Some outside facebook observer said that my “language” was too much and told me that I had “lost a fan” because she couldn’t condone my “language”. I am sorry for that, as I love my fans, and it sucks to lose one, but obviously she doesn’t understand that when you grow up the way that I did, with kids at school throwing rocks at my face because they hated it because it was so ugly to them and they wanted the blood from my wounds to cover it so it wouldn’t have to be seen and at summer camps stuffed dog shit in my sleeping bag because I was told time and again that I looked like shit – and that I had to empty myself in the dark forest and still sleep in smelling that shit all that night and for weeks after because my family was too poor to afford a new one, my “language” is on the strong side. I apologize for offending the former fan, but I am only myself. That is all I can be, and if I must apologize for that, I don’t mind. All I am trying to say is that no young girl should be told she is ugly. If she is, you kill her spirit, and she may grow up like me, and lose a fan.

I grew up hard and am still hard and I don’t care. I did not choose this face or this body and I have learned to live with it and love it and celebrate it and adorn it with tremendous drawings from the greatest artists in the world and I feel good and powerful like a nation that has never been free and now after many hard won victories is finally fucking free. I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.

I fly my flag of self esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were ‘different’ and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.

If you were raised lovingly and told you were perfect and beautiful and loved and the best at all things, I am just jealous. You had it much better, and so you really should spread that love around as opposed to judging those like me who never had that, never knew what it was like and never could even imagine it. I could learn from you instead of feeling judged by you. Give the less loved and less cared for and less treasured a chance. If I had that opportunity, then my language and attitude might not be so offensive. If I had been told once when I was a little girl that I was pretty (other than when I was being sexually molested – that doesn’t count) it might have made me nicer. It just didn’t happen. So I had to make do and make up for it myself. And that made me a bit on the edgy side. It made me a bit of a bitch.

When someone says something negative about my face or body I will always and forever just completely lose my shit, because I have so much hatred in me, a violence that lies just beneath the surface of my delightfully illustrated skin. Being called ugly and fat and disgusting to look at from the time I could barely understand what the words meant has scarred me so deep inside that I have learned to hunt, stalk, claim, own and defend my own loveliness and my image of myself as stunningly gorgeous with a ruthlessness and a defensiveness that I fear for anyone who casually or jokingly questions it, as my anger and rage combined with my intense and fearsome command of words create insults meant to maim, kill and destroy.

Things I could say should be left unheard and unsaid because I am not willing to be the bigger person. I do not take the high road. I take the low road and blows below the belt are my absolute favorite. The best revenge is not living well. The best revenge is revenge. My mouth and mind and typing fingers are weapons of mass destruction and I pity those ignorant idiots who would leave insults about mine or any women’s bodies in comment boxes because there’s ways of hunting people down. Lots and lots of ways. It’s not as anonymous as they think, as stupid as they are.

I’d like to say things that would haunt them for the rest of their days, because their hideous words stay with me eternally. Their insipid spouts of “no fat chicks” are branded onto my soul, so they must reap what they sow. If I am in my worst way and I talk to you, you will know you have been talked to. I want to punish you with the unforgettable shit you will take to your grave and hurt you long after you are dead in the ground. may my poison bore holes in your dry, decaying bones. I am not proud of this, but it’s just the way this life has made me.

I want to defend the children that we still are inside, the fragile sensitive souls who no matter how much we tried were still told we were not good enough. I want to make the world safe and better and happy for us. We deserve beauty, love, respect, admiration, kindness and compassion. If we don’t get it, there will be hell to pay. I am no saint, but I am here for you and me. I am here for us, and I am doing the best I can.

