La Imagen Corporal, Body Image, is a term I learned working with youth.

As I spent the better part of a year teaching healthy self-esteem, positive identity and knowing your value as an individual, in a foreign context, my own perception of body image has been challenged.

This post is very personal: I have wavered over whether I should share these thoughts here but I decided that, yes, I want to. It’s a very real part of this experience of Peace Corps. This lingering clump of authentic and prickly feelings has stuck in my craw for the last several months and I’m going to explore it now.

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The first month of training in Guatemala, I was presented with a math problem: If my friends are getting cat-called in the street and I am not, does that make me less attractive than them?

I put off answering the question, but I instantly felt three things: bad, inferior, and invisible. Above all, I felt vulnerable: At age 30 (now 31), my insecurities can still grip me like I’m feeling them for the first time, stinging like salt and vinegar chips on a cut in my inner cheek. Oh that comfort guilty pleasure food snack from my youth…

Being that nature abhors a vacuum, my mind filled my thoughts with an answer: yes. You must be less attractive than them. “Your chin isn’t like their chin, your breasts aren’t like their breasts. Or maybe it’s your personality, but I think it’s probably both but mostly it’s your body.” Who could know? There aren’t satisfying answers to these types of questions because you either decide that “Yes. You are not as attractive” or “Who knows? But just ignore it because those who matter don’t mind and those who mind don’t matter” and any other Dr. Seuss epithets you can use to comfort and distract yourself from the question.

Undoubtedly the best thing to do is to recognize that beauty is not only skin-deep, that beauty is fleeting and that your health is your wealth. I believe all of these things.

So why does not being cat-called, or standing next to a friend who is being gawked at, have an effect on me?

Those are hurtful things to think about yourself: “You’re less pretty than the people around you.” I have a historical relationship with this line of thinking. Why? I’ve played chess with the facts before and tried to arrange them to protect myself as The Queen Piece. I can use the comfort of food (the pawns), my sense of humor (the rook) and the compliments I do hear on my appearance (the knight)  to form obstacles around my insecurities. My age, my shape, my color, texture (curly hair) my height and my clothes compile a running list of the elements of my appearance. This list must have started when I was 2, when I realized that my appearance mattered, that my appearance had value and that it affected me. I learned to take notes on every single comment on my appearance at an early age. I learned that my appearance mattered.

So I let the reintroduced feeling of inferiority sit as I immersed myself into Peace Corps service. I started work in the middle schools and absorbed everything like a sponge: Spanish, K’iche’, the 2am rooster crows, the work environment (very unfamiliar) and a culture of generosity. In other words: an entirely foreign reality rearranged my new way of living as I continued to rearrange my apartment until I liked the way it looked. But I couldn’t minimize the feeling and pain of inferiority no matter where I stuck it.

Like the verbal processor that I am, I told some of my friends how I was feeling. “I feel unattractive” and explained what triggered this feeling. And I took in their various reactions with consideration: “It’s not your appearance” my boss shared with me. “It’s your style of dress. The others are being cat-called because they dress less modestly than you.” I thought: “could be” and tucked the possibility away for safekeeping. I told my host family and they said: “Dejarlo así/leave it alone. You’re beautiful..” and friends just reassured me: “You’re beautiful. Maybe it’s your height. Maybe you’re intimidating.” But none of these answers ameliorate the soft ache of feeling less pretty, but I appreciated the good intended in their words.

Naturally the work continued and I took-in the cultural differences surrounding body image: in Guatemala, comments on appearance (which would be taboo in the States) are as commonplace as observing the weather. “You’ve gotten fat” or “You’ve gotten thin” or “You’re so tall” are spoken offhandedly. Anything that is natural can be discussed.

On the national day of “No Al Racismo y Discriminación,” I heard the students reflect “the height of a person doesn’t matter.” When we talk about racism in the States, I don’t recall hearing much about height. And my best guess as to why is because height is a privilege that some cultures take for granted. But when you live in a country of chronic malnutrition influenced by poverty, lack of education and resources, height is a point of discrimination. I’ve noticed a difference in height when I go from indigenous communities to ladino communities (for example, leaving Santa Clara and going to Xela, the country’s second-largest capital, suddenly the people around me are taller).

I started my sessions on “Self-Esteem” with my middle-school students. The students were prompted to write down nine positive qualities about themselves: three about their appearance, three about their personality and three about their abilities. I rolled out an example of my HIGH SELF-ESTEEM on flip-chart paper: For appearance: “Bonita, Alta y Colocha,” personality: “Chistosa, Inteligente y Creativa” and abilities: “Escribir, Cantar y Elaborar/Decorar Espacios.”

