I Bought My First Bikini* - Why That Matters And Why It Doesn't

(*in a long damn time)

A few months ago, when talking to my best friend about my fitness journey, I casually noted that I previously had been deeply ashamed of my body and I saw her sharp intake of breath in shock and her eyes fill up with utter sadness and hurt. I thought nothing of hating myself but she, being one of the people who loves me most, was incredibly pained by the cavalier way in which I talked about being cruel to her best friend. It gave me pause to acknowledge how fucked up my way of thinking had been and made me love her a little more for how much my suffering clearly affected her. I mean, obviously, I already loved her but the people who cry for your pain as if it is their own are the real keepers in life; remember this.

In many ways, when I started out with tackling my on-going issues with how I looked, I was going about, and thinking about, things in completely the wrong way. My value systems were completely messed up and favoured aesthetics and societal pressure over taking care of the only vessel I have, or will ever have, to occupy in this life. As time went on and I moved on from eating slightly better and walking home from work everyday, to mild exercise, to being able to run 5km in under thirty minutes, to running and doing circuits multiple times a week, I felt my body change. Firstly, my anxiety chilled the fuck out in a serious way. Then I felt more energetic. Then I noticed muscles I never knew I had. Everything got easier. I was fit for the first time since I was an actual child and it all became about being fit, about being strong, about being able to do all the things I wanted to do, and about being healthy and investing in myself and some longevity. 

However, it's not like I suddenly forgot all about wanting to look different and I'd be lying if I didn't enjoy the reappearance of my cheekbones, my clothes fitting better, and not having to worry about people seeing the hidden shame that I felt my torso to be. But that was all just a bonus. What did really change was how I weighted the importance of, and how much less brain space I devoted to, worrying about how my body looks. I still don't have a "perfect" body and do you know what? I don't give a shit. I recently went running with my dad on the roads around our family home and as I am pretty much an (less determined, less innately kind, less good) exact little replica of him, I'm also a serious sweater when I exercise. So, as it was a hot day, I (me, yes, me) went running in public in a (double-layer because my tits came in real strong at 13) sports bra and leggings. I didn't cover up with a baggy hoody. I knew that I still have some belly fat that I'm self-conscious about, that won't budge, and, yet, loves to jiggle around, but I said, "Screw it." I don't owe it to anyone, including myself, to have a "perfect" body. Pretty much everyone else but me cares very little about how "perfect" my body is. And it was hot and I sweat a lot. So, fuck it.

In a similar vein, I recently bought my first bikini since that one time in college I had an aneurism and I thought that the high-waisted bikini sets advertised so appealingly in American Apparel would make me suddenly skinny and hide my multitude of sins with their high-waistedness. Spoiler: They did not. And so the suit was relegated to the bottom of my bra drawer. Since then, I have worn one-piece suits exclusively and felt very uncomfortable even with their relative and comparative amount of cover/protection/safety blanket. As a person that partially defines themselves by their sense of style, clothes have always been a shield but swimsuits have not allowed me to make the edits and flourishes with my body where I want to. Swimsuits don't play by the regular rules of the game of hide and reveal of clothes. But now, now that I care less about owing it to others or myself to look a certain way, and now that I am proud of how I have honed my body through time and sweat and commitment, and now that I don't feel the desperate need to hide myself like some dirty secret, I bit the bullet and thought I'd try it one more time. I still got something simple, functional, made out of recycled polyester and made for swimming and climbing and jumping and not just posing but it bears a flash of very noticeable shocking whiter-than-white Irish skin around my torso that can't be missed. 

I don't look perfect it in but I don't need to and I don't need to own that imperfection either. As Editor of Irish Tatler magazine, Sarah Macken noted in piece in the most recent issue of the aforementioned publication, it is great to see people who provide a beautiful alternative to the traditionally media and societal defined ideal "beach body", but some of us can also just have bodies that are ours and not a political statement. Some of us are out there changing the world but some of us can also just be. So, I'm going to be in my new bikini, around the people who love me; around a mother who is simply glad we are all healthy, a father who is proud that I've taken control of my life, siblings made of almost all the same stuff as me who don't give an eff about how I look. It's not going to be motivational or a statement (because who needs another white, middle-class, able-bodied, cis-gender, conventionally not unattractive woman in her twenties complaining about a little excess fat around her middle or trying to hijack the body-positivity movement that is far more needed, and better represented, by others?!), it's just going to be me on my personal journey, being. 

