Book Review: Shy: A Memoir by Sian Prior

An attractive, forty-something woman peers around a gallery, trying vainly to find her partner in the buzzing party crowd. ‘A familiar sensation was sweeping through my body’, Sian Prior writes. ‘It was as if someone had spiked my drink so that instead of sparkling mineral water I was now sipping a kind of effervescent cement’. Unable to spot a familiar face, she starts to sweat and her stomach churns. Alight with panic she flees the party, not even recognising the ‘calm, confident blonde woman’ she glimpses in a mirror on the way out.

Prior, a successful arts journalist, choir master, public speaker and media consultant, suffers from crippling shyness. But this Renaissance woman is also a published author and writing teacher, and the incident jolts her into an exploration of the paradox of her life – that someone so comfortable in the public spotlight could also be felled by terror in unstructured social situations.

That paradox makes this book unique. Its author was born to tell her own story of shyness because her professional persona is the perfect vehicle for spreading the message.

Shy is no conventional memoir, but nor is it a self-help book. Prior ditches a chronological account of her life and replaces it with a panoply of elements – interviews with psychologists (including her own mother, Margot) and her own research; playful lists; play-offs between incidents from her past and theories of shyness – to present a frank account that is often funny, sometimes poignant and always engaging.

Although the result can feel anarchic at times, it works beautifully; experience and vivid recollection step in where the research evidence is simplistic, suggesting both the strengths and weaknesses of scientific definitions.

To cope with the shyness she has battled all along, Prior developed a persona she calls ‘Professional Sian’ – a confident, polished performer who knows how to fake it till she makes it.

But ‘Shy Sian’ surfaces when there is no script, no structure. And for Prior this has meant a lifetime of lost social and romantic opportunities  – from Sally, the school friend round the corner who the young Sian is too scared to visit, to ‘the beautiful dark-eyed boy glimpsed in the stairwell of my first high school’. She has missed out not just on sex but ‘the subtle semaphore of attraction’.

For Prior, shyness is as much about fearful thoughts – what she calls the ‘what ifs’ – as it is about the intensely discomfiting physical symptoms: ‘armpits drenched, throat clenched, locked in battle with myself’. While travelling in Europe in her twenties, Prior develops a stubborn throat lump: ‘Lying on my hostel bunk in the night I would feel it resting there, nuzzling at my vocal cords’.

There is a central narrative here that anchors Prior’s account to the recent past. For ten years she lived with the musician Paul Kelly (whom Prior calls Tom in the book) – an Australia folk hero, one of our national bards. She reveals their slow-burning courtship, which blossomed into a shared life, and the cocooning effect of this relationship on her sense of self.

Her relationship with Tom and other life experiences are held up to the light to examine what shyness isn’t as much as what it is. Is it genetic? What is its relationship to social phobia? Is it the same as introversion, or can a shy person be an extrovert? How does Tom’s fame relate to Prior’s own contradictory stance towards being in the spotlight? Is shyness related to hypersensitivity? She explores the positive character traits that go with shyness, like empathy, conscientiousness and a willingness to listen.

Then the unthinkable happens and Tom announces he is leaving. Suddenly the very rejection that all shy people fear has come to pass.

Upheaval follows, but it is viewed in the light of a formative childhood event – deepening the examination of the origins of shyness in ways that take it far beyond the biological.

Prior’s writing is fresh, visual, funny. She has a sharp recall of the quotidian detail but also the insight and hard-won wisdom of someone who has battled to live a socially and emotionally fulfilling life in the midst of a sometimes crippling fear.

Yet there is something implicit in this book that Prior herself doesn’t pay much attention to. Given the rise of positive psychology, I looked for the protective factors that enabled Prior to seek out significant relationships and pursue professional success.

Without diminishing her pain, I was also interested in the class aspects of her success – her psychologist mother is an obvious factor, as is her immersion in the world of classical music and love affair with the clarinet. But what about schooling – was a private school, with its small class sizes and individualised attention, a strengthening influence?

Prior, intent on exploring a trait that has been hidden and denied in her public life, seems mostly oblivious to these broader questions, although two things stand out that will be useful to anyone who is shy. ‘Professional Sian’ first came into being because Prior was able to find, in a high-profile environmental job, a cause far larger than her own insecurities. She also singles out a passionate curiosity about other people and the world as an incentive to push past her fears.

In public appearances since writing the book, Prior has discussed how risky it felt to break the illusion of her professional competence by publishing Shy. While her discoveries did not lead to the cure she originally hoped for, they have enabled a new-found acceptance, and Prior claims she is no longer embarrassed to be shy.

While Prior’s level of professional success may seem out of reach to many of us shy people, I found this encouraging rather than dispiriting. I suspect most of us have our own version of Professional Sian, and although she may not be as reliable or fearless as Prior’s version, this writer offers a bold role model for risk taking and a path to self-acceptance that many readers will benefit from.

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Back, Again: The Tyranny of the Bad Back

I started writing this piece sometime in mid-January after being temporarily debilitated by a minor back injury. It’s all better now but I’ve learned a lot from my experience.

