Can you believe it’s been a little over a year since I got my braces? Wow! It’s actually been closer to 13 months since I started the process, but this is the first time I’ve really had a good chance to sit down and write about my feelings about this process.
I’m about halfway done with my time in tooth prison, as I like to call it. My doctor says another year at most. I’m hoping for less, obviously! Today I’m going to see the oral surgeon to discuss whether I need jaw surgery, but I’m really leaning towards not getting it. I mean, my jaws are already almost lined up, and I have another year of orthodontia to finish it up. I don’t really feel like it’s worth the pain, expense, and recovery time of a surgery to make things slightly better. But my orthodontist said I should talk to the surgeon anyway before I make a final decision.
Mostly, I’m just so super happy with the results so far. Yes, it’s been painful and uncomfortable. But look at my face! I look almost like a completely different person. I feel like I look, not really older, but more mature. My face looks more proportional. I still think my lips are a little weird, but they’re less weird than they used to be. And on a health note, I’m no longer having painful jaw popping!
I really can’t wait to see the end product. Also, I can’t wait to not have stuff glued to my teeth anymore, that will be awesome.
Late last month I had the opportunity to be part of an awesome photo shoot for the #lovethemirror initiative (I don’t know if they’re calling it an initiative, but I like that word so I’m using it!). The idea was that in 2015, you should resolve to learn to love the mirror, and love what you see in your reflection. I love this message, for so many reasons. Let me see if I can put them all into words…
1. If you read The Militant Baker’s blog post about the photo shoot and the initiative, you’ll see that she’s tired of people being told that they’re so smart, or talented, or funny, but never being told that their bodies are awesome too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s great to be acknowledged for your intelligence and your great personality, but I think everyone wants the chance to also feel like they are hot stuff. We deserve to feel beautiful or handsome.
2. I’ve written before about how tired I am of the word “narcissism” getting tossed around anytime anybody (but especially a woman) dares to think that she looks good, and enjoys her appearance. Enough of that. I am here to say that yes, I love the mirror, and yes, there are times when I put on a super bootie skirt like I’m wearing in this picture and check myself out in my dance mirror. Or I’ll take my hair out of its braid in the morning, brush it out, and then turn profile to check out how long and wavy and red it is. We need to learn not to be ashamed of occasionally stopping in front of the mirror and thinking “Damn, I am looking fiiiiiiine today.”
3. As stated in my quote on the picture above, the mirror is such an important tool for dancers. It lets you double check your posture and your form. In group situations, it lets you keep an eye on your fellow dancers so you can all learn to be on the same timing with your arms or other movements. You can also use your own reflection to practice maintaining eye contact. How can you do any of these things if you’re uncomfortable with looking at yourself in the mirror?
4. The mirror is also necessary for doing my makeup before a performance. Look, it’s hard enough to get the wings of my liner even with a mirror. I’d be a hot mess without one. When you look in the mirror to put your face on, you can’t get bogged down in your imperfections, you have to love the face you have and decide how best to make it up to emphasize your favorite features and make sure the audience can read your emotions.
Of course, even as someone who loves the mirror, I have my days where I don’t want to look at myself. If I’m in a new dance class and I have no idea what I’m doing, sometimes I can’t bring myself to watch my own flailing. And I have moments where I’m trying to do my lipstick and I fall into a weird spiral of thinking how strange the shape of my lips are and how weird I look when I smile. Body love is a journey, and sometimes I step off the road and I dunno, hang out in some sort of seedy diner? That analogy didn’t quite work out. But I want to make sure that everyone knows that we all fall off the self-love wagon, and the important thing is to recognize when you’re thinking bad thoughts about yourself, and to change your train of thought. You can do it! I think everyone can learn to love themselves.
Anyway, it was really awesome to be part of the photoshoot. I always enjoy working with Jes (true fact: she gives THE BEST hugs), and it was a treat to work with Jade Beall, too. It was cool to see a really wide variety of races, sizes, abilities and walks of life take their turn in front of the camera. I even got my Dad to come along (he’s the one in the kilt). And when I went to the launch party and got a preview of all the images and all the quotes, well, let’s just say that I inadvertently got to test whether my mascara was waterproof. There’s so many great reasons to learn to love the body you see in the mirror, and really, not one single good reason to hate it.
And also, I love this picture to pieces. Thank you, Jade Beall!
