Hello friends and happy New Year! Thank you all for your thoughts on my last piece. Your feedback was very special to me.
Both of my previous columns explored, to a degree, the relationship of relief to writing and fitness - how both of these pursuits are an attempt to alleviate the immense pressure of being alive. This week I wanted to talk more about vanity and its role in sharing your work and in working on your body.
This picture is of Lake Lanier Islands Resort in Georgia. Read on to find out what an overcrowded, vaguely trashy summer destination could possibly have to do with fitness and writing.
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Growing up in Georgia, I spent many summer days at Lake Lanier. I remember afternoons slick with Coppertone, eating a too-warm apple on my kitten beach towel, contemplating the murky brown water. It was a man-made lake, I knew, and an entire town had been flooded to create it. This both terrified and thrilled me.
I also knew Lake Lanier was named for the beloved Georgia poet Sidney Lanier. My mother had read me some of his verse before bed and I would recite the lines (which I understood not at all) as a talisman when I eventually braved the water.
Once swimming, though, I became fearless. I even had conversations with an imaginary friend while I floated on my back by the outer buoys. She was a little ghost girl, about my age, whom I pictured still eating dinner and going to school long after the lake was filled in. Can you breathe in the water now? I’d ask her. Do you have a Little Mermaid tail? Is it fun having no Mommy to tell you what to do? I created elaborate tales about my ghost girl and her summer exploits, which I scribbled in my journal on the hour car ride back home.
In her book The Faith of a Writer, Joyce Carol Oates explores the strangeness of this temperament, saying “The very act of withdrawing from the world in order to create a counter-world...is so curious, it eludes comprehension...Why have some of us, writers and readers both, made of the ‘counter-world’ a prevailing culture in which, sometimes to the exclusion of the actual world, we can live?”
Many of my childhood afternoons were spent withdrawn, reading or writing. I felt so ill-at-ease in the “actual world” that I compulsively created others. I was an intense and very nerdy little girl, prone to dropping truth-bombs on other children whom I considered to be foolish or prone to frivolity (Really, you’re building a sand castle? Did you know there’s an entire town underneath the lake and probably lots of dead bodies?). All those early days at Lake Lanier, when the other kids had told me - understandably - to get lost, I floated around alone, talking to a dead poet or an imaginary drowned girl. And I was totally cool with that.
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There are many turns in human life, moments when a curtain is lifted and you can no longer see the great Oz but only the nervous, inept man at the controls. These points-of-no-return can be positive or not, but they are all irrevocable.
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Back at school in September, we always had the generic What-Did-You-Do-This-Summer assignment. I often wrote about Lake Lanier and my ghost friend in her watery town. Once I even said I saw a wedding dress floating in the water below me (total lie) and that I almost drowned trying to swim to it.
I don’t remember everything I wrote but I do remember this: my sixth grade English teacher, Ms. Oliver, with all her poofed hair and nubby maxi-skirts, asking me to stay after class one day. I was petrified, of course: What did she know? Could I be arrested for lying about the wedding dress?
“I just wanted to tell you, Jessica,” she said. “That you have a talent.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t quite understand, namely, but also had such a hurricane of joy beginning to spin inside me that I couldn’t speak.
“Your writing is good,” she continued, matter-of-factly. “I’d like to send you home with some other assignments. Not homework,” she went on, “just exercises. You can share what you write with me for extra credit, if you like, but mostly it will just be for you.”
After a barely-audible thank you, I left her classroom practically singing. Not only did I have a purpose, but I was good at it. Someone else understood something about me without me having to explain it. I was hooked.
*
The next summer, we went to Lake Lanier for the 4th of July and to celebrate my upcoming 12th birthday. As an early gift, my mother had given me a blue and white tie-dyed swimsuit that had six criss-crossing straps in the back. I thought it was absolutely the coolest thing I, or anyone, had ever worn. What I realized in retrospect was that she had to get me a new suit because I had developed so rapidly in the preceding months that none of my old ones fit. Willfully unaware of my new body, I was still squeezing into swim team Speedo suits from the previous summer, ignoring the fact that I was suddenly 5’2” with hips and breasts.
