WOULD YOU LIKE SOME LOVE WITH THAT?
There are nights—usually cold ones, the kind where I drown in blankets and thoughts—when I am utterly and inexplicably tired of being with myself. I am tired of the way my thoughts reverberate, hard-knuckled knocks against my forehead, tired of how cold my hands get when I wrap them around myself, tired of being so fucking tired all the time.
I’ve never been in love, but I know it well. I’ve filled my lungs with Mariah Carey’s We Belong Together, and I’ve cracked open cheesy YA novels, the ones with covers plastered with girls’ heads cut off at the shoulder, that turn girls into miscellaneous arms and legs on the laborious quest for love. I’ve shoveled popcorn and peanut M&M’s into my face while I memorized the lines to The Notebook, and I’ve held my thoughts on The Titanic tight to my chest so as not to risk social ostracism (it’s too long, too boring—there, I said it). I’ve never been in love, but I’ve spent so long studying it, crunching the numbers, adding regurgitated responses from movies to my repertoire because I am well-trained, a dog that will sit on command without knowing why. Tell me romantic love is what I need to breathe, and I’ll crush my lungs trying to find it. I’ll convince myself I need it.
No one teaches you how to love yourself. Buzzfeed and Seventeen Magazine have told me it’s movies and bubble baths, but when I’m crying over how my stomach balloons and then pinches when my jeans fit tighter than they used to, I don’t think Netflix is the fucking cure. Self-care channels on Youtube, helmed by women whiter than their professionally cleaned teeth, the kind with perfectly tousled I-just-woke-up-like-this hair, never seem to get it right. If I watch another video where some valley girl accented, bleached-blonde bobblehead with abs sharp enough to cut my fingers gushes about how drinking more water made her feel more in-tune with her body, I’m going to tear my hair out and explode. Their love for themselves is so easy and naive and perfectly uncomplicated, and I am forever jealous. They don’t understand that it’s easy to preach the importance of self-love when you’re constantly reaffirmed to be the one deserving of it. I am not, and never will be, Rachel McAdams, and there are nights (the cold ones) when that feels like a travesty. Rachel McAdams is thin and pretty and white and everything that it feels like I’m not. When she and Ryan Gosling kiss in the rain, all I can think about is how alone I am, how different we are, and how tired I am of being with myself.
Growing up I had the kind of frizzy, unmanageable hair and gap-toothed smile that earned me compliments about how smart I was. Pretty was reserved for my sister, with her tanned legs that seemed to span entire solar systems before they found their way to her torso. “She’s gonna be a dancer,” my dad often joked, “and you’ll be her manager,” guffawing as he threw down the punchline, its shrapnel settling into the way my jeans pressed into my stomach. I took notice of how my body was, and still is for that matter, a collection of soft edges. Chocolate was my safe haven in middle school, and even now with frequent spin classes and weight lifting instructors that proclaim “sexy thin waists” as the goal for the night, I am blind to my own (objectively thin, subjectively unsexy) body. I don’t see the Rachel McAdams stomach, the type so flat with flat-ironed organs, leaving me to grapple with the reality of bumps and curves and divots that I’ve been taught aren’t normal. While my mom wavered between WeightWatchers group meetings at the synagogue and shoveling down chips in the cover of night, I only saw women with flat-ironed stomachs on the magazine stands at Rite-Aid. I saw these white women on TV get into relationships, happy ones, with white picket fences and a dog and a one-family home with an adoring husband. These women never had fathers who lied and cheated and left, never had to get free lunches at the park when they were twelve because their mom couldn’t afford to buy groceries that week. Neighbors had never watched them drive around in a car with a duct-taped window, band-aid fixes to bullet holes. A boy in their class had never asked them if they were a terrorist (I cannot remember his name, only what I felt).