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Beauty isn't policing your body under a reign of terror

Adolescence affects us all differently and we all react differently accordingly. For me, it was not a case of not wanting to grow up but, rather, that the sudden and drastic changes in my body made me feel attacked, as if I was robbed of a great sense of self and given this utterly new strange form to inhabit. A form that was no longer naturally and childishly slender but curved and cumbersome with bits that got in the way of climbing things and running freely and being freely. It embarrassed me and made me super aware of myself. I was always quick to rid myself of any signs of these changes, of this new, foreign me, that I could.

Hair - or body hair, to be exact - was the easiest to shed and, despite being warned against it by all the women I knew, I began to remove the soft blonde hairs that covered my arms and legs very early on. In turn, darker, coarser hairs took their place and I was quickly stuck in an endless cycle. It seems exhausting and downright ridiculous to the adult me now but, for almost a decade, I shaved my limbs daily and with an almost religious fervour.

Today, with newly changed sheets and warmer weather lying in wait, I shaved my legs and nicked my ankle badly in the process, something that is not uncommon for little clumsy ol' me. But, as my policing of my body hair is no longer a frantic beast, it had been a while - especially since I had done such a thoroughly good job of it. It stung and rushed with blood that, I knew, would not stop for some time. I stared at the reddening water at my feet and the throbbing wound on my leg and a rush of memories washed over me. Memories of a thousand other nicks, of bleeding through multiple bandages and all over everything, of being embarrassed by the whole thing and lying about how I acquired the cuts, of carefully navigating them a day or two later to repeat my routine...How did I ever have so much time or energy to waste on such painful frivolity?

Of course, I don't believe in judging how others deal with their own bodies and it's not as if I am against hair removal or ready to embrace a life completely free of hair removal myself nowadays. In saying this I'm also no longer willing to be embarrassed by something completely natural, to waste endless additional hours in the shower removing hair, to actually bleed for some ideal of beauty.

Looking down at that blood made me realise just how far I had come. In fact, I have these realisations often. Realisations of the fact that I'm closer to the woman I'd like to be. And, while I will forever want to be liked and approved of, the approval and opinions of others bother me less and less. Cliché as it may be: life is simply too short.

So, yeah, sometimes my penchant for ankle-grazing trousers will reveal the fact that it's been a while between shaves but now it bothers me less that the dude across from me on the bus or the girl next to me might notice. I can't say I'm completely over it. I'll still wonder if they see it but I won't stress out about it and I'm not going back to daily shaving in case strangers spot an errant hair.

In the time that this blog went from a fashion blog to a fashion, beauty & other stuff blog and I went from barely washing my face (I kid - mostly) to full skincare regimes and relatively advanced knowledge of (if infrequent use of) cosmetics, I grew to focus on the beauty industry a lot more. I've worked with lots of brands and tried all sorts of products. I've gone through brief periods of overly intense scrutiny of self. I've grown up and let go of some (some) of my body and appearance hang-ups. And I've come to realise that there is no beauty in policing your body under a reign of terror.

It's perfectly fine to take care of yourself, to want to look good, to want to present and groom yourself well but "beauty" should never cross the line into obsession and there should always be breathing room. Humans are hairy, sweaty, porous creatures that have bumps and lumps and will never, ever be perfect - no matter how close to it some people make it seem. The sooner you embrace your humanity and imperfections, the sooner you'll have more time, headspace and peace.

Right?

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Cultural differences, differences in perception and learning to like how you look

I'll be the first to admit that I haven't quite gotten total acceptance of how I look down yet but I'm a hell of a lot better than I used to be.

I can almost pinpoint exactly when I first became self-conscious about how I look or when I first even really considered it. As I've always had strong opinions on clothes but nearly always place importance on comfort over aesthetic, I spent most of my childhood wearing things that made climbing and running around easier. And, as I spent most of my childhood climbing and running around, I was nearly permanently dishevelled to some degree. But I was cute and naturally very slender, in the way that vaguely wild children are, and never had much pause to worry about how I looked. Of course, I did always want hair longer than the bob my mother imposed on me for ease and I did want it to be blonde, the way my favourite princesses were and most beautiful celebrities of the nineties seemed to be. Other than that, however, I didn't think about how I looked all that often.

As I grew older, the cute phased into the awkward in-between stage of the preteens. Still, I wasn't too worried. I was happy to remain a child for as long as possible but it seemed no one else felt the same way and, suddenly, no one wanted to play the games I invented at lunch and people began to have "boyfriends" and "girlfriends". This was when I realised that I wasn't one of the pretty girls and that such a category really existed or mattered.