Others did not ignore this fact. I’ll never forget the first time I was catcalled. Dripping wet from the lake water, barefoot, I was walking back from the bathroom and contemplating the possibility of funnel cake when two boys approached. They were older, already shadowed with ab muscles and facial hair, wearing the requisite Abercrombie & Fitch Hawaiian-print board shorts. I could tell they were talking about me before I passed them, their eyes dark with commiseration.
It’s a complex and inexplicable feeling, the tension of being discussed and sexualized by strangers, the worry that they will say something horrible, the worry they won’t say anything at all, the hope that you are beautiful and exciting to everyone who sees you but that you will be spared the demeaning and potentially dangerous aggression of those who see beauty as theirs to take. It’s a knotty sensation I’ve had countless times since, but who knows how it felt that first time - probably confusing, probably exciting.
Just as I passed them, holding my breath, the taller of the two boys reached out and grabbed my arm.
“Hey,” he said, twisting my wrist the littlest bit. “Turn around for me.”
I tried to pull away from him. I shook my head, mute.
“Damn,” said the other one. “Look at that ass.”
When I made it back to our spot on the beach, I immediately put on my t-shirt and shorts. My mother laughed, asked how I could possibly be cold in this heat.
*
Lake Lanier was a different destination following that summer. After years of it being a somewhat solitary playground, it morphed into a meat market. Or rather, I joined the ranks of those peddling and purchasing goods.
The catcalling became a gauge rather than a problem. Having abandoned my drowned ghost friend and my recitations to Sidney Lanier, I now spent afternoons at the lake walking around with a gaggle of other girls, hoping boys would come after us. I became acutely aware of my body and its imperfections. My butt was too big, my toenails weren’t pretty, I didn’t have a belly button ring (yet). Mostly, though, I never felt thin enough. Firm enough. Similar to the idea that a piece of writing is never finished, only abandoned, I felt constantly inadequate in my body. There was always better I could do, hotter I could get.
Once I had swum to escape gravity, to submerge both ears and become deaf to the world. Now I swam to get skinnier. I swam so boys would call out sexy things to me instead of mean things. The wrecking ball of puberty after the bliss of childhood is a tragedy for us all.
Though my mother and grandmother always received attention from men, and I was aware that these interactions existed in the world, it was still a shock to become the object of someone else’s judgment. Whether I enjoyed the attention or it made me feel ill, I did not realize I would have no choice in receiving it. The only control I had was over what I presented to the world. If I lolled around in the water and ate funnel cakes all afternoon, my body would slowly round out and devolve. I would become unattractive or, worse, invisible. The boys would start saying that ass with a different inflection. If I had no choice over the attention, at least I had a choice over its nature.
*
In middle school and high school, I loved the attention I got whenever I wrote something. I thought there was a magic to the way I could write a poem for the school lit mag or local paper and people would like me more. Writing gave me the chance to be better than I was, to be less banal. Once or twice I received letters in the mail from local parents - actual adults - telling me how much they enjoyed a poem or short story they’d read of mine and that I should stick with it. To use a loaded and very pubescent word, writing helped me blossom.
In case it wasn't clear, I was a strange and overly emotional little girl. My relationship with my father and his subsequent absence had birthed a little monster inside an already monstrous heart. The fear and distrust bred by that loss meant that connections with others came even less naturally to me. Usually I felt equal parts unignorably ugly and forever invisible. Writing gave me an out, a way to turn open my palms and offer what little I had. I felt empowered by the choice I had to be a writer, to offer my thoughts up to the world around me and know that they would understand or, at the very least, value my effort to try and explain.
I further hoped, and still hope, that someday my father will come across something I’ve written and be proud. And by proud I mean sorry.
