Textual Poaching

Selfie

"It doesn't happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easy, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

--Marjorie Williams Bianco, "The Velveteen Rabbit"

        I don’t know what my body looks like. Does that seem strange? This vessel I live in-- have lived in since birth—should be the most concrete thing in my life. I should be able to look at my body and be comforted by its constancy. By its reality. By my ownership of it. But I can’t.
        Body Dysmorphic Disorder is characterized by obsessive thoughts about trivial or nonexistent flaws in one’s body, often resulting in a distorted body perception and deep shame.
        My body is an enigma to me. Every time I see it in the mirror, it looks different than it did before. Distorted, somehow, and new, with varied imperfections popping up every time I scrutinize it. Sometimes it feels like the mirror is melting in front of me, distorting my perception of myself beyond recognizability, beyond hope, beyond love.
        The only way I know what I look like is through old pictures. Pictures taken months or years ago, where my face and body are captured inalterably in time. Pictures don’t shift. They aren’t projections of my perceptions, they simply are, and I can usually trust the way I look in them.
        “Selfie” explores this fragmented, constructivist way I see myself. I photoshopped identity-defining photos of my body, my eyes, my nose, my torso, my hands, and even my favorite hairstyle over a Jean Metzinger's "Tea Time" painting. True to its cubist heritage, this painting looks like a shattered conglomeration flesh-colored shapes. It suggests a body with shape and form and color, but it remains abstract. Disjointed. Unsure of its own reality. Cubist paintings explore visual existence from every point of perception. Pieced together from these shards of ulterior perspective, cubism almost perfectly represents the way I have found my body. My body is a hodgepodge of old social media photographs pieced together into a frankenstinian reality—still distorted, maybe, but significantly more realistic than the way I see myself in the mirror.
        The longer I exist with my cubist body, the more I understand Marjorie Bianco’s quote from “The Velveteen Rabbit”. With the help of old pictures, other perspectives, and the ideals of cubism, my body is slowly Becoming. Becoming what? Something perfect? Something untainted by distortion? Not quite. My body may never become something constant, but it can become Real to me. My disjointed perception probably won’t be beautiful—like Bianco's rabbit, I’ll have handled it and obsessed over it so many times that my perception gets shabby and overworked. At least I’ll have that perception, though. And I think any perception, new or worn, loved or unloved, is beautiful as long as it’s Real.