Nothing good ever comes of hating yourself

For the last few months, I have been obsessed with my neck. That’s right, my actual neck. I have been consumed by the appearance of horizontal lines, circling the terrain of my neck front and back. Grooves and valleys like rivers moving over the landscape of the earth. This creature has amassed a kind of girth I have never seen before. In the mirror, I look older, fuller, like the trunk of a birch tree.

Last month, while saving tid-bits on my Instagram on how to disappear your neck lines (which is a thing apparently — “neck lines”) I came upon a fascinating article about how French women take skincare “down to the decolletage.”

I didn’t know what the word decolletage meant at the time, although I had a vague idea it had something to do with the region around your breasts, the stretch and spread of skin there. I looked it up and came upon lovely, soothing videos of girls and elderly women, mostly white, mostly not French, smearing thick spreads of moisturizer on their faces and necks, then stroking it down below their collarbones.

Mmm, I gotta try that, I thought. But my Clinique moisturizer is too expensive and I’m too cheap to start taking it down to my decolletage, so I decided to use this old balm I found lying around somewhere in the back of my drawer. It was from a small mountain village in Uttarakhand, my native state. Yellow in color, made with beeswax and turmeric. I hadn’t used it for over two years, since my mother had gifted it to me.

I have never loved my body. I grew up with a sharp sense of distortion around my being, an intense feeling that mine was a strange body, an ugly body that will never conform to society’s needs. I was pre-teen when I was diagnosed with severe scoliosis, and my self-concept only worsened through the harsh rejections and brutalities of girlhood.

I was not the popular one. Not even the second most beautiful in ranking. I was invisible, plain. Yet somehow hyper-visible at the same time. That girl who wears a brace. Who everyone knew had something wrong with her back. Who everyone wanted to ask but no one knew how. Whose back was a great, impermeable wall between her and every potential friend every time they came close enough to connect.

Loneliness was a kingdom, and I grew up inside its buildings and streets. Its library shelves with aisles cool against my back. The sound of strangers’ shoes tapping in the distance. Dust scattering from pulled-out books, expanding like a dragon’s breath. I rode and swallowed on my mind’s self-annihilating fantasies. I grew into a wildly imaginative, readerly creature.

Rebecca and Jamaica Inn gave me solace. In Daphne du Maurier’s dark, tragic heroines I found a soft sort of beauty in being alone. Their worlds, English and French landscapes, so utterly different from mine, became my secret escapades. I hid in the library reading while the others played outside. I yearned for the men in the novels. Brooding, aloof creatures who nevertheless loved their women with torturesome abandon.

I don’t really know what any of this has to do with hating my neck. Except that this tendency towards self-loathing runs deep. It is a practiced habit whose wings I have sharpened so well over the years, they refuse to come down.

There hasn’t been a single morning I haven’t thought to myself “I hate my neck.” My neck has become a private object of fixation. The most visibly transforming part of my current body. The one that greets me in the dirty bathroom mirror every morning while I brush my teeth. The one I try not to look at while I actively look at it.

I thought moisturizing would solve the problem. Diligently, I slathered two coin-sized goops of the Himalayan balm across my face and neck, and feeling royally French, and oh so chic, I took it down to the decolletage.

Turns out, nothing good ever comes from hating yourself. I woke up with the worst allergic rash I have ever had in my life. Red hives and swelling all over my face, running down my neck. My eyelids were four balloons. You look like you have four styes, my boyfriend said, as I sent him panicked selfies of what-on-earth-is-wrong-with-me.

I googled and googled and googled. I ended up in Urgent Care. The pharmacist gave me antihistamines. The doctor gave me a cream. I had to cover my neck with a scarf for two whole weeks. My students commented on how cool my scarves were. I gave up makeup. I gave up contact lenses. No jewelry. It’s now been three weeks and my neck is still a little gummy and pink. My decolletage looks like the bottom of the trunk of an oak tree, the part where it spreads out in large conical shapes, and little gnome-families live inside the hollows.

Before all this hullabaloo, I had never moisturized my neck, let alone my decolletage. I never will again.

~

Thank you for reading Chronic Chronicles! I am collecting/practicing material for my memoir. I am also leading a summer round of my writing workshops, starting July.

If you’re interested in a warm, loving, invigorating writing community, come join us! I promise lots of writing, a playful, fun approach that actually leads to real breakthroughs, and meaningful connections with other writerly souls.

Here are all the details: https://www.kuhujoshi.com/writingworkshop

Will you be my marketing fairy godmother and help me spread the word? :)