I’ve always felt awkward in my Latina-Palestinian body. I love English and that feels like a betrayal to my Spanish-speaking grandparents. My words are smeared with shame when I stumble over verb conjugations in my broken Spanish. I hate how speaking Spanish makes me feel like I’m chewing on marbles, my tongue not quite sure how to contort itself. Spanish words just take up so much more space in my mouth, like my teeth are in the way, and if I could just pluck a couple out, then maybe I could roll my rrrrrrrr’s without sounding like such a gringa. My body has neither the deep tan of my brother nor the taunt, black curls of my sister. I am the only one of my siblings to resemble the Palestinian side of our family, my green eyes and lighter complexion and dark brown waves a dead giveaway. But what am I supposed to do with a Palestinian mouth that doesn’t speak Arabic, that doesn’t (correction: refuses to) grieve for her Palestinian father who has a new family, a new wife and kids, her Palestinian father who would pinch her stomach and tell her how much weight she gained, her Palestinian father who never remembered what grade she was in, or how she never liked hamburgers? How am I supposed to love my Latina-Palestinian body, easily and without hesitation, when Rachel McAdams is a real, living, breathing (thin and white) being?
When I couldn’t love myself, I turned to other people to do it for me. I’ve never been in love, and movies and books and magazines have all made it clear that it’s not meant for me (Latina and Palestinian and thick-thighed), but I’ve been such a good pupil. Every early 2000s romantic comedy and all the YA romance novels with the girls’ heads cut off on the covers spoon-fed me the message that romantic love is everything I need and everything I can’t have. When I was in middle school and other kids started to kiss in the school yard, I daydreamed of a man (any man, I didn’t have standards) who would tell me all the things that I wished I could believe about myself. I wanted someone to caress my cheek and call me beautiful and mistake my roundness for muscles. I would fall asleep to the same delusion each night—a man would stare into my green Palestinian eyes and ask me out on a date, sincerely, and we’d end the night with a deep kiss and my tongue wouldn’t balk like it does when I have to pronounce desarrollando.
Even now, as I’m teetering on the precipice of adolescence, a stumble away from adulthood, I still feel an instinct to seek validation for myself, for existing, for deserving love in all its forms, through other people. When guys invite me to spend the night, I can’t help but find it empowering, like I succeeded in fooling them, like I got them to think I’m Rachel McAdams, and I’m unbothered. When they don’t text me back afterwards, I’m more upset than I’ll ever be comfortable admitting in person. When I play back how his hands gripped my hips, I do it too. I think about how my fat pushes up past my fingers and I wonder if it means that my Tinder profile puts up a facade that my actual body fails to maintain. When I hear about how my old roommate hooks up with people with ease at an impossible frequency, I can’t help but to seethe with jealousy. I paint my face with goopy foundation products from Sephora and coat my eyelids in unnatural hues of pink, and still I am not lovable.
I’ve never had nail-biting, red-marks-down-his-chest sex in a car, with hands gliding down windows and torsos. I’ve never made out with someone in the crowd of a Mitski concert, faces damp with sweat and Smirnoff, just because we found each other so damn hot. I’ve never been romanced. I’ve never had someone tell me, breath catching and noses touching, that I’m beautiful. I’ve been yearning for a love, one that I could package and give to myself, and I searched for it in Tinder matches. Instead, I found sex, and Jack Johnson, and Hercules, and blueberry sours—fun, but not the same.
I’m a bad liar. I am still tired of myself. Even with this realization, there are nights (the cold ones) when I am overwhelmed by how my thighs touch or how my Spanish is eternally tainted with an American accent. There are nights when I swear that I’m Rachel McAdams, and Ryan Gosling is going to burst through my door at any second and declare that if I’m a bird, then he’s a bird too. And then I would know that I’m finally worthy of love, because Ryan Gosling said so.
But still, I am trying, and for now that’s enough. I am trying to find for myself the love I give to others, amidst the fat rolls that poke through the tops of my pajama pants, amongst the constellations of acne interspersed on my shoulders and down my back. Loving myself means eating cookies, proudly, it means averting my eyes from a mirror when I’m undressed (a band-aid solution, for now), it means training my tongue to say words from an inherited culture even if it still sounds off, especially if my form isn’t quite there. Because to love myself is to decry everything that said I wasn’t worthy of it. It’s to say that I’m Dominican and Puerto Rican and Palestinian and fuck you for not pronouncing my name correctly. I am tired of myself but I am learning how not to be.
AUTHOR: Rose Diaz is in her second year at Brown and is constantly wondering why it rains so much in Providence. She’s studying literary arts and enjoys spending way too much time pursuing random bookstores in her small, completely unheard-of hometown of NYC.
ARTIST: Shelby Kostal