Not beautiful enough.

Hair elimination tactics, desirability and body acceptance.

My nonno used to call me 'almond eyes'. He would tell me stories of how almonds were harvested in Sicily, how they arrived on the island through the Greek, just like our last name 'Meli' which is the greek word for honey.
'Your eyes are the shape of almonds and the colour of honey. It's like they hold the story of this island. You are beautiful' he would say.
He was the only person in my family who didn't talk negatively about my appearance. About anyones appearance for that matter.
My almond eyes are still my favourite part of my body. Maybe because of nonno. When I look at my eyes, I think of him. The stories he told, his constant singing and the poems he would recite. How he was gentle with his words and never offensive and how he always made me laugh.

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This isn’t a love story.
This is about acceptance.

For as long as I can remember I have tried to get rid of the hair on my body. Way too young of age, I would lock myself in the bathroom and secretly use my dads razors to shave my arms, my face, my legs. When I got older I tried other hair elimination methods - name anything, I have tried it. None of it really worked, not even laser.

My body hair has been a deep source of shame all my life. From early on children around me pointed out what was wrong with me. Too much of this. Not enough of that.

‘My mum said immigrants are dirty because you have hair on your face’

‘You look like a monkey with all the black hair on your arms’

‘Your chin makes you look like a witch’

’The princess is blonde, you can’t play her.’

‘Does your hair keep you warm?’

’You have a moustache, you’re ugly’

A small selection of what I heard growing up surrounded by mostly blonde and blue eyed kids in Germany. They remained stuck inside of me like little daggers. Over time you don’t notice them as much. You get used to the numb pain. And you don’t notice how those daggers start directing your life. Your choices. Your words. Your actions.

But why would I be surprised to hear those at school? It started a lot earlier.
At home.

‘She is not as beautiful as her cousins’

I wasn’t supposed to hear this. An overheard conversation between three women. I don’t remember if it came out of my grandmothers or my aunts or even my mothers mouth. My 8 year old brain has locked that memory away. They say that’s a protective trauma response.

But my body remembers very well how it felt. Something innocent, glorious and happy in my child soul cracked into pieces that day.

Shame entered through that crack.

Why wasn’t I as beautiful as my cousins? And how did my child self know that somehow this was a bad thing? How did I know to feel sad about it? The early indoctrination of patriarchal beauty standards is so subtle we don’t even notice where it begins, how it digs into our brains as soon as we are born. Passed on by our parents, by children’s stories, movies, books and fairytales.

Here I was, 8 years old. Suddenly knowing I had to hide my face, my body, my hair, my laugh - be ashamed of all of it, because somehow it wasn’t good enough. The things I heard from other kids and grown ups only confirmed what I had learned in my own home:
I wasn’t as beautiful as.
Which meant I wasn’t loveable. If I wasn’t loveable I would not be accepted. I would not belong.

Everyone in my family was concerned with looks and weight. My mother and grandmother, aunts and cousins were on constant diets, and if they weren’t, it was constantly talked about. They talked about their own weight and about other people’s. The messaging was relentless. Growing up, I can’t remember seeing anyone around me enjoy food without words of guilt or disapproval and jokes from others.

The only person who made me feel beautiful was my grandfather. He never commented on my appearance in a negative way, like it was customary in our family.

I am not angry at the women and men in my family. At friends, at strangers. At those words. At myself. We are all living under the same deception of patriarchy, with the same - but ever-changing - beauty standards imposed on us to maintain power over women, enforce class systems and control us. My family simply wasn’t aware. Like so many of us.

My life-long chase for beauty started way too early. It was really a chase of love and acceptance by using beauty.

When I couldn’t find beauty in myself I put myself in proximity to it. Translating it into my work. Making my home a place full of beauty.

The thing I despised the most growing up was my face. My strong jawline, my big head. My frizzy hair that wasn’t perfectly curly nor perfectly straight. But I could not change my face, other than a few laughable attempts at doing my makeup as a teenager. I wasn’t Kylie Jenner. I couldn’t get surgery at 14.
So I turned to my body instead. I have always had the body type I have now, before it was a trend (though as we know the trend is going back to ‘heroine chic’ now) - just with a few more or less kilos on it. And it wasn’t considered desirable or attractive in the 90’s in Germany. It was painful existing next to my thin, blonde friends. Going shopping with them. Stepping out of the changing room and seeing the clothes hang off their straight, thin bodies vs. them clinging on to me like a sausage wrapped in cling film.

I was too young to know that clothes should be made for bodies, not the other way round.
So I started hiding. Under big clothes. Started binging. And starving myself. Tried everything to be a perfect, straight clothes hanger. It never worked - but the insane thing is that when I look back at pictures of me in my teenage years and twenties, I see a girl that’s absolutely average sized. Why did I feel bigger than I was at the time?

