Appeasing the vanity

Though I usually forget about it, seeing a picture of myself reminds me of it like a smack in the face. My nose has been spotted for the past ten years, marked by my third nose ring, an ill-advised silver stud that tattooed its tarnish into my right nostril. I am paralyzingly self-conscious about it when I think of it. I believe it looks like rot on my skin.

And for years, my dad has supported me (yet solidifying the insecurity) by saying he'll pay for me to have it removed. For some reason, I finally took the steps this summer to have it done.

It's appallingly expensive, how much laser procedures cost. I finally found a place that is less pricey than others I researched, but still run by doctors. It's located on the Gold Coast in downtown Chicago, a swank clinic led by the most bosomy, golden-skinned receptionists I've ever seen. The whole office is posh, and I felt a smidge out of place there in my cut-off jean shorts and dirty tennis shoes.

Mostly, though, I didn't care. I was paying for my own procedures, just like the glossy, manicured ladies who sat next to me, waiting, on the velvet couches. I don't have time anymore, to feel self-conscious. If I really cared about what others think of my appearance, I would have to spend more time applying makeup and deciding what uncomfortable shoes to wear.

That might not appear true, however, considering I'm getting a sort of cosmetic surgery. However, a big grey spot seems different than sun spots on my cheeks, or even a pimple. It just looks unnatural. And I'm getting sick of people saying, "um . . . you have something on your nose," or even (and I'm not even lying, this has actually happened multiple times) licking their finger and trying to rub the spot off themselves. (Obviously, those people were strangers, who did not know what the spot was--which is even more disturbing.)

So I was photographed in a "pre" shot, by an employee who cheerfully told me about her own breast implants, done eleven years ago, then ushered to a cubicle with the machinery. The door opened, and I thought another patient was passing by, but it was actually the nurse. She was a blonde goddess, with flawless skin and fabulous, indubitably silicone, cleavage. She bent over me with the laser gun, sting, sting, sting, my right eye emptied a waterfall onto my cheek, and less than five minutes later, she put away her tool and dispensed some skin care advice. For that whole experience, I paid $150. (And there's even no guarantee the laser will break up the spot and make it disappear, since the doctor who consulted on me has only ever done ink tattoos. There's no precedent for silver tarnish tattoos.)

I know, I know, I know about the dangers of sun damage, but I just can't get myself all worked up over her words of doom about "age spots." I kind of don't care. I have more angst over my eye wrinkles right now. I'm not going to wrap myself up like a mummy every summer. I don't mind the aging process (in some ways!). I feel like it's a slippery slope to start worrying about those kinds of things, anyway. Millions of dollars later, and hours spent in close examination at the mirror, I'm still going to continue to get older, and my body will show that off. It's nice to realize I'm not kowtowing any longer to society's pressure to maintain youthful perfection. So much less to worry about.

Camp

I listened to This American Life today; it was a rerun from 1998 about camp stories. It reminded me so much about my own camp experiences, and my heart ached a little at missing it so much. Things ended really badly for me--no perfect final summer to round out my memories--so for the longest time, I pushed thoughts to the back of my mind and when I thought about it at all, it was while sleeping, in nightmares.

But the truth is, mostly camp was a little crystalline bubble of perfection, an escape from the normal angst of teenage years, a wooded oasis of peace for six summers. I'd give anything to be able to return in some capacity. Like maybe there's a summer camp out there in the wilds of Wisconsin or Michigan who needs a social worker on staff?

I felt like I was a completely different person there. Still me, I suppose, but electrified. (The things I would do to make a kid laugh . . .) Maybe I remembered being a camper--of course I did--and as a counselor I wanted to make sure the kids took away wonderful memories like I had.

Two things stick out in my mind as important and special. The second year I counseled, during a junior high week, we had Invitational during vespers. The invitational was the one night during the week where we took communion and invited everyone in camp to accept Jesus into their heart. For campers who had been coming back summer after summer, this was a meaningful tradition, and the cabin chosen lead vespers tried its hardest to make the service a tearjerker. The counselors stayed behind to talk to any kid who needed it. Technically, this was for discussing spiritual issues, but inevitably kids who had gone through rough patches, like losing a friend or having parents get divorced, would stay to cry on someone's shoulder. I don't remember what happened at the service, or after, I just remember going back to the cabin and putting the girls to bed and laying down myself. A few minutes after I turned out the lights, one of my girls got me, and said another camper was crying. I crawled up to the girl's top bunk, and said, "sweetie, what's wrong?"

I wasn't the type who called people "sweetie" or "honey," but the girl was crying so hard that it slipped out of my mouth before I knew what I was saying.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" and I gathered her in my arms.

She said, with difficulty through her sobs, that she didn't know whether or not she had Jesus in her heart. How do you know if you do?