My mother first informed me of the idea that beauty was pain, as she plucked her own thickly natural eyebrows into the hard, 70s spare lines of the era. “Beauty is pain” she said blankly, as her black eyebrow hairs seemed to turn brown because of the redness of her angry skin underneath her ineffectual Maybelline tweezers. This was a time before Tweezerman and Shu Uemera before we could really pluck those tiny hairs in microscopic earnest. I believed her and ruthlessly tried to avoid beauty for much of my young and then adult life. I am not a masochist. I don’t want pain. And therefore, beauty and I are incompatible. I no longer believe this to be true. To be beautiful is actually to be aware of yourself as art, and to frame your art in a way that is unique to yourself and easy to yourself and fun to yourself.  We are just masterpieces waiting to be framed and mounted and lighted then worshipped. We are worth this, as we are more priceless than anything.

In the last few months I have been practicing this “myself as art” theory, and I have seen a marked improvement in areas that needed a boost, and it hasn’t cost me any more money really. It’s an investment in time, but not a lot, and it’s helped me feel good about myself, which is all we really need on earth, to feel good. To not have dread when I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror – which I would do – I would actually feel horror at my own reflection, wishing myself a vampire, wishing myself undead so I would have to endure the image of my ugliness. I don’t feel ugly anymore, and no one has called me that in a very long time (believe me I used to hear it often, maybe more than once a day – seriously!). I am editing my closet and makeup drawers. I am wearing what is attractive on me on my face and body and really only that. Everything I have – its sole purpose is to flatter me, and if it doesn’t, it’s gone. Into a pile that might hopefully flatter someone else, out of my life to welcome another jacket/boot/shirt/scarf/lipstick/eyelash that will realize my beauty further. Make everything work in concert to bring out the beauty in you. Old dogs are the best at learning new tricks because we have been through it all, we know who we are, we know all about it.

Some youtube videos are excellent tutors and teachers. My favorite - Catalina is a genius. She’s Korean and probably could be my daughter. She’s lovely and so smart and also has great tips for skincare. We have similar skin. I have learned a lot from her especially regarding sensitive skin and how to do my eye makeup.

Catalina - Natural Flawless Look

I love these girls – Korean too! park and cube - gorgeous style, photographs – and also Shini is very funny. She’s amazing. She looks like she could be in my family also – there’s a striking familial familiarity. I love her posts.

park & cube

This blog – Luxirare -  is also exceptional – in so many ways. I am obsessed with Ji Kim’s design and her cooking and I want everything she posts – either to eat or to wear. I am constantly floored by the creativity of people, and the art which they choose to make from their lives. This blog is really a lesson in how we can live, how we should live – what is possible. We should live every moment like this. I plan to.

LUXIRARE

Of course I love food and I cheat on my ‘diet’ every day, and when I say ‘diet’ I mean eating pretty much gluten-free/grain-free/sugar-free foods but of course there’s always cookies and shit in there. It’s all about being consistent and doing something for myself physically every day.

I work with different trainers and they’ve helped a lot – but what they cannot prepare you for is when your body does change. How do you deal with being physically different? For me this manifests itself in a lot more attention from others. This is not always positive. In fact it can be quite disturbing. Being thinner, I have noticed people approaching me – mostly men, and it can be very strange. I don’t know what this is about. When you adhere more to a socially ‘acceptable’ body, there’s something that attracts others more to you. Last week on the Atlanta airport tram, an angry man sat down next to me and demanded to know why I was had so many tattoos because it was obvious I was old and really only young people should have them. He was very aggressive and I think was trying to hit on me, but really could only come at me in this very insulting way. I didn’t say anything – as I was actually truly terrified. He kept saying I was too old to have that many tattoos and kept looking at my body and my face trying to find some explanation. I wanted to run away but I was trapped on the tram and couldn’t find an escape. I remained silent, which triggered him further and made him come closer to me. Fortunately the tram stopped and I was able to run away from him. The male attention I have received since losing weight has been both aggressive and hostile like this and more tame, yet still boundary violating like some dude grabbing my waist and rib cage on the street, catcalls, etc. I am not sure what to attribute this to other than my changed appearance.