I wrote down “Beautiful” because I wanted to prompt them by example to consider themselves beautiful, too. If I had been asked to write down positive qualities about my appearance in another context where I wasn’t the example, I would have probably written “Pretty Eyes, Pretty Hair and Thin.” But would I have written beautiful? Possibly not. Or Maybe. Depends on the week.

That same day I was leaving school when a pick-up truck stopped and offered me a ride. It was getting dark and the woman to my left was boarding the tuk-tuk and reached for my arm “Don’t get in” she said and ushered me into the tuk-tuk. “It’s just that they think you’re beautiful” she said and smiled. I instantly responded: “Noooo.” In that moment I met eyes with one of my students who was also on the tuk-tuk: he was in my class where I had just described myself as beautiful. Oops. True colors.

I want to tell you what went through my head: Behind the woman’s words, I heard “You’re pretty because you have pale skin and you’re tall and have green eyes.” You’re Pretty Because You’re Different. To me that translates as: I’m not pretty for the way I look, I’m pretty because of context. Which begs the question if beauty is determined by who you’re around and how you compare to others? What happens when I’m in a place where I look just like everyone else?

My host sister says: “Of course that shirt looks good on you. You’re light-skinned. Everything looks good on you” and it stings. I bought her a pale pink nail polish and she said it doesn’t look good on her because it makes her skin look darker. I never thought of that. She’s learned that being dark-skinned is a disadvantage, and I thought the pale pink looked more beautiful against her dark skin.

On a long bus ride in Mexico, I explained this feeling to a close friend, another volunteer. I told her how much it breaks my heart when my Guatemalan host sister says: “Men want pale-skinned women like you.” It infuriates me for so many reasons. First: what my host sister perhaps doesn’t realize is that I feel overlooked in the US, where being white is not unusual. Secondly, and most obviously, it’s infuriating to hear women say that “white is more beautiful.” But what can I say? If that is what they have been told, then I cannot undo a lifetime of messages. And it’s not my responsibility to do so. Nevertheless I ardently disagree with them. I tell them that they are beautiful.

What I am saying is that what they don’t realize is that I feel fetishized, not complimented. I am being admired and stared at and touched and questioned because I look unusual. I have been told by several black female friends that this happens to them constantly.

Back to my conversation on the bus in Mexico, my friend explained that she hadn’t considered that women compare their beauty to other women in their own race. It’s like how I feel my appearance can’t be compared to another black woman’s “Who is prettier?” but if you put me next to a line of white women, I mentally rate myself as to where I fall on the beauty spectrum. Isn’t that the ugliest thing of all, that practice?

This particular volunteer/friend is of mixed race: Her mother is from India and her dad is white from the US (she gave me permission to share our conversation here). She said how strange it is for her, as a biracial person, to not physically exist in a particular space. There is no country of only half-white, half-Indian people. And I told her what a beautiful observation that was, how she expressed it: “As a biracial person, I don’t belong to a physical place.” She doesn’t have a context in which she is considered “normal” or “neutral. I hadn’t considered biracialism in those words before, and it made me think. How must that affect her identity and experience of living, of being?

What’s more: when I have visited her in her site in Guatemala, we walk side by side and people stare at us. She tells me: “People never do this to me when you’re not here.” And I stuff my feeling of envy, what would it be like to blend-in in Guatemala? To not have a host of eyes on me constantly and hear “Gewd Mohrning” at 3 in the afternoon or be constantly asked where I’m from and to give English classes. She never, ever gets asked her origin until people hear her foreign accent. I asked her: “Do you really want to be stared at all of the time?” and while, of course she doesn’t, I imagine it must be frustrating not to be recognized as US American. It goes both ways. It must be frustrating to tell people she is from the US only to hear: “But.. where are you from?” because she isn’t white.

And on this 2 hour bus-ride to Sumidero Canyon, we heard each other. And then we apologized for the various pains we’d felt. And friendship is architectured out of these sorts of conversations, where insecurities are heard and empathy crosses borderlines of being.

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So what have I covered so far?

I feel overlooked in my own country for not being the prettiest and fetishized in this country for the arbitrary reason of being pale-skinned.

On a separate but related note, my body is changing. I’m 31 and my face is slowly adopting the signs of age (and I do mean slowly, but nevertheless). I dye my hair to cope with the grays. A script plays messages in my head from my own culture: “You are aging. Your beauty is fading” I hear.

I bat the feelings away but they linger in the dustpan.

