No Nose Job

Adrian Piper, The Mythic Being, I Embody Everything You Most Hate and Fear, 1975

There are really two faces of egotism. We typically think of an ego trip as being "its all about me, and look how good I am." But the preoccupation with "I'm not good enough" is just as much of an ego trip. Both are barriers to actually doing the work that we're here to do. It's not about you.

~Robert Gass, "A Conversation with Robert Gass & Nina Utne About Spiritual Activism", Utne Reader, Jan./Feb. 2006

This is not altogether new to me. I always felt my esteem issues were an expression of some seriously grand self posession but I'm not sure what to do with it. All I can see before me is a bruising bind with masochism on one end and egotism on the other.

I used to be good at telling folks "It's not about you," but I'm done. I'm tired of the drama. I just don't need conflict in my life. I don't think conflict is bad; I just don't have the energy for it. As much as I lambast insincerity, these days I feel incredibly insincere, but only in so much as I am exhausted. I shun lying but when people want what you ain't never had but still won't accept that as an answer what other option do you have? Sometimes I wish I was rude.

Like on the train Saturday and every other day when men's unsolicited stares stalk me across the platform and follow me onto the train obtrusively and offensively f#cking up my rotation. I've particularly had it with the 40+ set. Stalk someone your own age! I'm incredibly offput by men's obsession with young women. How come y'all aren't hollering at 40 and 50 year old women? Leave me be. Since we're being ageist I should call out the high school boys who harass me on the train. I've been grown for a minute and I'm therefore off limits to your snide sexual remarks and physical intimidation. And to the teeny brown boy on Hanson Place who exclaimed "Bring that milkshake to the yard." (I was gonna rework a Big L line right here but since my God-fearing family reads this I'll refrain and say this:) I feel sorry for your mother. (Self-censorship is a b*tch but it keeps your relations in tact.)

Annika Ström, I have no theory about this text, 2004

What really got me going today, other than the mundane banality of being holed up in my apt. for the third day in a row after six hours of vomitting, 2 hours of dry heaving, and a trip to the ER for what I now know is Gastroenteritis, was looking at pics of Black Hollywood sirens on Crunk & Disorderly and Concrete Loop. Not too long ago Court' and I were trying to determine the least common denominator for Hollywood's standard of black female beauty: small facial features or light complexion. Now we all know there won't never be a black female star that looks like Wesley, Tyrese, Taye, Don, Morris "jb hearts u more than words can express" Chestnut, and (insert any dark-skinned actor here) but I think complexion is necessary but not sufficient for Black Hollywood stardom. It's also requisite that one have what I'll call anti-bulbous features. The only starlet with a nose coded as "big" by Hollywood's standards is Garcelle Beauvais-Nilon. Help me out here if I'm wrong. It seems a brown-skinned girl, though no one nearly as Black as Wesley or Morris... can get it if her features aren't "big" whatever "big" means. So being a pop culture junkie, a big/bulbous-nosed black girl, incredibly sensitive, and easily affected, this conversation/fact hurts my head in the worst way. I told Court' the main reason I wouldn't get a nose job is cause I don't think people would recognize me. Who cares if I looked like a fucking million dollars if I didn't look like myself. So for now I don't think I'll go under the knife but I'm not ruling out Botox when the time, unforgiving as it is, comes.