Banishing The Wookie

I say many things about how I accept myself for who I am. I accept my appearance for what it is. I do feel beautiful and amazingly sexy. I am beautiful and amazingly sexy. But I have one major self confidence issue. It is one I joke about most of the time. Usually I take it lightly and don't judge myself too terribly harshly because it is something I cannot help. But other times I cry.

I have posted about it in quite a few of my previous entries like Tom Fucking Selleck and Resexification. These were done in jest. But the root issue is far from a joke to me. 

I am a beautiful woman who is as hairy as a Wookie. This is the honest truth. I am not by any means alone in this. But the true issue is how I feel about it. Most popular culture since the 1980's has been telling us that hair on a woman's body is wrong and that all women should strive to be as hairless as an 8 year old. To me this is unnatural. It borders on a societal acceptance of pedophelia. That being said. I am many times victim of this societal pressure. Images of the accepted woman assault me from the television, magazines, books, and the internet. Then I feel like a failure of a woman for not spending more time de-hairing my body. On the occasions I do shave my legs I refer to it as 'banishing the Wookie'. Honestly for me to become as hairless as is commercially accepted I would have to spend THOUSANDS UPON THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on laser hair removal. Which to me seems like a waste of money because being less mammalian doesn't make me a better person. It just makes me without thousands of dollars that could have been spent buying things like food and electricity. 

The reason for my feelings of failure are not in the fact that I am a very hairy bitch. It is in the fact that I have a very real disorder called PCOS that causes much more than turning me into a Wookie. The failure part is long and involved series of emotions related to all of the symptoms related to my PCOS. I have been denied many of the things most women take for granted.

The biggest one of these things is my being denied motherhood. (I posted about this once before) I wanted more than anything to have children. But I have had to come to terms with the reality that this is not possible for me, at least not in the traditional ways. The second is my weight. One of the symptoms of PCOS is weight gain and difficulty losing weight. I embrace the fact that I am a veluptous woman. But sometimes insecurities creep in from that front as well. Again, mostly media based. (And yes, I posted about that previously as well.) The third issue I deal with personally is the excess body hair. PCOS is not for the faint of heart. You really have to be a strong warrior woman to deal with the trauma to the body and mind PCOS causes. It messes with hormones that regulate not only menstrual functions but also regulate mood and disposition. 

The depression is real. I am not a constantly depressed person. And when I am under the spell of depression I hide it fairly well from the world. It comes and it goes like the ebb and flow of the tides. I am capable of looking at it clinically and recognizing when it is setting in. I don't feel like I'm sinking into the quicksand of depression like many people with this disease do. I am connected and removed from it simultaneously. That may be hard to grasp. It's like this, I feel myself looking into my life from the outside able to analyze and deconstruct what I see. While also being connected from the inside unable to stop the process that I feel starting from within my mind. I have a technique that may only work for me.  I allow myself to experience it all the way through, then I come out the other side wiser about who I am and what makes me feel. I do not deny myself the emotions of sadness, discontent, depression, or defeat. To do so would render me unhuman, mechanical. (I'd like to clarify that I know this is not an appropriate solution for all those who suffer depression, some have it to the degree that medication is the only solution to keep them safe. The emotions I connect to it are not indicitive of what I assume others feel. This is my personal way of dealing with my own depression. Which is intermittent at best, and sometimes merely situational.) 

Tonight's depression stemmed from shaving my legs or banishing the Wookie as we've established. I felt as if the only way to emerge from my current state sadness which has coccooned me was to shed my outer layer. That outer layer just happened to be covered in 2-3 months worth of follicular overgrowth. Then I felt guilty for feeling like I was sexier after being freshly shorn. After that I felt guilty for allowing myself to feel guilty. Human emotions are not logical and should not be treated as being logical. Obviously banishing the Wookie is not a cure for feelings of inadequacy or low self esteem. Those stem from even deeper issues which are not related to PCOS. All of which I have dealt with on many occasions and do not rule my life. Well, except for during the holidays. The holidays suck for having feelings. Stupid holidays.

So now I have smooth legs and a rather trimmed landscape. Does this change who I am? No. It just makes me more aerodynamic. But since I'm not flying or swimming that shouldn't matter. None of these external things should matter. The sad thing is, they do matter. They matter to us becuase we always want to be accepted by the world around us. What really matters, beyond being accepted by others, is that you need to accept yourself as you are. Before or after the Wookie has been banished. For most of us, we are conatantly struggling to balance between our own accpetance and what we percieve as the world acceptance of us. The only difference between Wookie me and aerodynamic me is a clogged shower drain. Take that for what it's worth. I love me. All of me. Hairy me. Smooth me. Stubbly me. And even bearded me. It isn't fair that people will always judge us for such trivial things, but they will continute to do just that. If we try not to let those nay-sayers in and process our feelings as they come and not push them aside to be ignored because they may be painful maybe we could change the way the world sees beauty. Yes, sometimes life hurts. But by not letting the pain take the drivers seat in our lives we are stronger. Beauty is subjective when it is presented to the world at large. Each person has their own definition of beauty. My hope is that those definitions become more inclusive of a persons true self, thier hearts and souls. 

I will leave you with this video that definitely spoke volumes to me for more reasons than it's just a catchy tune. Amanda Palmer is someone who not only gets that beauty is more than skin deep, she is outspoken about it. For a woman who has felt like the family Sasquatch since she was 10, finding others that have this attitude has made me stronger. Maybe we really can change the world one attitude at a time.

Map Of Tasmania FUCKING DANCE WHILE YOU WATCH THIS PEOPLE!