2. There’s a kind of beauty that doesn’t arrive until you stop trying to be beautiful
I have returned to the gallery on my own, to sit again in front of those canvasses wrapped in brightly coloured paper. I let those pastel hues wash over me, the saturated patterns burned into my retinas when I look away. It is the skin that stays with me, the absence of colour. I look and look as if expecting to see the white face blush, or the leg be cast in shadow. Movement and stillness are synonyms in these paintings. Every sound feels weighted and close: the words from the video behind me, smoothing over my ears like waves; the distorted thumps of the audio in the next room, muffled by heavy black curtains; the quiet shuffling of other people’s bodies along with my own as I settle on the hard white bench.
It is only now that I realise how huge the paintings are, baring their skin wide, softly brazen in the dim gallery light. Once again, my mind turns to my own body and its own distortions, the scars that sit along my chest where my breasts once were. I am still acclimatising to the lost sensation of weight—that is, the sensation of freedom.
In the months before surgery, when the thought of it was all my mind contained, I tried a few times to adjust to my shirtless body, unrestrained by the compressive fabric that seemed at that point to be almost fused to me. It was a learning exercise: trying to exist in my body without shame, to be present without perceiving myself through someone else’s eyes. Four days before surgery, the lamplight was soft and my feet were bare as I went through the motions of my stretching routine. My face pointed away from the mirror. I remember looking at my hands, small and pale against the carpet; remember crying as I sank into pigeon pose. The tension between my heart and its own casing felt so taut it was hard to breathe. It felt unbearable to hold myself in my own skin.
For the first week after surgery I felt I had retreated into a kind of chrysalis. I was wrapped in multiple layers of compression and attached to various tubes which I had to carry with me in a small bag. My shoulders were hunched in and tentative, my neck bowed. It was difficult to look in the mirror. I shuffled around, hands clasped instinctively to my chest as if to hold myself together, draped in baggy flannel shirts and tracksuit pants. My hair—my pride and joy—was unwashed and tufty, brown roots showing through the pink. I was an alien in my own body, ugly and contorted, and yet I felt closer to it than I ever had before. The jolts of pain were also excitement, and although my mind was often a blank page, numbed out on painkillers, there was an undercurrent of deep, euphoric ecstasy.
What I felt when I first tried on the shirts I’d avoided for years, waiting for that nebulous point “after top surgery”[GS1] when I knew I would be able to stomach the sight of them on my body, is utterly indescribable[GS2] . I looked into my own eyes in the mirror and saw every iteration of my younger selves: the timid twelve-year-old, turning back and forth to see from every angle how her new bra made her chest look. The fifteen-year-old, pulling the oversized navy t-shirt away from their chest, hair shorn short and boyish, binder straps showing under the collar. The seventeen-year-old, adjusting their oversized jumper every time they wore a backpack. And I saw into the future, that colourful, textured thing: sleeping shirtless in the summer, fitted t-shirts, clothes thrown on without a second thought as to the image reflected. The brightness of it all, sparkling blue and orange and pastel pink. The smell of summer in nighttime air.
As my recovery continues, it seems to matter less and less to me—the imperfections my body carry, sometimes lumpy and sometimes scarred. I can breathe easier now. I am being delivered from myself, back to the richness of the world.
3. A world where body is synonymous to holy
There’s an artwork I made when I was seventeen that depicts a nude body—my nude body—standing in front of a starry black backdrop. It’s pastel on canvas, the skin mapped out in yellows, oranges and reds as if depicting a heat map of the body. The head is thrown back, the eyes closed, the arm reaching out to hold a white lily that unfolds in fabric petals from the canvas. But the aspect I’m thinking about is the breasts, which gape open from the skin, leaving black crescents underneath each one as if someone has torn slits in the fabric of me[GS2] [GS3] . Sewing those crescents back together is the criss-cross of bright red thread, the needle left in the fabric, unfinished.
It is this gap—the gap that turns breast into chest, the gap between existing in your body and living in it—that I am finally sewing shut. Three months after my surgery I’m still running my hands over my chest in awe, in wonder. There is space in my mind to focus on loving and loving to look, to behold my body as something sacred and mine. I had been squatting for years in a house that didn’t belong to me, despite my name on the door. But three months ago I got the keys and three months ago I began the renovations that would turn my house into a home—a temple, a space I am willing to take care of. I touch my skin and leave glitter in place of my fingertips, embracing flesh that no longer seems wrong to touch. There is no barrier between myself and my pleasure. Sex feels like flying now—I have stopped hiding in the dark, under covers. I have started a collection of tight t-shirts.