My body is also wrapped up in his absence, to some extent. If I ever see him again, I want to be as beautiful as I can possibly be. I want to be thin and graceful, to show him how well I’ve lived, without having to say a word.
Thus these twin impulses - to write, to be fit - are both ways to exert some imaginary control over an unimaginable circumstance, to employ vanity as a means of comfort. The difference is choice. I choose to sit alone in a room and shape my thoughts into something (hopefully) readable. I choose, then, to share that with others. Short of hermitude, which is not in my constitution, I share my body all day with others. Particularly in my role as a yoga teacher, I am constantly displaying my body whether by demonstrating poses or simply by wearing the clothing required for a true practice: tight, tight, and tighter than that.
This is not to say I reject attention - quite the contrary, I love it. I value it. Attention is the precursor to communion, a way of seeing someone clearly so that you may then connect. Everything I write - a poem, an email, this piece - comes from a place of communion. Even catcalling has its filthy place at the table: its demand for sex, its hope for thrill. Hecklers want to be seen, too, want attention for being lecherous and unbridled. This is not to excuse the practice, only to illuminate its very human roots.
The need for attention is so integral to survival that I struggle to understand why it is so often considered a weakness. Those writers prone to solitude gain some street cred for walling off, for offering only their work to the world and not their person. As an outgoing adult who was once a very lonely child, I am no longer afraid to be clear on the fact that I need attention. It reminds me that I am alive and that all these bizarre things I spend my life doing (sitting in a room typing, running for miles on a Saturday morning) have purpose and results. As Leslie Jamison wrote in her spectacular essay Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain, “A cry for attention is positioned as a crime, as if attention were inherently a selfish thing to want. But isn’t wanting attention one of the most fundamental traits of being human—and isn’t granting it one of the most important gifts we can ever give?”
*
Catcalling has changed little since my summers at Lake Lanier. I live in New York City now, where it is part of every pedestrian woman’s daily commute. If I have limited time, I will all too often choose to work out rather than write. However more frivolous it may be, the results are immediate and gratifying.
This is the thick split between the vanity of writing and the vanity of the body: the measurables. My friend Corey Van Landingham, an accomplished poet and athlete, put it well when she said “There's something about the body being concrete, about this tangible form that is, especially as a poet, so refreshing. ‘If I do twenty push-ups a day, I will look better.’ But you can't necessarily say ‘If I read twenty poems a day, I will write better.’"
I can walk away from a bad poem draft or frustrating essay, but I cannot escape my body. I have to walk around inside it all day. I have to hear about it. I get reviews hourly.
*
Georgia suffered a terrible drought season six or seven years ago and Lake Lanier’s water lines receded dramatically. House foundations, automobiles, firearms, and all manner of relics revealed themselves. An abandoned stretch of highway curved around the new shoreline. Though I haven’t been back in over a decade, I thought of my weird girl self, swimming around above the drowned town. I tried to remember if my conversations with the ghost girl were one-sided or two, if I ever imagined her responding. All I could recall was that she was an orphan and that she had strawberry blonde hair (because I thought that was the coolest kind of hair) that wafted around her underwater head like a blooming tulip. I remember I both liked and feared her.
As with all imaginary friends, I abandoned her. Boys found me and then I found them. Tales of her adventures gave way to love stories in my notebooks. For years, I gave her attention without wanting any in return. My scary little heroine.
*
One day, I’m sure, I’ll see a young man approach on the street and instinctually brace myself for the onslaught of his lust. Then he will pass without incident, without noticing me, and I will realize another curtain has been lifted on my life. There’s only so much we can do for the body. Luckily, writing doesn’t suffer the same constraints.
Originally from Georgia, Jess Smith now lives and works in New York City. Her work can be found in Sixth Finch, Phantom Limb, Ghost Town, The Best American Poetry Blog, Lumina, and other journals. She received her MFA from The New School in 2013.
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