Never Walked In High Heels

I was brought up with a relatively conservative background for a modern woman. At a young age, we were taught that we were to be careful about relationships we had, particularly amongst those of the opposite sex. We were to prize our bodies and under no circumstances were we to appear unnecessarily scandalous. Later, I revised the last point to add the word “unnecessary” as opposed to simply “scandalous” because after all, sometimes a little bit of scandal was fashionable. Therefore, when I called my mother late last night, I was expecting her to drop the phone on the floor. What I was not expecting was for her to commence laughing so hysterically that it took her a good fifteen minutes of me begging to finally bring her back to some sort of order.

It went like this: Last night my room mate was out of town for a single night and I was home alone. I had instructed a male neighbor of mine who happens to be one of my closest friends here to come over and plug in my electric chair at the end of the evening since I am unable to manipulate the cord by myself. He agreed that he would come by shortly after midnight and I left a key for him to get in. At approximately eleven o’clock, I decided that there is no point in waiting up for someone who is perfectly capable of plugging in an electric wheelchair on their own. So I began to get ready for bed. Shortly thereafter, I was attempting to undress myself and managed to get caught in my own white knit shirt.

Under normal situations, this never would have been a problem. Of course if my room mate were in town she would be helping me with my nightly duties. However, when I awoke that morning and carefully picked out my outfit for the day it came to me that I would be spending the evening alone and thus wanted my garments according to what I could get on and off with my own volition, or so I thought. By the time eleven thirty had rolled around, it was clear to me that because I was so warm from attempting in vain to remove my shirt, that I would never be able to get it off in such a state of panic which I had inevitably worked myself into.

In one last try, I attempted to pull the bottom of the shirt up over my head. This too was unsuccessful, and I had managed to loop the shirt around the back of my neck with my arms still completely in the sleeves. I had now reached a desperate measure and at eleven thirty-five, stuck in a shirt, late at night, I began to call all the female neighbors I could think of.

By the time I attempted to reach the sixth woman on my list, I heard my door unlocking and at that realized that my worst nightmare had indeed come true. I made my way downstairs tangled up in my white collared shirt.

Despite my embarrassment, my friend was more than happy to rescue me from my clothing malfunction. Finally reporting that he actually enjoyed “Rescuing damsels in such deep and disturbing distress.” At which point I raised my hand, forever clenched in that stereotypical quadriplegic fist, and I said “Guess which finger I would like to show you.”

On the one hand it was without a doubt one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. That having been said, there is something that, despite my conservative upbringing and my vain attempts to follow Jesus, I have managed to avoid, a much needed lesson which I needed to learn long before now.

Your best friends are the ones which you will doubtlessly be willing to break all the rules, even the rules of propriety for. Fortunately for me, my neighbor is one of those people who I will not only allow to see me vulnerable, but also see me completely humiliated, sweaty, frustrated, entangled in a shirt which is usually a simple on/off. Despite my embarrassment and the fact that I was on the verge of tears, he looked at me dead in the eye and said, “It’s no big deal. I have helped loads of girls take their shirts off before.”

Thank God for that.

            During my twentieth year, I had gotten the remarkable ability to lose time.  I could sit in my dorm room and watch the wall hoping that nothing would happen. And then my roommate would come in and ask me down to dinner, forcing me to look at my wall clock and see that over four hours of my life had gone missing. Sometimes I would find myself in a bathtub full of water staring at my razor blade  at 3:30 in the morning, having no idea how  I got there. It was like little green men had come and taken me, the essence of who I was, and left a shell which was too stupid to know to stop. And because I kept going through the motions, everyone thought I was fine.

            By the time four months slipped away from me (according to the calendar) I was gone. Everything that was characteristic about me had vanished. I couldn’t even recognize my own body in a mirror. I had a diagnosis, which frankly may as well been in Japanese. I knew what it was called, I had read about it during AP Psychology in high school.  I knew the literary context of it from English classes. I knew back then it only developed in extreme circumstances, back when I was eighteen I knew that I would never get it. Now I knew that logic was wrong. I knew all these facts, I just didn’t know what to do about it.

            I ‘snapped out of it’ next to find myself lying down on the back pew at our campus church. I heard singing. I heard bongos.  I pieced together that I was at our Thursday  night worship service. It was Thursday. Huh, who knew? I stayed there staring up at the ceiling, too heavy to move. People walked out by me. Suddenly my friend Ashley came into my vision.

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.”

            “What?”

            “I need you to pose nude for me this weekend. I’ve asked nearly every other one of my friends and nobody has the balls to do it. I have a painting due next week. So now I’m telling you. I need you to pose nude for me this weekend.” I don’t know what I was expecting Ashley to say, maybe ‘you look tired’ or ‘I’m worried about you.’ All I know is this wasn’t how most people climbed out of the depths of despair. But I agreed.

            For most women, the idea off stripping of all clothes and letting someone sit there with an easel and study you is horrifying. Not for me.  Body image is, unbelievably, one of the few struggles I have never had to deal with. Maybe it comes from the fact that my body is utterly uncooperative anyway. As a movement teacher in drama school once told me: “You can just tell, your brain says ‘do it’ and your body says ‘fuck you.’”

            All of which was probably just as well at this point. I have no recollection of that Friday and when I ‘snapped out of it’ again I was lying on my side, Ashley readjusting my hair over my bare shoulder, my arm straining to reach the edge of sunlight. She looked at me with the eyes of an artist, selecting what to paint and highlight as a metaphysical recreation.  Her eyes shifted back and forth from the canvas to my skin with the level of observation like a scientist. Her brown hair fell into her eyes every few minutes when she forgot herself.

            To let someone paint you, see you without obstacles and barriers and then interpret it for an audience, means they know everything. Not simply every scar or mole, but she knows you from observation and study, much like a scientist would know his subject. And yet she deems you a worthy subject to reproduce. As I stared up at the ceiling, feeling the ruffles of the cloth underneath me, I felt at rest. For the first time in months I didn’t have to explain or excuse anything. She just spoke quietly about her own thoughts and reactions so I could gather my own.

            It takes being naked and having nothing sometimes to regain something. That day I got the smallest part of myself and my pride back. This is me. I need nothing else. I am lovely. It’s okay to be naked and have no excuses. Within this feeble state you will be made perfect.

            And I sat there, naked, aware of every moment. I still haven’t forgotten a second of those three hours in November.