I just got back from our annual trip to Ogunquit, Maine.  As always, it was a nice break from our desk jobs/bills/aging parents/if something goes wrong in the house WE have to fix it reality.

It was not, however, a wholesale break from giving myself a break.  It usually isn’t.

It was one day of waiting until the pool was free of fellow guests so I could go down and swim laps, because I didn’t want anyone to see me in a bathing suit.  It was frantically calculating how much I was “allowed” to eat (if I walk the Marginal Way twice, I can have ice cream).  On vacation.  I did this ON VACATION.

I was on vacation, and I couldn’t get away from myself.

Listen, it’s tiresome.  I know this, but I am hard-wired, to a degree, for self-hatred.  I’ve long since stopped trying to force my body to conform to a standard that is simply not realistic.  At 40, I am too damn tired to keep fighting my genes.  But self-worth as defined by the number on my scale or the tag on my dress is still an issue.

Our bodies are our bodies, and if you’re 5’10” and a size 2 and you’re not killing yourself to look that way, fantastic.  I just wish that – well – you weren’t the standard by which the rest of us are being measured.  I would like mainstream media to acknowledge beauty in all its shapes and sizes.  I would like to see someone who’s – for example – 5’4″ and a size 8.  Or 5’2″ and a size 12.  Or 6’1″ and a 1X.  Whatever.  SOMETHING ELSE PLEASE.  Are we really that difficult to photograph?  To design for?  To LOOK AT?

And so I fought with myself all week in Ogunquit, calling myself things that I would never in a million years call my friends and loved ones.  Until we decided to go to the museum. There, tucked into the corner of the Barn Gallery Associates Wing, were a couple of sketches by Gaston Lachaise. Bellies, thighs, breasts. I walked around the museum, but I kept going back to those sketches. In just a few strokes, there was this palpable reverence for a body that was so similar to my own.

As soon as I got back, I fired up the laptop and absorbed as much as I could about Lachaise. His inspiration was his wife, Isabel.

Isabel would be his lifelong muse.  Her figure was something to be celebrated, adored, immortalized.

And you know, I recognized these sculptures.  It’s not as if I’m not aware of the preponderance of art that is entirely appreciative of women like me.  But this was the first time I really GOT IT.  Gaston thought Isabel was the most beautiful woman alive.  I look in the mirror and see something pretty damn similar, and I think (at my nicest): “You know, you could stand to maybe skip lunch today.”  I won’t even repeat what I tell myself at my worst.

What am I doing?  That up there is BEAUTIFUL.  I am beautiful.  Who CARES what the people at the pool think?