it out and use it. I can be short on common sense oftener than I’d like.
Not that I’m thrilled at seeing myself in a photograph anyway. It helps knowing that people see me every day and with the exception of one person several months ago, nobody’s called me names since I put on all this weight. I guess I must be passable, then. But knowing what I looked like at eighteen and how much I’ve decayed does little for my self-image.
What really got my attention this time around was the uneven boob size. Since I finished puberty they’ve been different sizes anyway, but it wasn’t glaringly obvious. Now, thanks to size changes and stretch-mark-induced sag, it is. The being larger and deflated I could probably deal with; the pointing mostly to the floor I might have been all right with; the looking head on at a torso shot of myself and seeing one boob seemingly half the size of the other (or close to it), well, I don’t cope so well with that.
It’s kind of sad because I didn’t have much to speak of as far as boob size when I was eighteen. Now that I’ve got boobs they’re not behaving. Oh, the irony.
Even when (I refuse to say “if”) the extra weight’s gone, my problems aren’t over. And it isn’t just that I’ll have to wear a bra to get things under control, something with which I am not bothering right now because I’d just have to buy another one in a few months. It’s that I don’t know what my midriff will look like but I’m pretty sure it’ll be a wreck. It’s that my jawline’s probably gone for good too, and it was never great to begin with. It’s that when you make your skin hold in more than it was genetically encoded to hold in, bad things happen to your appearance.
I’m trying to be optimistic. My face will surely look better when I don’t have ten extra pounds on it. It is a wreck at present. I look like I’ve gone without sleep for five years. I’ve got sun damage; particularly, a brown spot under each eye, neither of which existed five years ago. I’ve got what appear to be permanent creases under my eyes as well, as though I spent that five years tossing and turning and digging my face into my pillow. I’m a fright.
Again, I wasn’t model material at eighteen, but I didn’t look like this. And only some of it is normal aging.
So, sometimes I kind of wonder why I’m bothering if I’m going to look like hell at the end of this as well as I do now. I guess I will at least be able to say I can fit into normal sizes, which will mean normal clothes prices and being able to find clothes at thrift stores without too much trouble and so on and so forth.
I gotta say, though: I consider myself a feminist, but a boob job and several trips to the dermatologist sound REALLY good to me about now. And the idea of elective surgery terrifies me with all these drug-resistant bugs going around in hospitals now, but if I had the money and could guarantee I wouldn’t catch any of those bugs, you better bet I’d go ahead. I feel like I wasted the years in which I looked good through stupidity and short-sightedness and it’d be nice to have a do-over there, too. Barring that, I’d at least settle for looking less Night Of The Living Dead.
This extended moment of whining, self-centered vanity brought to you by WordPress. Hey, at least it was free.