I half-sit, half-lie on my right side. My torso is twisted awkwardly, my arms crooked, palms pressing into the sheets on either side of me. The sheets are tangled. The lamp casts its sickly yellow glow over the small room. My hands depress the hopelessly too-soft mattress beneath me. I’m wondering what to do with them next, which part of my body to use to haul my torso up and behind me so that I am sitting on the edge of the bed – the vital position before I can get up from it.

I’ve managed to sustain what is probably an abdominal strain. There are a number of abdominal muscles, and I think I’ve pulled the deepest one on my left side, the transverse abdominal muscle, which is involved in coughing, laughing and sneezing. It’s a strange injury – in my case there’s little pain, apart from soreness, as long as I keep still and sit or stand in the right position. The killer is the accompanying muscle spasms – an involuntary clenching high up in the wall of the chest when I so much as bump into something or move too suddenly (this clip from the IT crowd captures both the feeling itself and the dread of the feeling).

I must have a mild strain because I can breathe without pain (although laughter and coughing present problems) and even the muscle cramping isn’t all that painful. It’s just weird and scary, makes me feel like an invalid, leads to soreness and stiffness, and reminds me that something is awry.

I have an overly soft and comfortable bed, and having to lie in the one position on my back all night since the injury has been disastrous for my lower back, which is probably a map of muscle knots and old strains. I’ve had to stop doing my daily exercises too of course, further weakening my back. The spinal chickens are coming home to roost and I, it seems, am a sitting duck. Since the days after the strain, I’ve gradually lost mobility, and now hobble around like a superannuated courtier in a Shakespeare play. I think of my grandfather, his pot-bellied body stooped and pain-ridden in the weeks before he died of cancer.

Without my back able to propel and support me, my entire body image has changed. I feel fragile, elderly, vulnerable to further injury. I am hopelessly separated from the bulk of humanity, which, on the face of things, appears to take its collective back for granted, while at the same time feeling more bonded with the human race – for who among us hasn’t, at one time or another, had a back strain of some description? Despite the fact that my problems are all muscular, and therefore minor in the scheme of things, I am scared of the future. I want a prognosis. Worse than all of this, I am missing out on precious summer days, the kind so warm they give you the illusion that life will always support you, that you need nothing. Half the time I’m so worried I can't even read.

Frightened to laugh or cough, a thousand giggles and splutters are trapped in my tummy and facial muscles. Ricky Gervais, in a repeat all the way from 2004, causes me pain when he speculates about the attempt to fix Humpty Dumpty. ‘Horses? Why would you use horses – to fix an egg?’ he queries in his slow, droll way, drawing out the absurdity through superb pacing. ‘And all of the king’s horses? What if there was an invasion? Oh, we can’t send the troops because they’re trying to put an egg back together.’

I’m terrified something else will go wrong. I am hanging on to my independence, but last night it was a struggle to do the dishes. Further debilitation would mean a return to the family home, the worst outcome possible for my sanity.

How stubborn this injury is. In the past even the most debilitating back strains (usually lower back) have only been at their worst for a matter of days. Rest has always been the magic, quick cure for any problems. Yet rest doesn’t seem to be having the desired effect this time, or perhaps the progress is just too slow to measure. In fact, the abdominal strain is improving, albeit at a glacial rate, but my back seems to be getting worse.

In desperation, I go to the first physio I can find. Truth to tell, this one is participating in a scheme by which my extras health fund pays the entire fee for the first visit. But we won’t go into that, and I battle to avoid it during the session. He keeps asking how I found the clinic. Who cares? I trust him, he’s excellent at what he does; the clinic is his practice (whatever that means in relation to a group clinic) and he’s been a physio, the receptionist informed me when I made the appointment, for thirty years.

He can see there’s nothing seriously wrong. ‘I want you to feel relaxed and that you can walk around without worrying’, he tells me. By the end of that first session – not more than around twenty-five minutes long – I do walk out normally, if slowly and gingerly. I no longer cringe in fear at the dreaded spasm. That night I have one more of these horrors while walking with my friend Simon in the park. Then they’re gone forever, never to return.

I am watching a blu-ray at his place to see in the New Year, and I masochistically choose This is Spinal Tap, a digitised print that is unbelievably fresh and funny after thirty-odd years. I torture Simon by continually begging him to please turn it off, I’m trying not to laugh. I still feel cheated of this movie: there were so many humorous morsels to savour and I was scared to let them tickle through me for fear of the pain.

Second time at the physio and my back’s back. It’s in good form. He is very paternalistic. ‘Good girl’, he says. I don’t care. I’ll do whatever he says, within reason. I ask for some exercises, he gives me two to do morning and night. ‘I’m very motivated’, I tell him and I mean it. My precious independence is beckoning. At the end of the visit, the physio says he wants to see me one more time.

When he’s giving me treatments I understand why I haven’t been to a physio for 20 years. It’s terrifying. He levers different parts of my spine up and down, up and down, and I am scared I’ll panic. I had contemplated telling him I had an anxiety about being touched in a professional setting and then decided against it. Luckily he seems to think my clear discomfort is about a residual fear of muscle spasm.

