Modifications

As I laid in bed one night, I struggled to fall asleep. My thoughts kept returning to a girl. She had recently shared a story with me, an experience she had with body image and bullying. She was 14 at the time. She had come home from school distraught that a friend of hers was being teased about her body. She talked to her mom about it and shared how she was saddened by the judgment and cruelty placed on another just for being exactly as they were made.

I kept thinking about her and my memories of my own struggle with my own body that I had for so many years started to resurface. For so many years, I hated my body. I felt like it had betrayed me. I was teased and picked on and even followed home from school by a girl that told me I was ugly and I should not exist. I used to wish I could change my body, modify it, make it perfect, make into a form that would be beautiful, but what image would I have chosen? Did my body really need to be changed? At the time I thought so. If I could have truly modified it, what would I have done? In truth, I was thin and delicate, each body part in perfect alignment to the opposite. It was the image I had of myself that was deformed. If someone had told me, I had an extra limb growing from me, I would have been relieved to have finally understood what was wrong with me. 

It was midnight and I could not stop thinking about the memory of when I felt like I was deformed. I could not stop thinking about how 30 years later another little girl was facing the same kind of bullying. Images flooded my mind. I could not sleep, so I got out of bed, went to my studio, and I began this painting.