The last time I visit Lucy Liu’s paintings I feel strangely emotional. That spot on the bench is familiar now, but I leave it to peer more closely at the three canvasses. I note the way the paint has dried on the canvas, the outlines of blue and red that tinge the central figure’s skin, the way the background shifts and changes as if glitching around her hair and body. The lighting is strange and dim, and I feel as though my ability to really see the paintings is slightly obscured. I keep moving to leave and then returning to stare at the triptych from slightly different angles. It feels like a betrayal to turn my back on them. As I stand there, shifting my weight, all the previous times I’ve been in that room seem to condense into one mass of sensation: the video’s voiceover gently permeating my brain, the hard wobbly bench, the hazy light, the feeling of being somewhere else, transported.
It’s Sunday morning, and my sheets are clean, a faded pale turquoise and smelling of lavender. The light filters dimly through my curtains. A slip of blue is visible behind the translucent white fabric. The wide pastel flowers on my covers are crinkled and distorted, the doona having been thrown off in the night. I’ve slept naked and my skin is warm and smooth, sleepy. The faint smell of incense from the evening before still hangs in the air, sweet and woody, inviting. Above my head the ceiling is dotted with glow-in-the-dark stars, my own chapel fresco. The world is warm. Something settles in my belly as I roll over onto my back, fingers absently tracing the scars on my chest, eyes closing softly. My head tilts to the side and deeper into the pillow, and I take myself to that quiet place. My consciousness fades in and out. My hand rests gently on my stomach, my inner thigh. This is the moment before the moment, the mapping of a figure I am still learning to recognize. This is where I start.
Chrysalide
Echo Marriot
To become yourself is no gentle work
It is the colours that draw me in first. Those pale, shining florals, draped haphazardly across the canvas like broken wings; the marbled pink and blue and that buttercup gold, threatening to leak from the confines of background onto the blank white plaster beyond. The paintings pulse outwards with something heavy and cool, something entrancing, suggesting something bigger and primal. The cold sheen of acrylic stares me in the face, waiting. My eyes trace the bodies lacquered into stillness by those thick, shiny layers of pastel paint; those disproportionate limbs invite in my own body the sensation of strangeness, of dislocation. Perhaps it is my mind that has been dislocated.
A loneliness like cool water seems to trickle over my body. Something about the interior space being turned inside out, inverted, exposed. I take in the white expanses of skin, the bodies, straining to hold themselves intact. There is a pale, quiet trembling under the surface; that vulnerable, familiar feeling of being stuck beneath your own skin. I can't pin down what I feel. I only know what I project, what I carry with me: the years living in a body that doesn’t quite feel my own, whose edges drip and blur in my mind.
This is deeper than aesthetic captivation; it is recognition. I sit in front of that central artwork and find myself in the closed eyes, the pale complexion. The undercurrent of red and blue bleeding where sketch meets skin. I sit in the before of her, the before of me. I have the familiar urge to see how her own body reflects mine, the way I have done for years in galleries and museums, searching for the shape of my own body in marble statues and soft renaissance paintings. It is paradoxical to look desperately for something you do not want to find—to discover your own figure in art and see only something distorted and unwanted. To realise feminine has never seemed beautiful to you when it’s on your own flesh; to see a body built on not enough and too much. [GS1]
Beyond the shape of her body, this central figure still speaks to me. I know something of this: the quiet absence in the dark, hand under the covers. I know how the mind wanders to anything but your own body. I know what it is to be moi et les autres—flanked by flashing images, legs going numb—even to be mostly les autres, to leave the body behind. It is in the space between waking and sleeping, between sensation and feeling; the silence, the taste of yellow flowers a fervent mirage on a slack tongue[GS2] . It is the hands resting on your skin wishing your body was a different shape, wishing the image of it wasn’t branded on the inside of your eyelids, taunting you.[GS3]
For years I have carried shame in my body like water, hands cupped to keep anything from spilling over. Woman has never seemed to fit me—even in the years before I knew there was a word for anything else or in between. It was always a performance, a dance; hours in front of the mirror tweaking clothes or sucking in flesh to appear something I thought other people wanted me to be. Once I realised girlhood no longer belonged to me, those hours spent perceiving myself were no longer to squeeze myself into a shape I had never been. Instead, I tried to cover up the evidence that I was any shape at all. But the thing about shame—that terrible, guilt-filled feeling that coats your skin, promising to quiet down if only you made yourself smaller—is that it can’t be uprooted or eradicated or even addressed while you continue to don that oversized hoodie, those baggy jeans. The only way to look it in the face is to realise you had nothing to feel shameful for to begin with.