Body Talk

by Kelly Jensen

  Some things get better in college. I learn to eat. I make friends. Smart, funny, interesting friends who are occasionally racist, but at least they’re trying.

  I run every night. It shuts up some of the clamor in my head. Tires it out, mostly.

  On a path I’ve run a dozen times, something goes wrong. A twist, a blaze of pain, and then I’m on the concrete. (I should say it was cold or hard, should add some nice sensory details, but I don’t remember on account of how I’d just fractured my ankle.)

  This isn’t a story about how people are cruel and don’t believe me when I say I hurt. People are wonderful and don’t believe me when I say I’m fine. The students who flock to pull me into a chair. The friend who brings me Band-Aids, painkillers, and cookies. Two friends who carry me up the stairs and stick ice on my ankle.

  Friends who patiently ignore my chorus of “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine” and leave the pain meds next to me when I insist on sleeping without taking one. I’ve taught them, in their own way, to ignore what I say about my body.

  I don’t remember that doctor’s visit. I remember arriving to dinner with my foot in a boot, my best friend happily plopping next to me, bracelets jingling, and saying, “Hello, my dear CRIPPLE! You look so nice and CRIPPLED!”

  I stood right up and hobbled over to get my own food, ignoring everyone who tried to help.

  (This bit is in past tense, because even I look back at it and say, “Wait, really?”)

  So here’s the embarrassing part: I don’t stop running. I twist my ankle again and again. I get my other ankle caught between an elliptical’s foot pedals, bright bruises blooming like a child scrawled in marker and it leaked, swelling that never quite goes away.

  Almost a year later, my ankle an angry red ball, a doctor takes an MRI, and I am utterly shocked to hear my ankle is fractured.

  (I remember telling people my ankle was fractured. I just don’t remember believing it.)

  The doctor says, trying to turn bewilderment into a joke, “It’s a shame you didn’t wear your boot, huh?”

  And what am I supposed to say? I thought I was making the whole thing up?

  The car hits us from behind, and my water bottle hits my face. Everything dissolves into green light.

  My brother shakes my shoulder, asks if I’m OK. Am I in shock? Do I want an ambulance?

  I don’t want an ambulance, partially because money, partially because, as always, I think I’m fine.

  I’m grateful that to this day, my ankle screams at me for mistakes I made seven years ago, because it reminds me that I need to take care of my back.

  I need to let friends help me carry groceries, when I used to be the one stealing other people’s bags to carry.

  I need to find an identity besides “the one who is always fine, who will take care of you because she has no needs of her own” (the one who is completely delusional but will cook for you!).

  I need to lie down for a couple of days after moving apartments, even when my new roommate (the one who said she would totally be down to live with someone disabled, the one who brought me cookies when my ankle broke) is angry and bewildered and asks why I don’t get surgery.

  I’m not saying I actually remember to take care of myself all the time. But I remember that I need to, at least sometimes.

  It’s progress.

  I have to call and email my insurance company three times (less than usual) before they send me a simple email with a longer attachment.

  The simple email: “The doctor advised that your cervical, thoracic, lumbar, left shoulder, and right shoulder injuries are resolved as related to this claim. Therefore no further treatment is warranted.”

  The longer attachment spins through lists, my body broken down into numbers, tendon reflexes, range of motion, my name always “the individual” or “the claimant.”

  Ultimately, the attachment is just as simple as the email. “The claimant’s subjective complaints of pain do not match the objective findings. No further treatment would be reasonable or necessary.”

  I want to end this story on a tidy note. I want to say I learned a lesson, that I take better care of myself and no longer see life as a war between myself and my body. Better yet, I want to say I stormed my insurance company’s office or sent a lawyer to do it for me.

  And there are much larger stories here. Stories about the crisis of untreated chronic pain. Stories about how we’ve all learned as a society to turn away from acknowledging the pain of others, especially when they aren’t white or male.

  But there is no tidy end. It keeps going.

  It goes to me waking up in screaming pain most mornings.

  It goes to me making an elaborate dinner for friends and then collapsing on the couch while they clean the dishes and occasionally yell at me to get back on the couch and stop trying to clean the dishes.

