THE PORTAL

Last spring, I took a self-portrait workshop. Months after that class, this photo emerged, a smush of two composted photos made into one double exposure. Most of the self-portraits I’ve made have to compost for awhile before being ready to share.

What I thought I was going to learn through self-portraits, because of how the workshop was marketed, was how to love myself, how to see my body in a picture and have her be someone I liked, an unlearning of the instant need to pick her apart or deprive her of joy and pleasure to make her fit into the very specific ideal by which I measure her.

I don’t want to spoil this for you, but that wasn’t how it worked out. Staying with myself – being gentle, not running back to the comfort of diet, obsession, and restriction as a fix for being uncomfortable with how I see myself – after every attempt was the hardest work I’ve ever done. Throwing myself, literally, into the deep end of my own lifetime of body dysmorphia wasn’t something that I could simply cure in a month with a few self-portraits, as much as I hoped that familiarity and repetition might help. But it was one small step on the path of self-discovery and developing the resilience to stay with myself, to build self-trust.

Part of the process of healing, for me, is learning how to hold a container for myself while doing the work in it. My favorite way to imagine the containers I want to make is to think of them as portals, much like diving underwater is a portal into a different type of world waiting to be discovered. (My therapist has told me that my imagination is one of my allies, and I’ll hold onto that observation like a lifeline.) Once I enter the portal, the work happening inside the container is the feeling into self-discovery.

Containers could also be called safe spaces, held together with kind and solid boundaries. They are places where the most important rules are to stay curious and not be judgemental, because judgement and curiosity take the air out of each other. Practicing non-judgement toward myself is the hardest practice to hold, what I most have to work at when holding a container for myself.

And one of my favorite tools for practicing curiosity and non-judgement is to embody my inner creative. She is allowed to make as much as she wants, in any medium she wants, and it only has to feel good to make it. By making a container just for her, she gets to do her work separate from my inner critic, who then gets to have a say and do its work to critique and edit after the creative is finished. This process feels like nature – creating abundantly and then curating after.

There’s no neat ending to this; I’m still not comfortable seeing photos of myself, and my inner critic/asshole likes to tell me that my discomfort makes me unfit to even take photos of other people. But the magic of practicing holding containers for myself is this: when it comes time to hold space for other people, the edges of the container become reflective, a mirror that makes both of us capable of seeing good in ourselves in a space where our inner creatives get to explore the world beyond the portal together.