Ah, physios. What a worthy profession. I used to have a friend who was a physio and while in training she would occasionally come round and practise on me. At the time I wondered why on earth anyone would do such a long and intensive course in an area that seemed so pedestrian. Now I can’t think of anything more worthwhile than watching someone hobble into a consulting room, and later waving them goodbye as they depart with a spring in their step. Not that this happens every time of course –  clearly in my case I was suffering from nothing but strained muscles, easily assuaged by the treatment  – but improving mobility is a noble pursuit.

After my third and final visit to the physio I’m a new woman for a day or two, but my troubles aren’t over yet. The back strain has been worsened by too many hours spent slaving over a hot computer in the last few weeks. My back is angry and painful, and I can’t seem to get on top of it; I’m doing the exercises the physio has recommended, but am still not back to my old exercise routine. One Friday afternoon after meeting a demanding work deadline my back seizes up to the extent that I can hardly walk.

Determined to get my back back, I start walking laps of the oval at the local park. I buy a cold pack, use a wrapped towel as a lumbar back support when I’m working, consider buying a $200 back rest for watching tele. I religiously leave the computer and curl up on the floor when the strain starts to feel serious.

And then it just ends. It stops. My back is back to normal, in fact probably better than normal because of the physio's intervention. There’s no rhyme or reason, I’m not sitting any better or doing anything different, although I have started my old exercises again, which is probably strengthening it further. Perhaps I had actually strained it quite seriously as a consequence of the original abdominal strain, and it’s only just fully recovered. It’s working so well that I’m happily mildly mistreating it again, twisting and bending and struggling to make the effort to crouch down when I pick something up. The garden’s looking better, the car is clean.

But I will never take my back for granted as I did before, and I’ll continue to build it up with strengthening exercises. I need my back and I’m not going to let it let me down again if I can help it.

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Body Dysmorphic Disorder and the Sins of the Camera

I have a mild verson of body dysmorphic disorder. I impose impossibly high standards on my attractiveness and then feel dismayed and inadequate when I can’t meet those standards. It’s a mean way to live, to judge myself so harshly.

I’ve never been diagnosed with BDD, and its arrival in my life was subtle – it never really felt like a new disorder, more like another outlet for my existing obsessiveness.

Most of the time I’m okay with my appearance these days, but every now and then something happens that throws me completely off kilter.

Given that BDD is related to OCD, I imagine one treatment would be exposure therapy based on getting used to the sufferer's own appearance. In the case of ageing, this exposure would need to be constant: our faces regularly show small alterations as we age, alterations that would be imperceptible to the average person but can spell doom to the BDD afflicted.

This is disconcerting, but I’ve learned to cope. I can now adjust my expectations each time there’s some slight change in my actual appearance. I’ve learned to accept and live with many changes  in recent years and I’m confident I can keep doing this.

Photos of me present an additional problem: I have the sort of bone structure that doesn’t flatten well into the two-dimensional image. This means that the face that I’m familiar with simply doesn’t translate to a photo. I look different in the mirror from how I look in a pic.

Just as I’ve gotten used to my changing appearance in real life, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that photos of me will not look like the image I see when I look in the mirror. I don’t like this state of affairs, but I can live with it.

This shouldn’t matter. Photos are an important means of recording our lives for ourselves, friends and family as well as posterity. Even if we personally let down by them (as I do), avoiding the camera isn’t the answer.

But flash photography represents another degree of foreignness altogether.

The other night I was planning to spend the evening at a friend’s place, and I asked him if he’d mind taking some photos of me for my business website. The photo that’s currently on the site is two and a half years old. I’ve kept it on the site that long not just because it shows a younger version of me but because it’s a good photo – and I’m not the most photogenic person in the world.

Because it was evening, my friend took the photos using flash. The result? Pictures that were so at odds with my actual appearance that they gave me a distinct downer. I looked like a ghost, incredibly gaunt and with dark shadows under my eyes.

I don’t think I’m being overly critical here. I think the camera is! Now I've reached my late forties the camera's two-dimensional images are harsher than they've ever been, and flash photography increases the disparity between the real me and the photographic one.

So the question is: now that I know flash photos show a ghostly avatar that bears little resemblance to the real me, what should my response be? Should I gradually expose myself to these images for longer and longer periods of time so that they eventually lose their ability to discombobulate? Or should I avoid flash photography like a vampire avoids the light?

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Heroes and villains: food intolerance, hypoglycemia, candida and the Failsafe diet – Part 1 of 3

The following, first in a series of four blog entries, goes into a fair bit of detail about my food consumption and intolerances, and therefore may be boring for all but the most allergy-ridden. I’m on a restricted diet, and once I had mentioned particular foods I wasn’t eating, it seemed necessary to mention all the foods in my diet, otherwise it wouldn’t be clear what I was giving up.

Usually the sudden appearance of itchy welts on the legs, stomach and arms would be a matter of some concern. For me, with my body image issues, it was a disaster of mammoth proportions. After taking a few days to stare in horror at the welts – some of which were admittedly quite creepy, starting off red then turning into bruises – I finally faced the fact I’d been avoiding for the past five years: I was probably intolerant of a number of food chemicals.

