My friends want to jump in the river. Even though it’s February and mucky and grey and there are people on the opposite bank who might see us. They’re filled with warm beer and the confidence of youth, stripping shirts and socks like there’s no difference between the two. Here we have the age-old question: if your friends jumped into a river, would you?
It’s an unnaturally warm month at the beginning of what is sure to be an unnaturally warm season. I catch a glimpse of slender, tanned legs wheeling through the air as my friends crash joyfully into the murky depths. The water paints their skin into shimmering mermaid scales as they break the surface, their siren call that mischievous age-old lie: come on in, the water is fine. Dry and fully clothed, I watch from the shore, envious thoughts pricking me along with the mosquitos.
I haven’t shaved my legs in over a year, although I can’t blame the pandemic for that. Last time it took so long that the hot water ran out halfway through the first leg. I would have given up there, had I not remembered a professor who explained to me that the heroine of his novel, who left one of her legs unshorn, represented “a failure to live up to expectations of femininity". If one unshaved leg makes a failed woman, then I don’t dare imagine what that means for me.
Having given up on shaving, I hide beneath long, baggy jeans. A staple of my wardrobe since the age of ten. That was when I first learned that legs could be bad. A pointed finger, a whisper, a giggle. And that was all it took. My innocence blown like a broken lightbulb as legs became the first in a long list of body parts to be ashamed of. I threw out my shorts. I bought loose-fitting clothes. I stopped swimming.
I’m not a woman according to the tabloids, the commercials, the movie posters, the cosmetics billionaires born of female self-hatred. Not unless I buy the kind of woman they’re selling. But I will never be that woman, so instead of trying and failing I reject womanhood entirely. I aim for the other end of the gender spectrum instead, but carefully, wary of overshooting. Far enough to be identifiably dyke, not so far as to get my head kicked in. I shave off my hair and steal my brother’s shirts, revelling in the confusion of strangers as they fumble for pronouns which evade their grasp like a bar of soap dropped in a bathtub. Wherever my shot lands, there’s no real victory: unless I hit the pinprick-bullseye of the baby-pink target imposed on all things female, I’m a disappointment. Beyond that microscopic bullseye is a minefield of parasites promising to slice down my weight, to sand away wrinkles I don’t yet have, to bleach or burn my skin depending on which shade of insecurity I’m most vulnerable to.
I am so, so tired of hating my body.
Ideally, I would feel nothing for it at all, treating it the same way I would the practical effects of my life – wallet, keys, bag, body, and I’m ready to face the world. Failing that, I wish I could see it as something to love, to worship, to dress and decorate and treat like a temple. Something to celebrate.
I take photos of my friends hugging in the water for their inevitable Instagram posts. My friends, who seem so perfect to me, mourn their bodies as though they’re already dead and buried, lamenting hips and breasts and thighs that are too big and too small all at once, curves that stick out where they should slope in and vice versa. They put as much work into hitting that target as I do to missing it, and the result is the same. We are all victims to our learned revulsion.
But if I can forgive and even love the endless imperfections of those around me, then why not my own?
The tabloids, the commercials, the movie-makers and cosmetics billionaires can’t see me here. Down by the river, only my friends bear witness to the so-called horror that is me. Their discarded clothes littering the riverbank like autumn leaves. Here, I am safe from the world, and so I am safe from myself.
I jump into the river.
I jump, arms and legs and chest and stomach exposed. Not good or bad or ugly or beautiful but simply there. I jump into the river, and it’s as cold as hell isn’t, shocking through me like a defibrillator.
My friends cheer, and we toast our idiocy with warm beer as we drip dry on the shore. We lean on each other to wipe away the grit and sand still clinging to us, shoulder to bared shoulder. In this moment we are nothing but ourselves, and that is victory enough.