Skin Tight – a train of thought activity

Sometimes, I just sit down and write what pops into my head.  This is what flowed out today.

 

Skin Tight

There come seasons in your life that are so powerfully emotional that they overwrite every bad dream, every negative thought and your eyes water with tears over the smallest things, because you feel so perfectly good at just about every moment.

You walk over to fears and say “Boo!” and they leave.

You look at yourself in the mirror and say “Hello beautiful, where have you been all of my life?”

You look at other humans and you see richness and layers in bodies that sometimes used to appear as empty and vacant as those celebrity sign boards.

You walk among silence and hear it sing, and you walk among music and you hear the heartbeat and mortality of the composer who wrote it in a dark room, alone.

You read a book and you understand that the spaces between the words say as much as the words that rush in to fill the spaces.

And sometimes, other people can see it, and it makes them smile; others, still not there yet, think you remind them of an empty, vacant celebrity sign board.

 

Being human is a funny and frail thing.  Words dent and scar us and yet collisions with metal heal without a trace.  It is during special times like these that you wonder if you’ve suddenly discovered mental illness runs in your family or maybe your vision has been maladjusted for nearly most of your life.  Everything is sharp and clear, laughter rings deep in your chest and flows out of your spine and even the nonsensical makes sense, when you read it sideways, with your mouth held just right.

What causes such a shift in paradigm?  It is that moment that your skin clicks over you and locks into place, and you’re no longer walking around wondering “When will I get a covering in my size, to my liking, that reflects who I truly am?”, never knowing that your entire life you have been knitting it, tailoring it, letting it in and out, perhaps changing the color, raising and lowering the hem, fiddling with it always – in other words, you never just let it sit upon you the way it was meant to do.  You let the emotional fashion advice of those who did not truly know you influence you like those women’s magazines that show perfect bodies and expensive clothing that is so far divorced from most reality that they exist just to cause dissatisfaction with your real life – and so you rejected the skin that belonged to you because it did not suit another. 

It starts from when one is young and continues until one reaches a point where they can say “STOP.  This is my skin and the only one that needs to wear it is me.  If you don’t care for it, that’s all right, there are others out there.  But this one is just right for me.”  And you stop being Goldilocks, always looking in other people’s houses where you really don’t belong, for something intimately made for you that fits just right, even if there are stains, wrinkles, scars and weirdly run-together colors that are evidence of a life lived within that skin. Those patches that cover the inroads that others made to get under your skin?  Beautiful. The burn holes where the careless let the embers of their own emptiness burn into you that you never quite healed?  Priceless. The stray strings that reflect when you bump into things that catch hold for a brief moment and leave behind little things to be tended to? Normal.

And when this skin fits so well and is comfortable, you realize that you don’t have to change colors to be among others, to blend in, to be unseen. You don’t have to keep pace with the emotional fashion police that come into your life and warn you not to be wearing last year’s look.

You simply need to just be, because you are living art.

Credit to Sue Monk Kidd

 

~SE