My dietary life at the moment appears to be grimmer than ever before. Not only can’t I eat dairy, gluten, yeast and anything sweet, but I’m also probably sensitive to amines and salicylates, two natural chemicals that occur in many, many, foods (ironically, these chemicals add flavour to the food!). My immune system has turned against me, and I’m in extreme dietary blandsville. Also lost to me is the simple pleasure of eating a meal out with friends.

Why did I come to this grim conclusion?

There really weren’t any other culprits to blame. I’d been more or less avoiding gluten, lactose, yeast and alcohol for over a decade, and been religiously off sugar for about two decades as a result of reactive hypoglycemia (low blood sugar), a condition in which the pancreas can’t deal with concentrated sugar.

Hypoglycemia has been linked with the overgrowth of candida, a natural fungus, in the digestive system. I’ve therefore spent at least the last decade on a half-hearted anti-candida diet, which entails avoidance of any foods that could produce yeast in the gut. However, I couldn’t give up real coffee, which was disastrous for my blood sugar.

I finally managed to give coffee up completely in 2002, but the anti-candida diet’s remained a tad half-hearted, mainly because, in order for me to stay sane, it included tofu, tinned fish, shelled nuts and store-bought hummus. To this day, I can’t tell you if the diet’s half-hearted because it never made me better and I got discouraged; or whether its half-heartedness was why I never got better. Perhaps a bit of both.

At one point I did attack my presumed candida with a course of an anti-fungal drug, Nystatin, and I took vitamin supplements for years, but I never embarked on that full-on assault with probiotics and massive doses of garlic that you’re supposed to. I still feel vague and out of sorts on cold, cloudy days, and I’m reactive to any hint of carbohydrate, even the complex carbohydrates that occur in grains and vegetables, both of which suggest some kind of lingering yeast problem.

Apart from the exceptions outlined above, I had already made some additional food sacrifices. I got rosacea five years ago, and that’s when I stopped eating the flavoursome foods I loved – most of the time, anyway. Most herbs and spices were out, as well as garlic, onion, red meat, treats like tinned tomatoes, and eventually even fresh fish. But there were also perfectly harmless-seeming vegetables that inexplicably gave me a red face, like zucchini. However, I still ate these forbidden foods occasionally when I was willing to put up with redness. Coffee and alcohol are common causes of rosacea, but I was already off those.

My rosacea and candida food lapses (practitioners sometimes call these ‘dietary indiscretions’) had been getting worse in recent months. I’d started eating roasted cashews a few times a week, as well as tomatoes. I was also eating out once a month or so, picking the safer options at vegetarian and Asian restaurants. Store-bought hummus was becoming a weekly treat, and once in a blue moon I would eat a whole 250 g block of cheddar cheese for lunch. When I look back, my diet was becoming steadily higher in amines, natural chemicals that tend to be in aged and preserved foods.

I could ignore occasional red cheeks, but not these horror hives. So when they sprang up, almost two months ago now, I was forced to research foods that were low in amines and salicylates, and sure enough, the treats I’d been allowing myself were full of them. So I gave up anything that wasn’t low in amines and salicylates. And the hives have mostly gone, suggesting that the food chemicals were to blame.

Interestingly, though, the rosacea hasn’t gone, so the picture is probably even more complex. I still believe that there is a connection between rosacea and food chemicals, however, because I inadvertently gave up some salicylates when I first got rosacea and stopped eating herbs and spices, and I’ve got no doubt my rosacea would be worse if I hadn’t.

At the moment I’m trying to get an appointment at an allergy clinic at the Alfred Hospital (a whole other story – the hospital has so far not even been able to confirm that it received my referral, now faxed to them four times). I need to know for sure whether I am intolerant of these chemicals, and whether or not there’s a way of making me less intolerant, for example an underlying digestive weakness that could be fixed, or even a thyroid problem, said to be a cause of food intolerance.

At the moment the only foods I’m officially eating are chicken, brown rice, tofu, eggs, cold-pressed safflower oil, chickpeas, quinoa (a gluten-free grain), celery, raw cashews and cabbage! (Fruits that are low in amines and salicylates are out because of my blood sugar problem.)

Boring!

Learning to tolerate food intolerance
Food intolerance differs from food allergy in a number of ways. True allergies are the body’s immediate immune response and occur as a reaction to proteins in foods. With food intolerance the digestive system is involved, the intolerance is to particular chemicals in the food, and there is a longer onset between ingesting the food and a reaction appearing. It is harder to diagnose food intolerance for the latter reason, but there may be an advantage too: some say that if you go without the foods containing the offending chemicals for long enough, the body will no longer produce the antibodies against the chemicals, and you will be able to tolerate small amounts of those foods.

Apparently food intolerance produces an addiction to the food and a craving when it is removed from the diet. While withdrawing from amines and salicylates, I not only felt exhausted but craved amines like never before. It’s a very different craving from the desire for sugar or yeast. The yearning seemed to be for the taste of the food rather than the sugar content, which is what amines are all about I guess.