  It goes to one doctor telling me my insurance won’t pay for treatment anymore and I should just get exercise, another doctor a year later telling me of course I should keep doing physical therapy, another doctor asking if I’ve gotten an MRI lately, because this sounds like nerve damage, another doctor telling me maybe it’s just the anxiety.

  It goes to my body rebelling against me in a thousand tiny ways: hives all over, constant gas that fizzes and pops under a stethoscope (much to my relief, because what if I was making it up?).

  It goes to a different insurance company, a different hospital room, same wait, same form, same questions.

  Yes, it happened in 2016.

  Yes, I’m still seeking treatment.

  Yes, I’m sure it hurts.

  Maybe It’s Maybelline, or Maybe It’s Really Not Your Business

  by Roshani Chokshi

  I’ve just emerged from putting the finishing touches of makeup on for date night. When I get to the foyer, I tilt my chin up, don my best approximation of an insouciant moue, and say, “OK. Now I’m ready.”

  My fiancé looks at me. To be beheld by someone who loves you can transmute the blood in your veins, and right now, I feel a rush of fizzing champagne.

  “Notice anything different?” I ask.

  Too late, I realize this registers to him as a trap question. Alarm blares in his eyes as he abruptly shuts off the mental shuffle of whatever Instagram memes he was scrolling through moments ago and starts mentally rummaging through the day’s conversations.

  “No?” he says almost guiltily before adding a safe closer: “You always look beautiful.”

  I glance in the mirror. Tonight, I’ve dabbed a pearlescent highlighter on the Cupid’s bow of my lips and the crescents along my cheekbones. When I turn my face, I catch an almost fae-like shimmer by my temples. It struck me as coquettish—a detail that appears and disappears in a slant of light. I tell him what I added, demonstrating the shimmer by turning my head this way and that.

  “Oh,” he says before frowning. “I can’t really tell the difference.”

  “Ah, but I know the difference,” I say, smiling as I take his arm.

  Makeup, for me, is less about what others perceive and more about what I wish to project. It’s an art form, an act of ritual, a semblance of armor even.

  When I was growing up, my mother wore little makeup. Her only cosmetic ritual—if it can be called that—was cold cream and Noxzema, and those faintly mentholated bedtime kisses became a background fragrance to my childhood. In the morning, Mom swabbed on her favorite toner and SPF and went about her day. But on special occasions, she would open up a wicker basket that she kept on her counter and take out a shiny black tube of lipstick. I adored the waxen rose smell of her lipstick, the way her repeated use had changed the pillar of color, so that it dipped into a mauve crescent. Mom would draw her lipstick on like a heart, filling both halves of her upper lip before finishing the bottom lip in one smooth swipe. She would blot once with a tissue, then dust powd
er over her face. I loved to watch her fluff her hair once, her eyebrows arched slightly as she drew back, an imperial aura haloing her silhouette. My mother has always been powerful, but that swipe of lipstick and dust of powder lent her a sheen of self-awareness. She was powerful, and she wanted you to know that she knew it too.

  Naturally, I wanted a taste of what that felt like.

  In sixth grade, I crept into my parents’ bathroom and furtively dabbed on my mom’s lipstick (a full, pressed swipe was far too bold and unwieldy). When I looked in the mirror, I mimicked her eyebrow arch and chin tilt, and I. Felt. Fearsome. I didn’t even notice that I’d smudged the lipstick outside of the lip line. And I definitely couldn’t tell that it’d caught on my snaggletooth and braces . . . until, of course, I got to school. I don’t know what I expected.

  Maybe too many Bollywood movies or lazy rom-coms in which the heroine takes down her hair and causes a seismic shift in the universe had trained my soul to think how that one lipsticked smile would make the entire room break into choreographed dancing. When I walked into class, I grinned widely at my crush. I braced myself for a rain of silvery confetti. A sudden bloom of awareness behind his eyes.

  Instead, he took one look at my blood-claggy teeth and recoiled like I’d arrived to homeroom waving a vial of smallpox.

