The Awakening: A Coming Out Story in Pictures

Last night at our homeschool group's curriculum sharing night/7-hour chatfest, a friend I hadn't seen in awhile said, "Su, you look fabulous!"

And I thought, "Yes, I do."

This morning I had the idea of doing a blog post about how sometimes I look at old pictures of myself, and I am lovely, but when I think about what I thought about myself at the time, it breaks my heart. I was going to put up a picture like this one of me at 22:

And I was going to say: Look at this attractive young woman. She is packing up to leave the land after her first Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, and this unposed shot was taken by a friend. She is smiling out of the frame at her lover at the time (whom you may know as my friend Farina Endfen from some recent blog posts). She looks happy, relaxed, fit, and lovely. She has a charming, easy smile and, apparently, dimples, although this photo is too low-quality for you to be able to see them.

However, this is what she thinks of herself: she thinks that she is grossly fat. She thinks that certain unfortunate features of her physical appearance--her eyebrows, her nose, her high forehead, and her facial hair, to name only a few--mean that she is not, and never will be, pretty. Although she has never had any trouble finding either romantic or sexual partners, she is convinced that each person who expresses an interest in her in this way has been so charmed by her intelligence, her wit, and her bubbly personality that it has overcome their, what? Revulsion is too strong a word...so is distaste. Ah, let us say, their indifference to her physical appearance. It has never occurred to her that someone might be attracted to her because of her physical appearance, or that those who enjoy her bubbliness and wit and intelligence might also sometimes just enjoy looking at her.

I was going to go on to say that one of the many reasons that this, right now, is the best time of my life is that I feel very good in my body, and I look good in my body, and I know it. (Do I have any pictures? No. The only person who takes pictures of me is the Tiny Tornado, and they are usually pictures of my butt. But maybe I can get David to take some this weekend.)

I was thinking of doing a series of these: here I am at 16. Adorable! Yet self-hating. Again at 23. Again at 30. And so on. Until the thrilling conclusion: Here I am at 46, happier in my body than I have ever been before. Even though I am also, without a doubt, actually fat and not just imagining that I am. Who'd have predicted that?

The first box of photos I found covered only the years from my high school graduation at age 17 through my First Grad School Foray, which ended 6 years later. And as I flipped through these albums, I saw a different story being told: "My Gay Boyfriends: Seriously, How Could We Not Have Known, Just Look at These Photos."

But that's not the only story, and it's not the one I'm telling today. This is the one I'm telling today:

Until I was 20, in almost every picture taken of me, I am crossing my arms. Whether I am on a sailboat in San Diego Harbor with my dad's cousin Barbara or coming down the dunes with my cousins or getting my picture taken with Grandma Irene before we leave for the airport, my arms are crossed over my stomach:

If I can't cross my arms, I fold up on myself and look away from the camera:

In those last two shots, I am 17 and on a bike trip with my cousin Marion, who is 57. She's on the glider there with me, in the red tank top, looking completely at ease and gazing cheerfully and directly into the camera. The young woman on the glider drinking a Dr. Pepper is an amazing physical specimen. She can ride her bike 60 miles in a day, set up camp, and then hop back on to go exploring, riding another 10 or 20 miles before bed. Her bulging thighs and calves are like granite. But she believes herself to be basically an unfit and sedentary person, because she is so often harassed for the time she spends sitting around reading, and because she does not play any sports or do anything "athletic." She does her best to hide when the camera comes out, because even though she is in the middle of pedaling her bike over 700 miles across the state of Michigan and then up the western shore to the UP, she is ashamed of her body.

This is only a sampling of the pictures like this I could show you. But then, one day, something changes:

[Side note: In this picture, you can see my son the Lego Savant, who won't be born for another 16 years, squinting into the camera with me.]

Let me tell you the story of this picture:

I am 19. I am transferring to the University of Michigan, and they have assigned me a roommate. I get a letter that tells me that my roommate's name is, well, let's call her Muffy Lou. At this time in my life, I am hanging out with punk rockers a lot, though you can tell from this picture that I am not, myself, actually a punk rocker. I am not happy at the thought of rooming with a preppy. And Muffy Lou sounds like the ultimate preppy name.

A couple of days later, I get a phone call from someone who identifies herself as Louie and says she is my roommate for the fall. I say, "I'm confused, my letter said Muffy Lou." "Oh, yeah," she says, "that's my name but nobody actually calls me that. I think we should meet."

So we do. That picture is of us meeting. She's not home when I arrive at her house, and her mom shows me to the rec room in the basement. After a couple of minutes, I hear the door open and that woman in the picture comes down the stairs. Blonde hair, plaid skirt, oxford shirt, sweater on a chain: Muffy Lou. The preppy personified.

Then she whips off the wig.

In this picture, I think that I am not just squinting into the sun but perhaps also not as OK with this practical joke as I am pretending to be. You can see that Louie does not have my problem with body image--Look at how she stands, hands on hips! Look at that smile! Look at that direct gaze! She is tough, good-humored, smart, playful, self-confident, outgoing. She has a little bow-legged swagger and boundless physical energy. After this picture is taken, she will change into regular clothes and then barbecue seafood for me on the beach.

It is August. By the time I turn 20, on October 13, we will be lovers.

This is the last picture of me with my arms crossed over my stomach. After I come out, my pictures start looking like this:

And this:

And this:

And, for heaven's sake, this:

[My cat Susie Sienkiewicz, may she rest in peace, chewed a bite out of that one.]

It's not that all my body image issues are magically resolved. I doubt they ever will be, not completely. I would be a much better person than I actually am to live as a fat woman in our culture and have no issues at all with how I look and how much I weigh. But you can see that something happens. And it's not just sex--I'd had sex before, with men. Some of whom turned out to not actually be gay, even. It's something else. Something complicated about finally understanding why, for all those years growing up, I felt I didn't fit in but didn't know why; and about Lou liking to look at me and me figuring that out after awhile (why else do I have all these pictures of myself?); and about love; and about it just being very exciting to be a young lesbian in the late 80s.

p.s. In case you are wondering what Lou looks like under that wig, here we are a couple of years later:

We're Facebook friends now. She looks exactly like that but 100 times better--one of those women who starts out cute and just gets better with age. I am happy about every good thing in her life, because she was one of the good things in mine.

(Also, these pictures look crappy because I don't own a scanner, so I just took pictures of them with my camera. I hope they're good enough to make my point.)