I also have been receiving more positive attention – and that’s a bit of a problem too. I think that trainers need to educate their clients on what to do with the amount of attention we receive in our new bodies. I think that for me, being thinner always meant being more sexual, and this is not necessarily appropriate for me. In the past, whenever I got thinner, I wanted to show my body to as many people as I could because I was convinced I wouldn’t have it for long, and so I wanted proof that it existed in the approving glances of others. I am old enough (not too old for tattoos) and mature enough now to know not to go crazy like this anymore. I want to keep my body healthy and enjoy being fit, and not feel that I have to be thin in order to be valued. I am valued at any size.

The other thing that trainers don’t really warn you about is shopping. It is such a rush to go to a store and be able to buy clothing! Before, when I shopped with my beautiful, thin actress friends, I would never be able to buy anything but housewares! They’d be trying on the cutest outfits and I was limited to mugs and bead curtains. Now I can wear different kinds of things and it’s so exciting that I want to shop all the time! It’s absolutely insane! To look at clothing tags that say ‘m’ and ‘s’ and even ‘xs’ sometimes is a total rush for me. It’s an expensive high though, and it’s not the right thing to do. It’s wonderful to be able to treat yourself to beautiful things, especially if you’ve been working hard toward a goal, but for me it’s a dangerous preoccupation!

Trainers have helped me so much in finding a good balance with eating and exercise, but the social behaviors are something that I need help with too!

Sitting down at a friend’s family home, just teenagers satisfying that after school hunger that is insatiable. There is something about eating after school – there’s no way to fill up the bottomless well there. School was such a battle, for me all the years I managed it. I never went to school one day where it was okay. From daycare on – it was always always terrible. To this day, I still wake up at 6:50am and my first thought is, “I don’t have school today!” and I am sure I will think this every morning and will worry the day I don’t think this first thing. Miraculously, I did manage to have a friend here and there. She and I ate often at her home after school, where the blessed refrigerator was not filled with embarrassing Korean things fermenting, which is what my home was; giant jars of cabbage and fish that shamed me painfully then, but what I would give anything for now, as a sophisticated and worldly gourmand. Then it was just the pain of my immigrant existence. But her kitchen was filled with buttery chafing dishes of noodle kugle, thick with raisins and cream – there was not a fish eye or egg in sight – welcome relief further intoxicating me with the exoticism of white people. I loved her family’s Russian Jewish cooking. All the latkes in the world will never be enough for me. My kingdom for a stuffed cabbage.

That day there were latkes there, cold stacks, tiny air bubbles dotting the surface like steam widened facial pores, ready to be filled up with sour cream and applesauce. Rolls of stuffed cabbage, tomato sauce crispy with celery and onion – and of course the beloved noodle kugle. What I love about the eastern European dishes are the sweetness – probably invented to cut the bitterness of life there. Whatever the origin, whatever the reasons – it’s fucking good. We dished out heaping servings onto thick rustic 70’s plates and microwaved them without covering, so the food was heated unevenly, bites containing scalding hot morsels and disconcerting cold lumps. It didn’t matter because it was about getting the food down. Her mother came in suddenly and sat down, taking a moment from the ‘Me era’ to sit with her daughter, but probably only to satisfy her own guilt, so it was still in keeping with the times. She looked at the food on our plates and she looked at me and said, “You have an eating disorder. You have to stop eating like that. What is wrong with you? What makes you eat like that? You have to stop! You have to STOP RIGHT NOW!!!” My friend threw her fork down and said, “GOD! MOM! SO EMBARRASSING!!! This is why I have like NO FRIENDS!!!!!GOD!!!”

I felt sick immediately, the fat in the food coagulating in my blood and stopping it. It felt like a heart attack, or a tranquilizer dart right in the chest, felling me in my tracks. Like when you take your battery out of your phone – just blank screen. Blank. Mother and daughter were full on fighting now but I had checked out and gone somewhere else. We were all still sitting there but I don’t really know what happened after that. Perhaps we went to my friend’s room and drowned out her neurotic mother’s musings with Duran Duran, but whatever happened I know that I was permanently changed. I had been marked with a big scarlet letter “E” on my chest for “eating disorder.” That was when I was tagged in the wild and categorized forever, and even though I was put back into the general population, I carry the mark to this day.