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Another thing I don’t really know what to do with is how my female students carry their bodies. In school, dance is a big part of every event (it’s Latin America for crying out loud). If we have a concurso de baile, dance contest, or it’s Mardi Gras, the girl students are sure to be in skimpy clothes dancing to a song with more than offensive lyrics. And all my male teachers love it: they say into the microphone: por arriba por arriba por abajo por abajo.. And I just sit in mild disgust and sadness and don’t know what to do with my face.

But before I go pointing fingers at Guatemala which is not what I want to do, my culture is not less culpable. Sit down for five minutes of a music video, look at cheerleading uniforms and how much skin is showing on the girls vs. the boys. It’s just expressed in an unfamiliar way to me here which is why I find it more shocking. Sometimes things are just more shocking because you aren’t used to them, but the things you are used to are just as shocking.

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It occurred to me one day walking the streets of my pueblo:

My relationship with my body is different in Guatemala than it is in my home country. Here I am noticed simply for walking into a room, it’s like my body speaks a language of it’s own no matter if I speak K’iche’, Spanish or Swahili. My body speaks a language that is out of my control: my skin tone, my hair’s spindly riotous existence seems to say things that I am not saying. Things like: “I’m a tourist, I don’t speak Spanish, I have a lot of money, I want to have children and a boyfriend, I can give you money and buy you expensive things.”

And what occurred to me is that, in the US, I have things around me that project their own messages: a car, typical clothes, likeminded friends, English, familiarity, anonymity. In this country, all I have is my body to speak for me. My body is my vehicle, my introduction, my language and my explanation until I speak for myself and correct the assumptions and challenge the stereotypes.

There are people of minorities who feel this way everyday in my country. I recognize that being a minority in this country was my own choice. I cannot identify as a marginalized group because white people are not marginalized, they are the global dominant group. I’m a part of that. I think of marginalized groups so differently now, now that I know what it’s like to be treated as “other” (even though I chose the otherness which is a totally different type of otherness because it is not imposed on me).

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As I walked to my hostel last night at 6:30pm, I walked past a young man walking towards me and he grabbed my left butt cheek with his left hand. I turned around and glared at him, cutting him with a thousand knives with my irises. Why didn’t I say something, make a scene? Something in me told me that was not the right thing to do. So I simply glared and kept walking. Of all the countries I’ve walked through, museums packed with crowds, strangers on trains and subways, no one has ever touched me like that. My blood boiled, thin as steam.

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My relationship with my body is complicated because I am a woman. 

Being a woman and having a body means that there will be demands made of me, impositions on my space and violations of my rights my whole life long.

The first message, the first imposition stated to me at the age I started learning things:

If you want to be valuable, be beautiful. 

“What is beautiful? Here’s a list” and culture fills in the list with images, media and assessments of other peoples’ bodies.

Why aren’t we more outraged at what women are being told about their bodies? Not only when a woman is raped (obviously cause for outrage), but when a woman is overlooked or admired simply because of how she looks or when a 3 year-old is bombarded by images of Victoria Secret stick figures with augmented breasts. Why is a woman discarded when her hair turns gray? Why is a woman expected to bear children and raise them, often alone? Why does this only begin to bother some men when they have daughters, if then?

We are told to support men and children with our bodies and then be images of perfection at the same time. Why is a woman expected to care for the world and not be cared for by the world in return?

Why do I walk that world and feel less-than-perfect because of how my body is formed?

The question shouldn’t be: “Why am I not getting cat-called?” rather “Why are people cat-calling my friends and why is that okay?”

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The last thought to share is, ultimately, standards of beauty and my preoccupation with my appearance is a result of privilege. I’ve noticed in my pueblo that beauty, as much as young girls obsess over makeup and are just as affected by the media, ultimately doesn’t affect a day’s work.

The work is to carry leña or firewood, sell food in the market, carry your children on your back, breastfeed them when they are hungry, offer coffee and bread to visitors and pray before your head hits the pillow. Body shapes are more matter-of-fact than they are determinants of a person’s value.

I wonder if my student’s understand their imagen corporal better than I do; they seem to understand that bodies are simply bodies: meant to work, rest, eat, enjoy and eventually pass from this life.

Above all, I am grateful for my body: my health, my ability to move independently through this world and become acquainted with it. Beauty is extra, it fades and it isn’t objectively defined. So why do we hold it with such high esteem? I want that to change. I want to change that. I don’t know how.

But I’ve started with detailing my experience. Here is my raw experience in it’s vulnerabilities and vicissitudes.

I will work harder to love myself and be grateful, protect myself and cherish my health and the gift of living and sift out the ugly myths about what it means to be beautiful. I will start today.