That was a conundrum for me as well. I was supposed to be some sort of spiritual advisor for these girls, yet I wasn't even sure how I felt about things myself. At that very moment, I didn't know if I had Jesus in my heart. Was he supposed to wave and say hi once he got there or what? And since he hadn't, did that mean he hadn't shown up? I was only 18 or 19, fairly new to Christianity myself, and not 100% sold on it. Honestly, I think I was a camp counselor more for the kids and less because I was an avid Christian.

But you don't say that to an 11-year-old kid in spiritual crisis. You don't admit that you have no answers when she's sobbing and looking to you to ease her pain somehow.

So I asked her things about her belief, and I talked about how you never know anything for sure--you just have to believe. And believing makes things real. She stopped crying, and thanked me, and we both went back to sleep.

I don't know why this ranks up at the top of my experiences, but it seems so special to me.

The second thing happened my final year of counseling, for the most part, a pretty miserable time because of my co-counselors, not because of the kids. Senior high week towards the end, we had a closing ceremony for the graduating seniors--yet another opportunity to wring the most possible tears out of an evening. This particular class was special to me. They had been freshman when I was a senior, so I had been both camper with and counselor to them. After the ceremony, one boy said he had something important to talk to me about, and could we go for a walk. We ended up sitting by the lake under the stars. I was slightly nervous, because I knew I had to be careful about anything with the slightest hint of inappropriateness, and a counselor and camper of opposite sexes off somewhere alone could fall into that category. But he and I had been friends since we'd met, at a youth rally four years before.

He talked about meeting me then. As a senior, Kurt Cobain and grunge had finally hit Marion, and I embraced the combat boots, flannel shirts, and what Hannah called my "elephant" pants. I ran around the youth rally, according to him, this really cool person, unlike any Christian he had ever met. Like him, he thought, and he decided he maybe could find a place for himself in religion. (It didn't hurt that he was a hot little skater punk. I have a weak spot for them.) He said he considered me his spiritual mentor. I didn't know how to respond, how to let him know that no one had ever said anything more wonderful or meaningful to me in my life. How to thank him in a way that conveyed how honored I was. I don't remember what I said.

I'm not the person I was back then. But I suppose I don't have access to the same environment, and the world seems like a harder place now--no place for the same blissful summers where you're closed off from the real world, existing in a special dream place like camp.

The first summer counseling, I felt alive and hypersensitive every single moment, drinking in the experience. I made friendships with my co-counselors that I thought would be rock solid for the rest of our lives, but the intensity that camp fosters rarely translates successfully to the mundane world. I thought I'd fallen in love, too, and remember like it was yesterday a walk we took, on the way to the chapel, revealing our feelings and the tragedy that we could not be together (for myriad reasons).

Oh, everything was so dramatic and important back then. (Maybe it came from being 18, too.)

My last summer counseling was night and day different than the first. I felt I was on one side of a canyon, my co-workers on the other, and I couldn't figure out how to build a bridge across to them. It didn't seem like they were trying to connect with me, either. I felt so isolated, and threw myself into the work, ignoring the importance of connecting with them. The tone was different, too. I always looked forward to immersing myself in a deeply spiritual summer and making new friendships, but suddenly the space was no longer safe. I was no model Christian during my college years, but the woods were sacred to me. The other counselors were profane, disrespectful, pretty much assholes, really.

The hardest week was senior high. I was 20, so not much older than some of them, but a few of the counselors were where I was two years previous--just a summer out of their own camping experience, and good friends with some of the very people they'd have to take charge of. S, the boys' counselor I shared a cabin and responsibilities with, he was my age, with a year or two of counseling experience, thus theoretically more capable than some of the younger counselors. Yet he was one of the worst. It was more important to him to be liked, and he took inappropriateness to an extreme.

In the middle of the week, he supervised the kids who wanted to drag their mattresses out to the communal porch to sleep. I stayed in my bunk on the girls' side with a few of the campers who didn't want to brave the mosquitos. The porch crowd didn't get much sleep, and I didn't close my eyes all night. I don't know what reality S was experiencing that made him think that sex, sexist, and race jokes were somehow appropriate in that setting, but nonetheless, that's what he was telling. Then he started talking shit about the other counselors. I could hear everything clearly through my open window in the quiet woods that night, and I felt like I was being kicked in the stomach over and over and over. Today, though, I don't remember if he said anything bad about me. Everything about the night was so horrible, him talking cruelly about me would not have made things noticeably worse. I don't know if it was an idea that has only come to me over the years, or if I thought it but couldn't execute it: I should have gotten up, gone out to the porch, and asked S if we could take a walk. The kids, of course, would have known as soon as we were out of earshot, that he would be in deep trouble--or so he would have told them later. I was so meek and passive that I probably couldn't have said how I really felt. Or maybe I would have just started crying.

I am slightly proud to believe if this happened today, I have grown enough that I would have addressed it. Back in 1995, though, I stayed in my bunk, crying and praying all night.

And then I think of the "Footsteps" poem, and I felt God with me that night, but what I would have given not to be there, listening to hatefulness where there should have been love.