It’s true, I have changed the way I have been eating and exercising, trying to stay in my body as much as possible, after having abandoned it time and time again for almost an entire lifetime, but I am not trying to lose weight, I am just trying to lose the feeling of being unconscious, trying to jump into my skin out of the ether every day, plunge into the depth of being. I feel that I deserve this, I owe myself the time and commitment it takes to be healthy. I am so sad and angry at my young self, because I was such a beautiful kid and I never appreciated it because I was convinced I was fat. Now I look back and see that I wasted so much time hating my body, when it was really truly lovely.

If you are a young person and you feel frustrated with the way you look, I beg you to look again. I can tell already, you are beautiful. Your life is just beginning. Don’t let this time go by without enjoying it. Don’t listen to the bullshit that people say. It’s just awful. I listened to the media and the dumb indignities and insensitive comments people made rather than looking at myself with my own eyes. So much weird stuff would stay in my brain – the numerous times people asked me if I was pregnant/with child/when I was due/if I had a thyroid problem/if I had ever considered bariatric surgery (seriously). Also – there was so much unsolicited weight loss advice! Bitch I don’t care! Don’t tell me what you do unless I ask you to tell me.

Now I am getting less of this type of criticism and more questions and jaw dropping reactions to the way I am looking now. Why are people so bowled over? What I would love to hear are your stories about body transformations, and how people in your life react to it. How do you react to it? I am overall kind of resentful, like why is it better now, why couldn’t you say nice things to me before? I am not a different person, I am not even that different a size, what is it that makes me so acceptable now? I am still as bad at holding in a fart now as I was then.

So years ago, I was at the gym for the first time after a long absence, tired and worn out from hating myself ferociously all night. While waiting for a step class to begin (oh shit remember Reebok STEP????? Bruises appear all over my shins when I even think about fucking STEP), the woman and I were talking about her marathon training. She had run in the Los Angeles marathon and was thinking about going to Boston and New York to run in those famous city marathons. “You can eat anything you want…” which to me are like weird magic words. Have you ever heard these words uttered – “if you take this class/pill/powder/hire this trainer/dance this number/drink this drink/swim every day/get on a vibration machine while you work out with weights/buy this ab-flex/watch this dvd/learn to purge/run this marathon – you can eat anything you want.” If I ever am fortunate to encounter a Genii, with his muscly arms and curly shoes, I would ask for just one wish consolidated from all three – “I want to eat whatever I want” (presuming that my body would be perfect to begin with and then just never change). My mother tried to append this wish by adding “and never get full” because truly that is her desire – because fullness gets in the way of eating whatever you want! Goddamn body – doesn’t it know we are not eating for hunger!! We are eating for reasons entirely personal and unique and emotional and mental – not physical at all!

The marathoner got to eat whatever she wanted. She ran and ran and ran away from the food and it never caught up with her. Her eyes got misty and far away as she reminisced about bagels and cream cheese, countless pasta dinners, desserts long ago eaten and enjoyed and burned away by running. She ate and ran to utter exhaustion, and after the race was over, she felt incredibly triumphant. Her face glowed as she said, “and afterward, my body was just…..CARVED.” She described the thinness of her own body after running a marathon with a pride and satisfaction that I have never known for myself. What a strange world to live in – to enjoy oneself and love oneself so you are high from it. She actually looked high – thinking about how thin she was, despite eating everything. Is this the runner’s high that is so sought after, yet to me is so elusive? Then she talked about all her toenails fell off and I got grossed out and never tried running.

