Inexplicable

“Who gets to sit in the Porsche, to look inside my mouth, to come into my bedroom or mind?”

My teeth are misshapen. They are mangled. One is on top of another and often food gets stuck in it. I find it interesting that growing up in India no one really thought of braces for me. Not my parents or any relatives who were doctors. I guess one would say that in a certain socio-economic category, which I belonged to, there are other more important things than fixing your teeth. While I believe that to be true, I always thought of my teeth as an important part of my Identity, just like my physique. Changing it would bring about a drastic development in my Image that my mind might be torn between feeling self-hate and being confident. Fixing my teeth is a luxury that I cannot afford, not mentally or financially. Frankly, apart from the occasional toothpick use, I don’t have any functional problems with my teeth. So when I see people who have fixed their ‘problems’ – parents who are very serious about braces for their children, I see it as the only form of minor plastic surgery which is vanity-wise unjudged. 

Vanity brings me to this: 

“While I mostly do not like my face, or looking in the mirror, hating one’s face this much is its own kind of vanity.”

Like Issy, I do not like my face. And like her I always had the impression that extreme self-hate and narcissism are opposite sides of the same coin. You walk too close to the edge and fall to the other side. One thing I would like to point out is all her paintings have a certain pixelated quality to them. It’s as if they are digital photographs that have been zoomed in far beyond their resolution.  This makes it seem like her self-portraits have something more to them in the surroundings and that somehow soothes my mind. We are seeing one particular of her face even though her whole face is visible. I relate to that because when I look in the mirror, I try to focus on one and only one feature of mine because I cannot bear the whole mirror. And while it may seem that a part of something tells less than all of something, I believe in Issy’s case she has proved that it enhances the rest of the things. I can comb my hair in peace because I am looking at my hair and not my face.