During this period I wanted, more than anything else, rich tangy hummus with falafel. (This probably sounds like a bland craving to have, but to me these foods are tasty treats!). My whole body wanted not concentrated sugar but concentrated flavour. The cravings have now diminished but, like a dysfunctional relationship that still beckons, I’d go back to amines in a second if I thought I could get away with it.

Having said that, I’m thinking more clearly than before I gave up the amines and salicylates – when alone especially, I notice my brain seems to be working better. I know that sounds weird but it’s the only way I can describe it.

And I do wonder whether this sensitivity could have been the main game all along rather than a side issue. In other words, perhaps it’s contributed to my low blood sugar problems, not to mention my lack of energy. On the other hand, low blood sugar could still be the main culprit, because it supposedly leads to too much insulin washing around in the system; insulin is a hormone, and too much of it can supposedly have adverse effects on other bodily processes.

Stop press: I gave in last night and ate some store-bought hummus, and there were a couple of hives on my knee this morning.

In my next post I’ll look at the Failsafe diet, which is low in food chemicals.

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A peaceful period?

the warts have gone (after months of basically digging them out of my heel with nothing but a small blade and a jar of salicylic acid)

the hives have gone (okay so I had to give up yet another food – tinned tuna)

the dermatitis has gone (thanks to nasty cortisone cream which is definitely not recommended, but where the dermatitis was it doesn’t matter!)

the neighbours with the constantly howling dog have gone (she had a good life but cried whenever they left her alone in the house – now my neighbours are spookily quiet, for the first time in decades)

the real estate sales manager who wanted to look through and value the flat has gone (he might come back but it’s only 15 per cent likely)

my walking-sister’s-dog-in-the-park arrangement has gone (this is sad for many reasons but also signals an end to the ongoing conflict with, and need to see on a regular basis, one of my difficult sisters)

the rats have gone (not completely but I haven’t seen or heard one in weeks, and there’s nothing for them to eat at my place anyway)

the cockroaches have not gone (and I can’t bring myself to kill them these days, I’ve become an involuntary Buddhist)

Barnaby Joyce has not gone (and sadly will be on the political scene for some time)

climate change has not gone (but I have with much difficulty resigned myself to its implications)

I seem to be moving into a peaceful period – but I’m almost too scared to write that. If this is just a lull in my ongoing struggle with the world, not to mention my own body, then so be it! I’ll enjoy it while it lasts. Bottoms up! (Quaffs some mineral water and daringly eats some raw cashews.)

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The perils of internet dating

After a long absence, Slightly Nutty recently returned to the exciting, unpredictable world of internet dating. What a ride it’s proving – and I haven’t even met the Gentleman in question.

I admit to being on a rather ‘questionable’ dating site, down a notch in the respectability stakes from RSVP, which I hate to give free publicity to but have to admit is probably the best known dating site in Australia.

But I prefer the dodgy site I’m on, for a host of reasons. And they don’t include posting naughty pics of myself in compromising positions with my face artfully blanked out.

I’ve only met one person through this dodgy site so far and he, like me, was a refugee from RSVP. And the Gentleman I’m hoping to meet up with in the next week or so also looks like he could easily be on RSVP – he’s fully clothed in all of the three pics he sent me.

So why do I bother? Why not just get back on the RSVP treadmill?

The main thing is the expectations are lower. RSVP meetings are fraught with danger for the slightly nutty. I’ve been on and off RSVP for ages (you can hide and display your profile at will) and, now that I’m in my forties, I’m finding that dates basically expect me to own. Yes, property. They don’t like genteel poverty and fear you are going to sponge off them. My one and only female date asked me if my job was full or part time, and whether I owned or rented. It felt like a job interview.

It’s not just that, but the general expectations that accompany an RSVP date, mine included. They evoke a host of long-buried needs, hopes and unrealistic expectations. In contrast, when I meet someone from the dodgy site I’m not scrutinising them as closely and asking the questions: ‘Could this be my next life partner? If so, does it matter that they like playing obscure board games/have appalling taste in restaurants/break wind in intimate moments?’ The thing I’m mainly interested in is the chemistry. Is there something there? Are there things to talk about? Do I want to spend time with them?

But there are still difficulties, the main one being the need to have a recent photo on hand for prospective suitors.

Because the site I’m using is a bit dodgy, I didn’t want to have pictures of myself on my profile for all the world to see. Even if I did, the last decent picture of me is two years old and shows someone who looks younger and prettier than I normally do. When this current Gentleman responded to my profile, sending me recent non-rude pictures of himself, I realised I would have to update my own pics and send some to him. (On the website you can post your photos on a ‘private gallery’ and tick a box when sending a letter to allow the recipient to view the pics.)

So I asked an obliging friend to help out. We went to the urban forest near where he lives and took lots of shots, in heaps of different poses, in the hope of choosing the best ones. Predictably I was disappointed with the ones he sent me to choose from. I’ve never been that photogenic, but I’ve become less so as I’ve gotten older. It didn’t help that I had bad PMT that day either. And it also didn’t help that the photos were on large files that gave uncomfortably detailed close ups! (Tip: if you're not happy with photos of yourself, blame the photographer!)