When you are dancing, you have to constantly look at yourself in the mirror, which I had great problems with. I don’t look in the mirror much. I never have. I never watch myself perform, with the exception of when I am playing music, but then I am usually looking for mistakes I have made on guitar so I can correct them, or I am watching the other musicians. Having to watch myself and preparing for other people to watch me dance was nerve racking, not because I expected myself to be such a good dancer, but because I am so unaware and out of touch with my physical body, it was like I was having to power myself with a remote control with fading batteries. There was a tabloid story about how I was the obnoxious one backstage at DWTS, but I don’t know who could have said this because frankly I never said a word backstage. I didn’t speak at all because I was so terrified of having to be compared to the beautiful dancers next to me. One contestant and corresponding partner would say almost every taping, “Stop being so nervous!” which just made me feel worse.

What sucks is I danced beautifully in rehearsals whenever my wonderful partner Louis and I were alone, but this was completely frustrating because when we would get out on the ballroom floor I couldn’t replicate it because I felt so weird about the way I looked. This hit me as so strange because I thought I had left all these physical insecurities and self doubt behind, but what truly happened was I was just in denial about how much self hatred I had left in me. Now I really need to let this go, not just for myself, but for everyone in my life, everyone who comes to see me perform, everyone who hears my voice and gets it and loves it. We need to feel good about ourselves, not just for competition shows or dance contests, but so we can truly live.

I started to regress into bad habits while DWTS training. I would put on my eating dress and panic-eat entire pizzas and boxes of chocolates. I have no problem eating this way to satisfy hunger, but I wasn’t eating two whole pizzas and entire boxes of sees candy (large from Dominos with extra pepperoni, sausage – seriously along with one bite each of every chocolate in a big boxed assortment because of pickiness) because I was hungry. I wasn’t hungry – because I was already eating these balanced meals we got for free so we wouldn’t pass out from all the training – there was no starvation going on, that’s for sure. I was eating because I was so scared all the time (golden oreos became my life). I could tell that this obsessive behavior wasn’t about eating, it was about escape. My mouth would be all torn up from biting the insides of my cheeks, because I was so desperate to get the food down so fast I wasn’t chewing properly. I was trying to run away into the cheese, into the caramel filling, into the creamy lard middle of the golden oreo. This was super scary.

I don’t want to do this to myself anymore. I have been trying to eat healthier to get some sanity around food. I know that I am an addictive personality, especially when it comes to food, but you can’t give up food like you can give up drugs and alcohol. We have to eat, so we have to face food and face it several times a day. I am making a commitment to myself to eat better and get into my body. I am trying to work out more, not to lose weight or get fit, but to get inside my skin. I did this briefly with bellydance and burlesque, but now DWTS has shown me I really need to get more committed to really living my life. I know it’s just reality TV, but interestingly enough, it made my reality more real and I am changing my life for the better.

I will be back in the audience next week to cheer on the stars and their pro dancers, feeling radiant and confident and happy, knowing I will dance again another day. And though it was hard, I have fond memories of dancing on that floor. Although it unearthed a world of pain I didn’t even know existed, there were moments where I have never felt so beautiful (especially in the gay pride rainbow flag dress).

I’d love to hear your stories about body issues like this. I need some help and guidance and support. Also I am getting physical trainers in every city on my tour, so if you do this for a living, I’d love to meet you!

My body feels sore but also strong and capable. I am doing spins that weren’t possible two days ago. I can feel the floor through my bruised and calloused feet and my body is starting to understand what to do – where to step, where to stop, where to be physically silent, where to be loud. Louis is pushing me further and further – I am crying now all the time, not because I am sad, but because I feel like I am really in my body. I didn’t realize how much I have been avoiding being here – how little time I have spent in my skin – for my entire life. It’s the same with my house. I never really unpack. I never really am home. it is the same with my physical being. I have been told so many times that my body was not right – for this reason or that. I have abandoned myself so much that now it feels strange to stay here. To be here. One thing is certain – I am here now. I am doing this. It doesn’t exactly feel good, but it feels right.