The Last Woman in the Universe
Post-apocalyptic love
I saw a headline that said, “We Were Never Meant to Look at Ourselves this Much” and I have to agree. I always approach a mirror with caution. It has a way of telling truths I’m not prepared for.
“Is that what I look like?”
I saw another headline that said something like, “You Look 10X Better to Yourself than You Do to Others.” So, apparently my brain applies a beauty filter, and I look even worse to you. Great.
The truth is, we all see through filters all the time. Human vision is pretty complex.
Our brains “fill in” a lot that our eyes don’t actually see—like depth, colors, peripheral vision. And most of that has been preprogrammed for us at birth or in our upbringings.
What if that filter that I’ve been seeing with isn’t accurate? What if I’ve been watching the Body Dysmorphia Channel, and I have the power to change stations?
Studies have shown that most of us think of our future selves as a different person, a stranger. It’s trippy to fathom that the 60-year-old me is also me. When the future gets here, I’ll be that woman looking at pictures and videos of me now and thinking, “Damn, I was so skinny!”
“Is that what I look like?”
My default is to see myself from the outside like a movie, like my face has been photoshopped on someone else’s body, into someone else’s life. But lately I’ve been trying to focus on how it feels to be inside my body.
As a visualization exercise, I find it helpful to envision the future not like a stream of Instagram photos of someone else’s life, but how it will feel to be the person inside my skin.
What do I see when I look around?
What do I hear?
How do my clothes feel?
What’s that smell?
I’ll know I’ve reached my dreams because it will feel like this.
I’ve been working from home since the beginning of Covid, which makes living from the inside-out much easier. It cuts down on the need for mirrors when you only have to be presentable from the waist up.
Since I’m not commuting, or going to the gym at lunch or making trips to the Ladies Room or hitting up happy hour, I’m probably looking at myself 75% less than I used to when I worked 9 to 5 in an office.
The result is that I’m getting very earthy. These days you’ll find me in billowy pants, ponchos, loud-patterned socks, muscle shirts. My favorite is a sleeveless yellow t-shirt with a cartoon cactus that says Desert Days. When I wear it, someone is required to say, “desert daaayyyys” in the style of Peter’s neighbor, Lawrence, in Office Space.
It’s not that I don’t want to care how I look anymore. It’s just that I don’t want to see attractiveness as currency, status, or love.
My beauty filter must shine from the inside. It’s not an artificial mask or a covering-up; it’s an unveiling. It’s an ambient light. It doesn’t come from deprivation; it’s earned through living.
And if I look like shit, well, I earned that too. If it looks like I’ve had a hard time, that’s because I have. It’s been rough, and it shows on my face and in my body.
“It’s not that I don’t want to care how I look anymore. It’s just that I don’t want to see attractiveness as currency, status, or love. ”
But I’m still here. And as I start to feel better again, that will show too because I’ll possess that certain “I-don’t-know-what” quality of someone who knows some kind of truth.
If I don’t do anything to tame my mind, it runs the same boring program: You’re fat. You’re old. You’re ugly. Blah blah blah.
One of the tricks they tell you in therapy is to think of this critical voice as another person. Give them a name and then speak to them directly, like: “Shut the fuck up, Gladys.”
Or, more diplomatically, “I hear what you’re saying, Gladys. I want you to know I got the message. So now you can shut the fuck up.”
But stopping Gladys’s voice doesn’t do anything to heal the trauma she’s caused. It takes a lot out of you to be battered by your own thoughts. There’s literally nowhere to hide. She’s already in the house.
Healing means replacing those bad thoughts with something else. I need another image, a different story. I need to experience what it would feel like to love my body as a total gift. But how can I love myself when my mind is bombarding me with criticism?
One day, I had a thought: What if I were the last woman in the universe?
What if it was like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Earth is destroyed. We wake up on a spaceship with some aliens and we’re the only two humans left.
Each of us thought we were the only one, but then the aliens told us, “Hey, so, there’s another human on board.”
I bet we’d both be pretty psyched. I doubt we would care how each other looked or where we were from or even if we spoke the same language. All our tiny criticisms would be inconsequential. Nothing would matter except … human. A real, live human.
You know how in disaster movies (and I assume in real-life disasters too), there’s that scene at the end when everyone runs up and kisses and hugs each other even though they’re covered in dirt and slime and body fluids? They don’t care how gross they are. They certainly don’t care what they look like.
Maybe I don’t have to be the last woman alive or a disaster survivor (or in a disaster movie) for someone to love me like that. Lots of people love me already, even with my flaws. And I love them that way too. It’s just harder to locate that feeling when I’m distracted by my own image in the mirror or my phone.
It’s easier to feel that love when I stop looking so hard, tell Gladys to shut the fuck up, put on my Desert Days shirt (desert daaaayyyys) and choose my own filter carefully.
I try to see myself and others with that feeling of gratitude as if we’ve all just climbed out of the rubble and realized that we’ve made it.
They’re actually here! Other humans! . . . Aren’t they amazing?