But no excuses. I would upload the best three to my ‘private gallery’. I did, asking the Gentleman to contact me if he still wanted to meet up for coffee. (The photo-taking friend and I had rationalised that it was preferable to supply ordinary photos rather than pics so flattering that the prospective would be dreadfully disappointed when he first clapped eyes on me.)

I uploaded the pics on Wednesday. I went away on an overnight trip on Thursday and was hopeful that on my return on Friday afternoon a response would be waiting for me.

No response. Saturday morning arrived. Again nothing. Saturday afternoon also proved unfruitful.

I reeled, I quavered and I quaked. This would be the first time I had been rejected on the basis of a photograph!

I spoke to another friend whose roles include being a kind of mental health buddy. We discussed the concept of exposure, a popular therapeutic tool in the treatment of anxiety and OCD. Exposure therapy involves putting up with discomfort in relation to a phobia, fear or obsession, and gradually increasing one’s exposure to that discomfort.

As someone with a minor case of body dysmorphic disorder (which in my stronger moments I admit is actually an impossible demand that I be beautiful) one of my worst fears is being rejected on the basis of my appearance. The silence on the Gentleman’s part suggested this might have actually occurred.

But in fact, my mental health friend and I agreed, there was no way I could know this for sure. Perhaps the Gentleman didn’t like my ‘look’ rather than my ‘looks’. Alternatively he might simply be away, or incredibly busy, etc etc. Staying in this state of uncertainty, of unknowingness, rather than forcing some unalloyed truth from the world is the essence of exposure therapy.

I told my mental health friend I had wanted to send the photos to him to get his opinion. But we both agreed that that would constitute seeking reassurance, a no-no in exposure therapy.

Anyway, on Saturday evening the longed-for answer finally arrived. Yes, the Gentleman would still like to do coffee. He explained his slowness by saying that he wasn’t addicted to the dating site and didn’t check his messages that often. This had the ring of truth to me, as there had been a lapse of several days between telling him I was going to post the pics and actually doing it.

We still haven’t spoken, but it looks like we’re going to catch up on Saturday morning. Wish me luck!

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What I see when I look in the mirror: ageing, body image, feminism and psychoanalysis

I often assume I suffer from mild body dysmorphia, which means that I supposedly have a distorted view of how I look. It’s much worsened by the fact that I have rosacea: the degree of horror varying with how pink the cheeks are at any one time.

But I’m not even sure about whether it is dysmorphia. For a start, my face is simply never the same each time I look in the mirror; with the rosacea affected by my food intolerances, I sometimes have ‘egg eyes’ (pinched and defeated looking); ‘tuna eyes’ (red and shrunken) or ‘oil eyes’ (same as previous). Usually there is some degree of swelling on my cheeks. The menstrual cycle complicates this further and I literally appear to age five years just before my period.

I suspect what actually afflicts me is hypervigilance coupled with an unhealthy narcissistic streak!

As a coping strategy, I go for long periods where I don’t do mirror close-ups. Everything except eyebrow plucking is done from a distance and even then I just focus on the relevant area, not the whole face.

It hasn’t always been like this. There was a time, before the ageing and rosacea started their ghastly double act, when I could gaze into the car rear view mirror and see my plumped-up, pale, glabrous skin and believe, momentarily, that I was beautiful.

So what happens when I allow myself, after a long interval, to edge closer to the mirror, to witness all the flaws – most of them identifiable as age spots, milia, broken blood vessels, enlarged pores, but some of them inexplicable, indeterminate markings, as if someone had smeared a tiny piece of non-removable charcoal on my forehead?

I got a close-up look the other day after perhaps a year of being too scared to. I was in the four-lane highway of Dandenong Road, in the Saturday morning traffic, waiting for a red light to change, and the face had gone. I mean the face as a whole, the face as an idea, as a unified concept. The new face was defined by its irregularities: the uneven vertical wrinkles on each side of the nose bridge, the deepening labial folds, the tiny crimson paths under the left eye socket and on either side of the nose. The expression in the eyes one of distaste. Not scared exactly, not quite horrified but somewhere close.

I almost stopped the car to check again. It’s unbearable, the desire to check. You check once and are shocked and then when you move your eyes from the mirror your imagination makes a monster of what you have witnessed, so you check again to reassure yourself. And in between the first and second checks you compose the expression on your face, you adjust your hair, you point your chin upwards, you civilise and arrange yourself.

You’re okay, your mind finally decides, overriding that first visceral reaction. Barely.

P.S. I’ve just done some basic internet research on dysmorphia and I probably do have a mild version!

Stuck in the mirror
Like many women before me, the ageing process has made me question my identification with what I see in the mirror. In the way I’ve written this blog entry so far, I have refused to identify with ‘the face’, distancing myself from it. It is no longer me. (In certain mirrors, with a bit of make-up on, it becomes ‘me’ again – for the moment.)

Could the discipline of psychoanalysis shed some light? Sigmund Freud explored the unconscious through psychoanalysis, and Jacques Lacan basically developed and elaborated on Freud’s theories. But other theorists of early child development such as DW Winnicott have extended and challenged their work.