When I was 30, stuck in a miserable marriage, I went on an extreme fitness and nutrition journey and lost 30 kilos. I shared it online too - and something huge happened. Both, people in my life and strangers on the internet told me I was beautiful. A l l t h e f u c k i n g t i m e.
I got stopped on the street by people who just wanted to pay me a compliment. Every time I showed my face online it wasn’t about the content anymore, I would only get comments about my appearance. At first it was nice. But I didn’t expect this other feeling that creeped up:
It started to mess with my head.
All the compliments confirmed my worst fears:
That to be loved and accepted I had to look a certain way.
My face didn’t matter - I had to be thin.
Thinness was the golden ticket in:
Belonging.

But of course I didn’t stay thin. Of course it wasn’t a lasting change. It wasn't a change made out of love. It was made out of hate.
When people say they wear the makeup because it is their preference, they workout because they prefer looking a certain way - I know now it’s not true. We can tell that ourselves all we want.
We are not born with preferences concerning physical appearance. (and those preferences have changed wildly over the centuries!)
We ‘prefer’ things because we are constantly exposed to the same messages.

I gained the weight back again over the course of a few years, through divorce, getting through a pandemic alone, comfort eating and also just loving life, honestly.

A few weeks ago I had another flashback teenage moment. I saw a pair of trousers in a shop window that I really liked. I went in even though I already knew that trousers from this particular store never fit me. Their sizing is all over the place and I knew I wasn’t the problem. I knew that the numbers slapped on these items are not accurate. I knew all of this and I still went in and tried them on.

I was standing in the changing room with the biggest trousers they had in store around my bum and I couldn’t zip them up. I wasn’t surprised. I fully expected this to happen.

But I had a moment of thinking back to nine years ago. All the shopping I did when I lost all that weight:
If you loose weight, shopping will be so much more effortless. You can just walk into any shop and something will fit you.

My brain didn’t stop there though:

Now you’re single again. He didn’t tell you you were beautiful or sexy a lot, remember? It must have been because of your weight. If you loose weight than you can go back on the dating market. It will be easier. More people will find you attractive if you’re thin. Three of your friends have partners now - look at how small they are! If you’d look like them you’d have someone too.

Even though I knew these thoughts came from a lifetime of brainwashing and a system that wants me to hate myself so that I feed it - the thoughts still came flooding in, busting through the door.

The difference is that now, they don’t stay long anymore, they flow right out through the backdoor.

As I said, this is not a love story.
It doesn’t feel like the ‘self-love’ that they talk about. This body journey feels like a deep acceptance, a joy spreading through my skin that whispers:
This is my home.

At this point in my life I am quite good at detangling the outside from the inside.

And here’s how I do it and how I know which voice is mine.

I look at myself.

In the mirror or without it. I touch my skin. I touch the parts I used to find disgusting and shameful. My belly. My beautiful dark body hair. My cellulite. My arms. I do this often.
Because repetition is how we learn. This is how brainwashing works too. You can reprogram your brain to think differently.
I also use photography for this. Sometimes I bring out my professional camera. Sometimes it’s my phone on self timer.
Sometimes I wear clothes, usually I don’t. Because I want to see the unevenness of my skin. I want to look at the bumps. I want to see the soft stretch of my back. I want to feel the bend where my hip becomes soft. I want to look at those glorious thighs that don’t obey standard sizing. I want to really look at myself.

Photography for me is a medium for celebration, but also exploration and reflection. I use photography to be in conversation with myself, as a form of therapy you could say.
Looking at myself in photographs or in the mirror is confronting, it’s really difficult sometimes - but it’s also healing and liberating.
It takes a lot of courage and vulnerability to take photos or have them taken. Allowing someone to see me and also look at myself.

When I do this, it illuminates that those changing room thoughts are not my own. They come from somewhere else.
The thoughts that tell me to shave all my hair below the neck and leave nothing untouched are not my own.
It’s not my own preference to be hairless.
It’s society’s preference for me.

Because when I see myself naked in the mirror, I realise I love all of this. I actually really really like what I see. I like what I touch. I don’t want to change it.
The only reasons I would want to change my body are for outside reasons - for fashion or to be more palatable to other people.
But I have no inner, personal reasons of my own. None at all. I feel at home in this body I currently have, even on hard days.

This doesn’t happen overnight. But it works. The more you look at yourself, the more you will like and accept what you see. The more you avoid it and look at others, the more you will struggle.

There was a time when I considered getting my body lasered from the neck down again.
I don’t anymore. I know that all the reasons I tell myself are planted there. They are not mine. And I refuse to let my decisions be led by conditioning.

I’d love to know if this resonates with you and why? How do you detangle your own thoughts about your body from what you are taught to think?