Dying in Order to be Invisible

My grandmother said my smile was my greatest asset. At the age of seven, she’d already taught me to do yoga and watch my diet. “Once you pass 30, your body will absorb every calorie you consume.” That’s what she said, so she taught me to watch my food long before I even became a teenager. Thou shalt not fall prey to your bathroom scale. You owe the world a svelte and smiling silhouette.

I felt guilty every time I put a spoon in my mouth, and I hadn’t even bought my first bra yet.

My body was an ornament. It belonged to every stranger who could see it. If a shopkeeper tells you to smile, it means you’ve failed. You’ve been caught out in public thinking about your career goals instead of the way your face appears to others. Out on the streets, they only require one thing of you: be a pretty piece of tinsel on the mantelpiece for thou shalt not forget you have an audience.

My body was sexualised before I knew what sex even meant. That’s probably why I used to live in baggy T-shirts—I grew tired of being an ornament. I wanted to get lost in my thoughts. I wanted to daydream. I wanted to even <gasp> be miserable on occasion. Most of all, I didn’t want to think about how complete strangers were interpreting my face.

I never once wondered why men required me to smile. I took it for granted that thou shalt always be pleasant to look at, no matter who died yesterday or how harrowing your latest breakup was. Good girls always looked happy. So began my journey through anorexia: My grand attempt to become invisible, and it worked for a while. That it ended in a hospital bed was besides the point. When the nurses came to my bed, I smiled while fighting for my life and sanity.

Yesterday I wrote about overcoming this obligation to be an ornament, and several cis men complained that their pictures didn’t attract enough compliments. It’s almost as though they had no idea what being an ornament really feels like.

Oh, wait. They probably don’t.

“Prettiness is not a rent you pay for occupying a space marked “female”. That was the theme of yesterday’s post, and there’s a reason Erin McKean used the word “female.” We do feel we owe prettiness to the world. We do feel we have to smile for random men on the street. We do feel we owe it to our mother and our children and civilisation in general.

You, a cis man, think this is about popularity and attention.

It isn’t.

It’s about giving up small parts of your autonomy for the sake of the taxi driver at the other side of the road. It’s about spending decades starving and self-hating for being a kilogram overweight. It’s about dying in order to become invisible.