Seeing myself from the inside out

My father was really big on appearance, especially women’s appearance. I find it difficult to even go to these places in my memory because of the very deep pain. How he looked at women. How he behaved toward certain women. How he berated my mother and me and my sister. The unattainable standard he lifted up and worshiped. When I was young, I picked up on a message: your outer beauty defines you. It is what makes you valuable (or not). This message seems indelibly marked on my soul and I cannot escape it sometimes.

I cannot escape it and I can never measure up to the standard that has been etched in my consciousness. This is the source of almost all of my struggle and sorrow.

My father liked to look at Playboy and Penthouse magazines. He collected them. Stacks of them. When I was eleven or so and my parents were gone, I used to go into his room and get some of those magazines down. I looked at the pictures. I read and learned about sex. My entire perception of beauty and sexuality was formed from pornography. My parents never explained sex and sexuality to me. How could they? Their understanding of it was completely broken. So their avoided that topic. My education came from airbrushed lies.

I knew this was what my father valued, so I unconsciously adopted it as my ideal: to be sexually attractive, to capture the eyes of men, to be outwardly beautiful. If I could capture their attention, I could have the love and acceptance and security that I had craved from my father. And because I could never, ever, actually be one of those women in those magazines, I realize now that way back then, I created an imaginary life where I was just as beautiful as they were, just as captivating. I built this imaginary existence in which every eye turned toward me. I was one of the women in those magazines, perfectly beautiful, perfectly posed. The only thing that would break this reverie was seeing myself in a picture. I hate pictures of myself. Seeing one picture of myself snapped in a candid moment can throw me into a pit of despair for weeks. For my entire life, I have imagined that I was something I was not. Do you realize how utterly insane this is? How sadly delusional? I didn’t realize it. I do now and I am afraid for myself.

I cannot adequately express the damage this has done to me that is still being discovered and undone. I am sure that this madness I created for myself has broken me in unspeakable ways that will just continue to come to the surface as I grow older.

I’m sure that the written word is hollow and wholly inadequate to describe the pain of this thing that I carry around. I have not known who I really am and now I have the doubly hard task of coming to terms with who I am by stripping away vain imaginations and seeing myself as I am, AND learning to re-orient my idea of what makes me valuable. Trust me, this is much, much more difficult than it seems. Someone who doesn’t struggle with such a deep-seated brokenness would probably say, ok, you’ve realized it, now just don’t do it anymore.

If you’ve ever seen the movie Memento, let me share with you that, in a sense, I am Leonard. Leonard has a memory disorder in which the last thing he can remember is seeing his wife attacked and killed. After that, he has been unable to make new memories. In other words, he forgets everything he experiences, each day, within moments. In order to compensate, he tattoos himself with important information. To him, important information means anything that will lead him closer to the person who killed his wife.

I am like Leonard. My memory is frozen at the traumatic realization that I can never be the things that my father gave me as ideals. Even though I am “re-programming” myself with the Truth of who I am and what my true ideals are, it seems to slip away over and over again and my original programming: you’re a sham, you’re disgusting, did you see that picture of yourself, look at that roll of fat, look at how small your breasts are, look how big your ass has gotten. If you think this is easy for me to express, let me assure you, this is shaping up to be a very difficult post for me to write.

What I was, and what I am, is a person who is beautiful from the inside out, with some nice qualities on the outside too. An amazing person on the inside, a fairly average person from outer appearances. What I have to constantly tell myself is that is a really cool thing. Sometimes I feel like I start to believe it, too. But underneath the “good” voice that I seem to control, is the “bad” voice that I can’t make shut up, that sometimes I can’t hear, but that is always there like the sound of the highway that drifts over the neighborhoods below. What the bad voice keeps telling me, maddeningly, over and over again, is that being average, middle-aged, and yes, overweight, is not cool at all and makes me a complete and utter failure and it makes me want to hide and sometimes even makes me want to die. I’m sure this sounds completely odd to some people. For others, it may just make sense. And I guess that is why I am willing to share this with basically everyone on the planet. It might help someone to show them what I live with, what no one else, except maybe Darin, sees.

If you’re someone who collects pornography or looks at it online, I don’t condemn you. We are free agents and I am all about liberty. What I would ask you to do is to consider the effects you may have on those around you. I’m quite sure my father, who is dead now for over 12 years, did not realize what he did to me. Or to my mother. Or, I am sure, to my sisters. Or to himself. And it doesn’t end there. The effects continue on in my children, to my husband, to my grandchildren. We are all experiencing the healing that comes from knowing Truth and being set free, but the consequences of seemingly small actions are great and long-lasting.

I am going to be OK. God has given me a great treasure in my husband, who has shown me the love of Jesus in countless ways and has been a friend, a lover, and a father to me. Jesus shines through Darin to me and I have healed so much in so many ways. If you don’t know who Jesus is, please ask him to introduce himself to you. Just talk to him. He won’t be pushy or religious. If something is pushy or religious or condemning in your life, it isn’t Jesus, and you can discard it.

Tags: beauty, brokenness, Jesus, pornography, sex