I wanted to leave the next day. I was leaving early anyway, to study in Ireland, skipping the last week of the summer. I only had a week left before then, and I didn't think I could make it after that night. The only person I felt close to was the camp director, and she asked me not to go.

So I stayed, and got through the end of senior high week, and the next week. I don't know how, or what happened. That night was burned so deeply on my consciousness that, more than ten years later, it's really the only thing I remember from that hellish summer.

I relived it in dreams for years after. My photos are stuffed far out of sight; last time I checked, it even hurt to look at them. My whole love affair with camp was obscured by that last summer. It seemed so unfair that I couldn't even locate my good memories of it; my sleep self only recalled the bad.

But ten years have passed. I'm a different person now, which is good. Maybe someday, back in Kansas, visiting for the summer, I could go back and make peace with the woods again.

Skyline

This week, coming home on the train earlier than usual, I caught the sunset by the time I got to my stop. Some of the glass-faced buildings downtown were glowing reddish gold. They looked like they were aflame.

My el runs straight downtown, so I have a perfect view of the tracks running into downtown. After I got off the train, I waited until all the other passengers had gone down the stairs, and I stood by the rail and gazed at the city.

I felt a rekindling of my previous love affair with the city, and it made me happy.

Photos

Last night I put on some good music and dug through my photo pile. As much as I love having a digital camera, I am so grateful for the old cameras that spawned loads of pictures of my past. I learned a lot, too--mostly that most of my hairstyles were serious missteps, and I need someone to sit me down and firmly tell me exactly what haircut I am best suited for.

I also used to be a lot more photogenic. I have millions of pictures of me leaning into a friend, us beaming widely and authentically--and beautifully. I don't remember having more self-confidence when I was younger (in college and after). But I do see so much happiness in the pictures, which is a universal beautifier. And friends. I see lots of friends. That's got to be what's missing now.

Another reason for looking through pictures: A friend asked about summer camps, and I thought of mine, Googled it, and found a web page for it. There were enough pictures that I could tell how much it had changed--and hardly recognized it. I made my way to the staff list for the upcoming summer, and saw a name I knew under Art Director. It took the wind out of me. If my memory does not fail me, she was my favorite camper 4th- and 5th-grade week my second year of counseling. That would have made her, what, nine or ten? And now she's the art director at the camp that, when I was there, could barely sustain crafts hour once a week for the littler kids.

I feel so old.

So I looked through my camp photos, and found a few pictures of her and me. I think I'm going to get copies made then send her a note with the pictures this summer at camp. I feel a bit tentative about it, as I always do contacting people with whom I'm long out of touch, but I remember what it was like at camp. I hope they still do post-lunch mail call, make a big fuss out of people who receive a lot of letters, and sign them up for an act in the weekly talent show. I would have loved to get a letter from an old counselor sharing memories with me, remembering me. I don't know, though, if I had been a camper at ten, if I would have remembered my counselor ten years later. I do know how influential counselors are, and I do still remember the ones I had the years I attended in high school. It could be like always remembering your first-grade teacher.

God I feel old.

Self Portrait Tuesday

Jamie intrigued me by posting about Self Portrait Tuesday. I decided to attempt it. Not by actually following the SPT blog's assignments, but by making my own up.

Then it immediately occurred to me that taking my own picture is basically my worst nightmare. It gets worse the older I am. There's something about a camera in my face that makes me panick. Something akin to that pathetic Friends episode where Monica and Chandler try to get their engagement photos taken, and Chandler makes a hideous, pained face in every one. I feel my face freeze in a grimace as the camera flashes each time.

I don't want to take pictures of myself warts and all. I want to take pictures that show me as devastatingly beautiful, graceful, and stylish. Because in my head, that's what I am. But then I see photos, and I look pudgy, blotchy, gangly, awkward. I don't want those photos to be a physical reflection of me, because it's not who I feel I am.

So it kind of breaks my heart every time I see an ugly picture, because the more I see, the more I start to think, "but what if I'm just delusional? What if I really am this unattractive?" I know everyone really is her own worst critic, but I do have Tim agreeing with me that I'm not a very photogenic person.

The hardest part for me is that I've always struggled very hard to find myself beautiful and be at peace with my body. It's been so important to me to have self-confidence, and I feel like, nearing 30, I should have had it figured out by now.

It's strange--I expected that being in love would do it for me. Not having to worry about being "perfect" all the time, because I finally have someone who tells me no less than a million times a day, in all seriousness, that I am the most beautiful person he has ever seen. But it's almost too much. I don't believe it. I still thrill for the moments when he mentions a co-worker or classmate has said something to him. It usually takes the form of "how'd you get such a beautiful wife?" And I blush and say, "No really, they didn't say that! Ok, wait. Tell me again!" And he'll smile, and boast again how he's always been picky, and only dates really outstandingly gorgeous women.

And I hate myself a bit, for not believing it until I see it reflected in someone else's eyes. I want to be better than that.