I studied a little Freud and Lacan at university. I’m no expert on either of these controversial thinkers, but my obsession with the mirror made me think about a stage in infantile development that Lacan posited. It supposedly occurs between the ages of six and eighteen months and is called the ‘mirror stage’.

I wondered if I was going through another kind of mirror stage, a kind of de-identification with self.

Psychoanalysis, so often discredited these days, can be incredibly useful in explaining aspects of human behaviour that social theorists might struggle with. For example, like me, many Western women have long been crippled by a form of narcissism that sees them invest way too much in their body image. The fallout from this is obvious in eating disorders, as well as excessive time, energy and money spent on appearance.

Perhaps body dysmorphic disorder is some extreme manifestation of this?

Naomi Wolf wrote her feminist classic The Beauty Myth almost two decades ago. In it she posits a trenchant and disturbing thesis – that current standards of beauty came about as a backlash against second wave feminism. According to Wolf, when the popular media such as women’s magazines could no longer control women’s actions after feminism sent them scurrying out of the home, they introduced the body as a site of feminine guilt and preoccupation. The perfect woman, a 20-something, underweight blonde with translucently clear skin, is the uber-woman that none of us can ever measure up to (Twiggy was, of course, an early major prototype).

This is a compelling argument, one that is still useful in the twenty-first century to explain why women are willing to risk disfiguration and ill health to explore ever more invasive anti-ageing procedures, so ‘raising’ the standards that apply to all women.

But I think we need psychoanalysis and related theories to explain why so many of us are so invested in the beauty myth and our own appearance in relation to it; and why the ageing process threatens our self-image so gravely.

Feminine narcissism – not just a metaphor but a psychiatric condition, albeit mild in most – is one reason why feminism was spectacularly unsuccessful in luring the mass of women into checked shirts and overalls, and convincing them to bare their faces (another, of course, is that in an unequal world women feel compelled to compete via appearance).

Thus, women are not lying when they say of the face lift, the botox injections, the face peels, ‘I did it for me’. Advertisers encourage this: ‘Because you’re worth it’.

A word of warning: narcissism is often used as a term to denigrate women, to imply that we are foolish and frivolous to be obsessed with our bodies and appearance. This is the double standard of patriarchy: set up an impossible ideal, then complain when women spend all their time and energy trying to live up to it.

A recent article in The Age’s Good Weekend would have horrified many readers. It featured four women of various ages who spent what most would agree was excessive amounts on their beauty routine – the average was $16 762 a year, but two of the four spent more than $19 000 annually. These sums were for beauty and hair products and treatments only, not clothes, shoes or jewellery.

Before looking at how these women justified their spending, let’s take a very condensed journey through some of the theories that consider how we look at ourselves.

Lacan’s mirror stage
What happens at the mirror stage? Basically it takes place when the child sees its reflection in the mirror, and recognises itself as itself, for the first time.

At this point the very young child is a bundle of drives and experiences, with little control over its needs and bodily functions. It doesn’t experience itself as a unified being and it does not see itself as separate from the world.

When the child recognises itself in the mirror for the first time, it’s thrilled – the self that looks back at the child appears to be far more unified than the child feels itself to be.

The mirror stage supposedly helps the child develop an ego. But there are two sides to this. The child rejoices in this image of the unified self it sees in the mirror. But the child also becomes aggressive and angry towards the image in the mirror because unlike the image, it is still stuck with the reality of its uncoordinated, helpless body.

Feminist academic Elizabeth Grosz describes it thus:

The child invests the [mirror] image of itself … with all the hostility directed towards its own lack of satisfaction … The … internalized image becomes an … object of aggression (for example in narcissistic self-deprecation). [my italics].

Therefore, a huge split takes place within us in this important stage of becoming ‘ourselves’ – of developing an ego. Just as we are becoming ourselves, we are also alienated from ourselves.

All about my ‘other’
Before we get on to the bit about narcissism, we need to know that the mirror stage has another important function. It sets up the distinction between the self and the world, the self and the other. This is because for the first time the child sees itself as a kind of double being – reflected back at itself in the mirror – so it’s then able to recognise other people, and other objects, as being separate from it. The child is no longer merged with the world.

The mother is an important part of the mirror stage because she is the child’s main ‘other’, reflecting the child back to itself.

The mirror stage is associated with narcissism because it takes place in the state that Lacan calls the Imaginary – a closed system where mother and child continually reflect each other. In growing up, the child moves from the realm of the Imaginary into that of the Symbolic. What brings about this move is the oedipus complex. (Freud refers to the end point – the resolution – of the oedipus complex as the development of the superego.)

For Lacan, this process is represented by the presence of a male who brings the larger world into the closed system of mother and child. He believed it takes place when we start talking, when we enter language. Similarly, the superego described by Freud represents authority figures that we internalise.

Before I go any further, I have to say that the mirror stage has long been howled down as a developmental phase. Why, other theorists have asked, does it make a material object – a mirror – more important than the role of the primary carer, usually the mother? And how do blind kids develop an ego? Lacan himself later said that it wasn’t a stage at all but a state of being.

I and others have found it compelling, though, because it dramatises so beautifully that split from the self that also separates us from the world. And it uses the mirror, that non-place in which women so often get caught, as a site of self-becoming.