  After that, I shoved the lipstick back into the depths of Mom’s makeup basket, furious with its betrayal.

  I didn’t mess with makeup after that. I didn’t trust it. Whatever power it had, it clearly had no interest in working for me.

  I didn’t reach for makeup again until I was in high school. My dad wouldn’t let me wear contact lenses; I still had braces; and to better frame my mouth of metal, I unwillingly sported a dusting of facial hair. It would be a kindness to call it a Groucho Marx aesthetic. In certain lights, I was convinced it looked like I’d taken in a homeless badger and allowed it to live right beneath my nose.

  Alas.

  My best friend proposed a solution: Nair, a depilatory cream and darling of the early ’00s. What could go wrong? proclaimed the advertisements. Indeed.

  A few days before the homecoming dance, I perched on her toilet seat, nose wrinkling from the corpse reek of the product as she slathered it over my upper lip.

  “Now we wait eight minutes,” she said.

  Eight minutes seemed like a longish time, so we puttered around her house, annoyed the cats, scavenged through her fridge, and got distracted by a rerun of Totally Spies! By then, I’d gotten used to the reek of Nair, and I remembered it was there only when I felt a faint stinging sensation.

  “Do you think we should wash this stuff off now?” I asked her.

  “Hmm?” she said distractedly. Then she looked at my face: “Shit.”

  When I slunk back home, I sported swatches of peeling, raw skin below my nose. I wanted to burst into flames. Even worse, my parents were furious.

  My dad, who lives for ominous pronouncements, declared that I would be permanently scarred. I cried for hours before walking to the nearby pharmacy, desperate for a solution. Inside I was met with a spectrum of concealers, a rainbow of pristine skin bearing names like “Honey,” “Caramel,” “Toast,” and “Café au Lait.” It was a lexicon of camouflage, and I wanted to hide so badly. I grabbed a shade that I thought matched my face, got home, and dabbed it over my bruised skin. It was a bit cakey, a bit yellow tinged, and the more it was exposed to light, the more it oxidized. I saw all that, sure, but what I didn’t see was a scabbed-over mustache.

  That was the start of my new relationship with makeup. It wasn’t just a swipe of self-aware power. It could be expression too. If I wished to hide something, I could. If I wanted to look bright, I could. Dark, I could. It was potential, and my face was a canvas.

  Those early years with makeup summoned a strange tension. There were days when I felt like my cystic acne and terrible scars meant that I shouldn’t even walk into my parents’ kitchen without a layer of foundation, concealer, and powder. If I went to a party and felt beautiful, all those compliments melted from me the moment I washed my face and saw what lay underneath. A sort of dysmorphia set in, where who I was felt inextricable from what I looked like.

  I think a large part of that unease with my own face came from not knowing what I was supposed to look like.

  I grew up wanting to look like the beauties from my favorite books or the shows around me: Alanna the Lioness, Fleur Delacour, Sailor Moon, Lizzie McGuire. Girls with uncomplicated names and candlelight hair, gemstone eyes, and milk skin. It wasn’t until I graduated high school that interest shifted a little. The Kardashians ushered an era of exoticizing the ethnically ambiguous, the girls whose bloodlines showed no particular allegiance and celebrated the in-between.

  I’d always struggled with how to be both Filipina and Indian. If I was half of each, could I still wholly belong to both? I thought my face would decide for me, but a touch more eyeliner there, a straighter hairstyle here, and, well, I could slip between realms of belonging or eschew them both entirely.

  At that point, makeup became a language of control. “Indian girls shouldn’t look too tan. Stay fair,” counseled one aunt. So I bought bronzer and self-tanner. “Asian girls shouldn’t wear too much eyeliner. It makes their eyes look small.” So I became a raccoon impersonator.

  As I grew older, time became crueler in some ways but kinder in others. Its best kindness to me was that I grew accustomed to myself. At a certain point, it became exhausting to exceed or defy anyone else’s expectations of me, so I endeavored to meet my own. I reached for makeup to enhance what I loved about my features, rather than to transform what I disliked. Makeup was no longer about what I couldn’t control, but about what I wanted to craft . . . for fun. For me. It was a new stage in my relationship with makeup, and all I had to do was, well, wait to grow up a bit.