I’m pleased to announce that I am now a regular contributor at Belly Dance at Any Size! After participating in the 90 days challenge, I said I might want to write more in the future, and when I pitched a new article idea to Andalee she asked me to come on board. I’ll be writing for them approximately 4x a year. My first article is about how belly dance taught me to love my smile.
I really like BDAS because it combines two things I feel strongly about: dancing (obviously) and body positivity. In addition to covering issues of size, they talk about the experience of dancers of different races and ages. There’s also frequent costuming tips, such as the recent two-part post on how to modify your bras to be more covering. I think it’s a really great resource for the community.
So please wander over there and have a look not just at my article, but at the archives as well.
Yesterday, my afternoon got hijacked by a little blog post titled My Husband Doesn’t Need to See Your Boobs. My first thought, before reading the article, was a cheeky “Well of course he doesn’t need to see them, even my own husband doesn’t need to see my boobs, but hey, boobs are awesome, of course people want to see them.” And note that I say people, not men, because men aren’t alone in liking to look at breasts. Many people find breasts, and the rest of a woman’s curves, objectively beautiful. There’s something very aesthetically pleasing about a body, whether it’s the soft curves of a woman or the chiseled planes of a male athlete.
And that’s what I’d like to talk about today, because much like the bikini-clad young women decried in the above article, belly dancers like me often get accused of dressing immodestly and attracting the attention of other women’s husbands and boyfriends. Well, of course we attract attention, we’re beautiful. And we dress to be beautiful. But we don’t dress to be sexually attractive — that’s a side effect, but the truth is, as a woman, no matter what you’re shaped like and how you’re dressed, someone is going to find you sexy. There were times and cultures where just a glimpse of a woman’s wrist was considered provocative, whereas in our current culture we only notice a wrist if it’s adorned with a nice tattoo or piece of jewelry.
When I dance, I dress to impress. I show my belly, the better to display my torso isolations. I might wear a skirt that hugs my bootie, the better to draw attention to my hips while I do a slow, languid maya. But then again, I might wear a huge, fluffy cotton skirt over billowing pantaloons, to make my spins all that much more showy and impressive. Either way, my intention is to create a beautiful image, an impression of something at once exotic and artistic. The dance would still be beautiful if I did it in sweat pants, but it would lose some of its magic.
There’s this weird idea that when women dress or put on makeup or do our hair to make ourselves more beautiful, we’re only doing it for men. Either we want to attract a man, or we want to make our man feel good about choosing us. As such, it’s obvious that a belly dancer must be showing off her body and wearing 50lbs of stage makeup to seduce a man. Why else would we go to the effort?
But quite simply, I think that women like to feel beautiful for our own sake. Is it wrong to think “My eyes are gorgeous, I should use this shade of eyeliner to really highlight them” or to enjoy smoothing a skirt down the curve of our hips? Is it wrong to be pleased with the size and shape of our breasts, whether we’re happy that they’re still young and perky or nostalgic about the way they sag from when we nursed babies that are now grown to adults? Is it wrong to sit down with a tutorial from Pinterest for a complicated braid, because your hair is finally long enough and you’ve always wanted to try that style? I don’t think it is.
Likewise, when I meet up with one of my female friends, whether it’s to grab lunch or to get ready for our show backstage, and I say “You look great” I’m not saying “Damn girl! You are going to seduce the hell out of someone tonight!” I’m saying “You know what? I find you to be objectively beautiful. You go girl, great job picking that skirt.”
We’ve long known that the human form was objectively beautiful. If it wasn’t, instead of the Venus de Milo we’d have a lovely sculpture of some flowers.
Talk about some objectively beautiful curves.
Proponents of the modesty culture like to say that once a man has seen an image, he can’t unsee it. Well, I believe that. I can’t unsee some horribly graphic pictures that friends have posted on Facebook, and I wish I could. But I don’t wish that I could unsee the Venus de Milo, or Mira Betz stepping on stage “dressed like the Queen of Sheba” as she likes to say, or me and my friends wearing bikinis and eating pizza. Why would anyone want to unsee those things? I think that our society needs to spend less time policing women’s modesty, and more time learning to differentiate between beauty and seduction.
This Saturday night I will be performing at the Every Body’s Beautiful Revue in support of The Body Love Conference! It looks like this is going to be a GREAT show, featuring burlesque, acrobats, and more. I’ll be performing one of my all-time favorite solos. If you’re in Tucson, you should be at this show.
