If I am a superhero, and I am, then Photoshop is my nemesis. It’s not just because it’s tedious and you have to endure a learning curve that ranks right up there with learning how to perform brain surgery. It’s not even that it takes up so much memory that if I attempt to listen to music in media player while working in Photoshop, the songs skip. No, no, no, that is all just gravy, stinky, artery-clogging gravy.
What I hate the most about Photoshop is it is just another way to conceal the truth in this already fictitious world. It’s a way to make unhealthily thin models even thinner so that teenage girls can starve themselves even more, or to fix a photograph so that it has zero imperfections. I hate zero imperfections. I hate this silly, fake world. I hate the way that people demand flawlessness, while going about their lives being completely intolerable themselves. I’m talking to you, Donald Trump, you schoolyard bully prick. What kind of world is this where the people who can become billionaires are the same people who, when faced with the questioning of their dubious morals, can only come up with, “Yeah, so what? You’re fat! And Barbara Walters likes me more.”
So I get online the other day and I am looking up an actress, whose name I will spare to save her the belief that she is being a good teen idol, on YouTube, and I find out that she is the “thinspo” for Ana-loving girls all over the world. This disturbs me. What disturbs me even more is that I fall prey to it too, like a confused ten-year-old who needs to be told what pretty looks like. A few years ago, I set a weight goal for myself that I cannot reach, and it has not been for lack of trying. I eat very little, I work out a lot, and I cannot drop below a hundred and thirty pounds. In fact, every crunch I do, every time I step on a treadmill, my weight only goes up, and it becomes impossible for me to zip my knee-high boots up over my calves. So, what do I do? I work out harder, I eat even less, and about four days into that routine, I suddenly realize I AM FUCKING STARVING. And that’s when I get some sense back in my head and stop trying to be such a delicate flower, and go find a cow to slaughter.
The only time I have dropped below one hundred and thirty pounds was last summer when I was filming Drawing On Walls, and that’s only because I wasn’t eating or sleeping or sitting down. It was basically like being on crack for a week, without the benefit of getting to hang out with Whitney Houston.
This is my public decree that I am never going to make it to one hundred and twenty pounds, and, as of this instant, I am going to stop trying, because it’s ridiculous. I am not overweight. I am not disgusted by my body. The imperfections I do have, I can live with. I like having curves, and I do not find women who don’t have them attractive, so why in the hell would that ever be anything I would strive toward? And I can’t, in good conscience, continue putting forth so much effort to be thin when it makes me completely ill to see all of the girls on those pro-anorexia sites who don’t realize just how sick they really are. I would accept weighing five hundred pounds if I thought for one minute it would help them find some kind of realistic self-view, but instead they would just put me on their sites in the “reverse thinspo” category and remind themselves of everything not to become. But I am really over it. I’ve gotten over a lot of things lately, but right now, this tops the list. And this year for my birthday, I am getting a tattoo, the one I kept promising myself I would get when I reached my goal weight, no matter what the scale says.