  Learning about makeup became a celebration of self. I learned the difference between red lipsticks with blue undertones and red lipsticks with clementine souls and chose what fit me best based on the hue of the veins on my wrist. I learned how to open up my eyes with shadows that smoked along the corners rather than dusting the entire surface. I learned that experimenting with looks was an act of artistic expression.

  Even now, I love to sink deeper into the mind-set of a character I’m writing by changing up my makeup look to match them. When my brain looks like a ziggurat of adverbs and descriptions of a love interest’s eyes, and the plot demands a bloody sacrifice before it moves an inch further, I swipe on red lipstick, glare at my laptop, and plunge back into the book.

  These days, I love taking off my makeup almost as much as I love putting it on. I live for the ritual of returning to bareness—the cotton pads like flattened moons, soap lather squishing between fingers, glossy creams sinking into my skin. The repetitive motions take the day away. If I get a bad review, it’s swiped off with the concealer. If I regret cruel words I let slip, a clean lip is a clean slate to do better.

  Sometimes I hear, “Oh, but you don’t need makeup.” Other times I hear, “Do you need to wear that much?” Need is a strange condition. As an artist, I need an outlet for expression. Sometimes I need armor and sometimes I need invisibility. Those needs don’t negate my self-worth or sense of self. Rather, they’re things I do for myself that no one need notice. There may be days when no one else around me can tell what difference I’ve added or subtracted, but it doesn’t matter.

  Because I know.

  And I’m the only one who needs to know.

  How important is sleep?

  Human bodies need sleep. It’s where some of the most important growth happens. The challenge is, of course, that the world doesn’t operate on the best schedule for allowing your body to sleep. Teens need eight to ten hours of sleep every night, but because of changes in hormones and circadian rhythms, you might not be able to fall asleep until late at night. That means waking up early f
or school can be challenging. And when your body doesn’t get enough sleep, it can impact everything from your cognitive function to the way your skin looks. You might not be able to concentrate, and you might find yourself quick to get angry.

  One of the best ways to ensure you’re getting enough sleep is to establish a routine by going to bed at the same time every night and waking up at the same time every morning. It can be tempting to sleep in on weekends, but if you go to bed and wake up around the same time every day, your body will know when to shut down and wake up in a healthy pattern. Other ways to help get good sleep include routines that tell your body it’s time to unwind, like taking a shower or bath before getting into bed, turning off all screens an hour before you want to fall asleep, writing out a to-do list for the next day, journaling, doing gentle stretches, or anything else that helps you relax. Try not to rely on caffeine or energy supplements in the evening, and if you choose to take a nap during the day, limit it to about twenty minutes and make sure it’s not too close to your normal bedtime.

  If you struggle with sleeping for long periods of time, it’s OK to see your doctor about it. There are many reasons why you may be unable to sleep, and there are many treatments that can help.

  What’s the Deal with Hormones?

  by Alicia Lutes

  For all the things your hormones affect and control in your body, it’s sort of wild we don’t talk about them more. Maybe it’s because they’re so hard to pin down—your responses and reactions are personal, depending on your family history as well as other external forces. Hormones show you just how truly connected every part of our bodies really are.

  I know this because as a teenager, I was tested for Cushing’s disease, a rare condition in which your pituitary gland overproduces the hormones ACTH and cortisol (ACTH is the hormone that regulates cortisol production). Weight that feels impossible to lose is one of several symptoms of the disease. Even though I tried to shrug the diagnosis off, like any other teen would, learning about the interconnectedness of my hormones ultimately paved the way to understanding my physical and mental health as an adult. So I thought, who better to ask about hormones than the woman who helped me understand them when I was sixteen? Thankfully, Dr. Kai Yang, an adult endocrinologist affiliated with Yale University, along with Dr. Susan Boulware, a pediatric endocrinologist and assistant professor at Yale, was more than happy to answer my questions and hopefully help all of you to understand your hormones, too.