I have a rather distinct memory of what shattered my innocent illusions and made me pine for a place in said category. It was break and the latest issue of Spiderman had just come out, I was sitting with some guy friends discussing it when one of the prettiest girls in class walked past. All of the guys turned away from our conversation to watch her and I was completely ignored. I felt completely invisible and realised how powerful being beautiful could be. Of course, I didn't know how much more complicated life was than that but, in that moment, it seemed simple: being pretty meant being noticed and privileged in lots of ways. That same summer, I started to notice my "stomach". Skinny as I was, my stomach was rounded the way a healthy child's is but I began to resent it.

Curves hit me hard and fast in the next few months, leading to extremities that felt foreign and unwanted and were temporarily covered in very visible stretch marks from the sudden growth spurt. I went from skinny to awkwardly busty so quickly that I didn't really have time to adjust. My teens were an awkward time, to say the least. Clothes were my saving grace and I hid my baby fat as best I could with flamboyant punk armour but I had no clue what to do with hair or makeup. During a brief stint of beginning to play with makeup at fourteen, my best friend at the time asked me why I was bothering as I was simply plain anyway, in front of our entire class. Needless to say, I stopped "bothering" thereafter.

Throughout secondary school I had my friends and was very happy but my relationship with the boys in school wasn't particularly good. I was either the target of unwanted attention and torment for being outspoken, unapologetically myself and smart or utterly ignored. Younger boys I didn't know shouted things like "dog" at me from time to time and I was consistently told I was "frigid". Such things don't exactly boost one's confidence.

Somehow, I came out the other side and, in college, began to cultivate my personal style. A couple of years ago I began taking care of my skin properly and went from knowing nothing about makeup to blogging about it and attending press events. Since I've started to work, I've had the economic luxury to regularly pay for hair appointments and personal grooming. I can safely say that, today, I look a lot less awkward than my teenaged self.

And, over the years, I've gained perspective on my appearance. A part of me will probably always crave hearing things like "pretty" being said about me but I am no longer the teenager that so desperately wants someone to think that that it almost hurts. I'm largely at peace with how I look and this is down to maturity, time and an increasing awareness of cultural differences, personal preferences and different perceptions.

In fact, my interest in other cultures and my attempts to listen to the opinions of others more has been intrinsic to my journey to liking how I look more. For example, my eyes are a feature I've always liked. They were my selling point as a child as they were impossibly large and made everyone bend to my will. When I grew into them as an adult, they became my favourite feature but one throw-away comment from my sister made me self-conscious of them for a long time. She casually tossed the comment that they were "froggy" across the dinner table one day and I began to obsess over how they protruded slightly from being so big. The fleshiness beneath them became something that I saw as detracting from the one thing I had been utterly confident in. When I became interested in Korean makeup and beauty, however, I learned that they called this the "aegyo sal" and it was considered a feature that made people look cuter and younger. In fact, some people even undergo surgery to exaggerate or create this effect. Seeing people want something I was born with made me look at it in a different light.

Standards of beauty, outside symmetry and health, are almost all subjective and change over time and across cultures and the thing that you might not like about yourself may well be considered ideal elsewhere, in the past or future. If you try to maintain your health and confidence and step back from the ideals shoved in your face by the here and now, if you try to keep a sense of perspective and if you try to look at yourself with kinder eyes, you'll find more that you like in the mirror.

Throw-away comments can have a positive effect too, which is why we should always be mindful of our words as they can create or salve complexes. Negative comments about a person's appearance can be unbelievably damaging and should be avoided but saying that nice thing you think - even if it seems odd - can make a person's day or change the way they look at themselves. I used to hate the sprinkling of freckles that appears across my nose and cheeks in the summer with the slightest amount of sun and no matter how much I protect my skin. One day, my boyfriend of the time said they were cute utterly unprompted and, though I don't think you should utterly validate yourself because of another's opinion, it made me look at myself more kindly. For a moment, I saw myself through his eyes instead, and the flaws I normally found weren't so glaring after all.

Of course, at the end of the day, beauty is only skin deep and we'll all end up rotting in the ground anyway...cheery, I know. But, on a serious note, there is much more to a person than how they look and learning to love and accept yourself inside and out is an important part of growing up. I also do realise that it can be easier said than done but just remember this sage advice from Laverne Cox when she appeared on the Mindy Project: "Now, if the person in the mirror was your best friend, would be as mean to her as you [are] being to yourself?"

Exactly. Wouldn't we all be a little happier if we gushed about ourselves even a fraction as much as we talked adoringly about our BFFs?

(L-R) Teenage me, college me and me today.

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