I've spent the last few hours (at least six or seven of them before I started writing this post, and it's an hour and a half working on this - I'm a bit perfectionist at times...) creating this space, making my first post, telling my very close friends I've opened a blog... spending some time on Facebook with my sweetie and making a coffee date with a friend... and then returning here to see some views :D then looking at old and actual photos of myself.
[I want to point out that I am not ready yet to post any of them here. As much as you might plead. They could come later, maybe.]
I am terrified by looking at them. How could I have let myself slip into such shape?
But I am also smiling in most. In some, just to dissimulate how uneasy I really am. But in some, I am truly happy, and joyful, and it shows. Like in the pics of New Year's Eve where I had sooooo much fun, or in those of my best friend's wedding that was last week's Friday.
I open my personal photo album, not the one my parents made for me but my own. On the first inside page are school and passport photos of myself from all those I have been taken and I cared to keep. I look happy as a child. I look a pimply bumpkin at around fourteen. I look an intellectual misfit somewhere between sixteen and seventeen. I look a sophisticated young lady with twenty. I look sad and earnest at twenty-three. I look somewhat tarnished but smiling at twenty-six. I look like a woman who handles her life but her smile is hiding something, at twenty-seven. I look smiling and with a little spark in my eyes in the last pic, but my flabby cheeks and double chin tell the story of a life.
I turn to see pics of myself as a baby, as a young child. Problems were small and assuaged easily. I see myself with my siblings, with neighbor's children. My smile is weaker, I am an earnest and silent kid. But I am smiling, especially on the pics with my grandma. I love you and I miss you so much. There are two pictures of a mountain picnic back in 1991 with my family and dad's parents, my grandparents. I am six years old. My sister is still a baby, being fed mash by my mother, while I am sitting at my grandma's side. I am wearing a lemon coloured cotton suit and a straw hat. I remember it was a splendid day. I was perfectly happy that day.
The pics go on throughout my childhood (not very different from my siblings, I suppose). There are some more on the day of my religious confirmation. One pic is with my mother, beneath a flower sculpture of a duck. The duckling is growing up.
Dear heavens, what kind of ragtag clothes am I wearing here in 1997? I was twelve.
I am at a Girls Camp in summer 1998. I have huge red circular glasses. I look like an owl, but I don't even care.
Spring 1999. I am leaving secondary school. It is the most horrid pic I have of my teenager years.
I have entered upper school. I am a normalweight, rather too skinny girl with tight polyester flare trousers and a too loose sweater. I still have the glasses, and to add to it, blue satin high heel slippers to use at school (I wanted them so badly I practically blackmailed my mother emotionally until I got them). No wonder I was a misfit.
Some one year later, in a cottage, with whom is going to be my cousin's husband. I have new glasses, short hair, wear silver rings and look like a normal teen.
October 2001. I am sixteen and about to go out on a grunge/punk party. My lips are brown, I wear a punk shirt and a self-painted-on jeans. Back then I thought I was drop-dead sharp. It was the night I lost my virginity (don't worry, mum is not reading my blog).
With my class in 2002 or very early 2003. I have a broad smile and feel happy. But actually, I have few true friends at school. Even today, most of them are barely Facebook friends, with no big emotional attachment.
Spring 2003, around easter time. Probably one of the happiest times of my life. My online crush from London is coming to visit for the vacations. Mum, sister, everyone loves him at first sight. He takes about 200 photos of me. I only keep the best. I am seventeen, have a good female figure and a passion for hippie clothes and cowboy hats. He takes a pic of me when we are bathing at a river, me in bikini. It is a warm spring and I am in the best shape of my life, in every possible way.
My first trip to Spain. Granada, with the school study group. It should be life-changing, but I didn't know that when the photos were made. I am carefreely bathing in the ocean of La Herradura and visiting tourist attractions. There aren't any photos of the truly important stuff. You can't capture this magic in an image. Not even when you had a cam with you and perfect daylight.
Summer 2003, London. I am living a summer dream visiting Sikh temples and getting used to Immigrant Indian culture at Hounslow. I am jobbing at McDonald's. I am afraid to use the gas stove at my boyfriend's house. I have an accident when crossing a street. I am returning with more than two confection sizes plus.
October 2003. Not a photo, but a small article in a newspaper. Some poems of me got published. I am shown as the author, with a pic taken by a friend while travelling to Spain.
After that, photos stop. There isn't a single one anymore until 2010. At least not in the album, except the passport ones on the first page.
Just say I left upper school, went to University but dropped out after two years, went to Granada, lived there for about 20 months, then noticed I went there for all the wrong reasons (not because of the beauty of the city that attracts and enchants me until today, but because of a guy, and not precisely the one I would have really wanted). I returned after noticing I was living a miserable life at his side, and I had no proper job nor money either. But returning to the house of my childhood and youth after all those years was almost worse and I totally freaked out and it took me some time (along with changing houses frequently and consequently re-thinking some behavioral patterns) to find my emotional balance again, passing through therapy and all kind of medication that also fomented further weight gain.
From june 2010, most photos are of vacations, because other photos are later posted on Facebook and seldomly printed out. Even if painted with a smile on every single one of them, I am fat. And that nags me lots. It did back then and it does now.
My Facebook pics don't help either. I am happy, cheerful, partying with my friends, but I am fat. And although I try not to think too much about it, it keeps a recurring itch in my head. All those ups and downs are getting on my nerves.
I imagine how a worm must feel when a butterfly flutters by and tells him HE WILL ONE DAY DO JUST THE SAME!!! He'd say: "I'll be damned!" And then: "That would be just amazing. To fly like you." And then: "I'll never be capable of this." And when he hears that the butterfly used to be a worm himself and went through a total death-like painful metamorphose to become what he is now, the worm will say: "OMG, now you scared me paralyzed. I think this is too much for me to handle. I'd better skip it totally and forget about it, because this sounds just too excruciating."
But the worm will keep dreaming of how amazing it were if some fairy appeared with her magic dust and immediately transformed him into a butterfly, without all the painful chrysalis reformatory process and without the fear of stopping to be himself - because he knows he WOULD BE someone completely else, and completely amazing, so why care about losing yourself? But if you are not sure what you are leaving behind, for becoming - what?
I have been dreaming of the fairy. But I know it will probably not appear, ever.
So I will do this the hard way, the natural way, the beautiful way, the way it has to be.
The truly magical way.
And I know it could be just amazing.
A male friend (innocuos, I-like-you friend) commented on my photo from outside my best friend's wedding registrar's office: "You're incredible, Kirancilla."
Well.
I COMMIT TO PASSING FROM INCREDIBLE TO GORGEOUS.
At my own wedding, I will look so stunning that not only my then fiancé wants to marry me when he sees me, but as good as any male in the room.
And my husband will feel the luckiest person in the world, every day of our eternity together.
See that as a vow.
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