An important aspect of the mirror stage is what Lacan called ‘the desire of the other’. This means that at this point the child comes to see itself as an object of the mother’s desire – it is seeing itself through the eyes of an other, the mother.

For Lacan, then, narcissism might become pathological if we get stuck in the mirror stage, stuck in the Imaginary. And we can see, too, how, if we did get stuck in the mirror stage, we’d continue to feel aggressive towards that mirror image.

But here the concept gets confusing – when we start to age there’s no idealised self to falsely reflect back a unity we don’t feel. Instead, at this point in our lives, shouldn’t we feel more unified on the inside, so that the outer image, which is falling apart, isn’t so important? Shouldn’t the mirror stage be reversed? Perhaps that’s what actually happens when mentally healthy people age – perhaps they begin to detach from the image in the mirror. If so, this would surely be a healthy development.

But what happens if we never get to feel unified and whole on the inside, and the outer image starts to fall apart as we age? Perhaps as we try to detach from the outer image we're also feeling panicky and scattered inside. Or perhaps we simply can't detach – that’s when all hell breaks loose and we seek the two-hundred-dollar face cream, the knife, the injections.

These are speculations only (sorry about the pun). In his discussion of the mirror stage Lacan wasn’t overly concerned with narcissism as a pathology. Indeed, he seems to think that narcissism is the normal state, and goes on to portray conventional heterosexual relationships as narcissistic.

The mother as mirror
Everyone breathed a sigh of relief (not really but it sounds good) when the famous paediatrician and psychiatrist DW Winnicott replaced the mirror with the face of the mother.

It's significant that, just like Lacan and Freud, Winnicott believed that the newborn didn't see itself as a separate being and couldn't distinguish itself from the world. The newborn gets hungry, cries, and the world -- which appears to be part of itself -- feeds it.

According to Winnicott, as the mother tends the child and gives it her attention, the mother’s face literally reflects the child back to itself – in ideal circumstances, ultimately giving the child to itself.

This is very important. If the mother is not in a state where she can reflect the child back at itself, she will not be the mirror the child needs to become itself.

If she does not mirror the child, the child develops a ‘false self’ to protect the ‘true self’. Instead of having its ‘true self’ mirrored in the face of the mother, it searches her face in order to anticipate her moods, and responds accordingly.

The child is in danger of never being able to move into the transitional phase (the phase where kids have an object, like a blanket, they can’t be separated from). In this vital phase the child is slowly coming to terms with the fact that its mother (and others in general) is a separate being with her own interests and autonomy.

It’s not hard to relate this theory to a woman’s relationship with the mirror. Perhaps when we look at ourselves uncritically in the mirror and can accept our ageing process, we act the part of the approving mother who responds to our true self.

If we haven’t had that positive mirroring, perhaps when we see our ageing face we worry only about the reactions of others, and fear they will reject us.

But I think it's worse than that. If we don't get mirrored properly we can't move onto and through the transitional phase. So basically if our parenting's been poor (and there might be a thousand reasons for this, many of them social or economic) then we may still believe on one level that we are merged with the world. We may therefore wait indefinitely to be properly parented by a world we expect to bend to our needs, and we may grapple with the idea that those around us have interests and indeed existence totally apart from us.

Back to the superego
I wonder, though, whether the disapproval some of us experience when we look in the mirror is even more complicated. Is something else going on at the same time, something to do with the wider world beyond the bond of child and mother?

What makes us care about what the rest of the world thinks of us? What makes us subscribe to the beauty myth as an exterior standard by which we measure ourselves? This is where Freud’s idea of the superego and Lacan’s related idea of the Symbolic could prove useful.

I think we really need these ideas when we think of how some women might view their faces and appearance in general. If I think I look bad it’s perhaps partly my superego telling me I no longer measure up to an external standard that the world has imposed on me – the ideal of feminine beauty. I have internalised a disapproving larger world that is telling me I don’t measure up.

Thus, in the Good Weekend article I mentioned earlier, 28-year-old Canna Campbell justifies the $17 754 she spends a year on beauty with the words ‘People say that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression’. Head of a company that offers financial advice, she’s talking about how prospective clients will view her – seeing herself through the eyes of a larger world. Similarly, 50-year-old Wendy Snyder declares: ‘I want [people] to see a groomed, efficient person’ and 39-year-old Vina Chipperfield believes that ‘People judge us every day on the basis of our appearance’.

Beyond the mirror?
These remarks are very much just possibilities based on my limited knowledge. Not all women are narcissistic and overly invested in their appearance. Not all women have conventional upbringings with father and mother playing traditional roles. Parents vary enormously in their ability to love and nurture children. It would be fascinating to see qualitative studies on how aspects of upbringing affect female narcissism, body image and attitudes to ageing.

But again, let’s not forget Lacan’s idea of the larger Symbolic, the wider world, that we enter through language (but that also includes visual symbols). However loving, parents can’t protect their girls from the saturation of media images that portray society’s ideal of feminine perfection.

But perhaps even perceiving all this gives me choices. If I look bad in my own eyes I now have a choice: I can stay in the world of Winnicott’s false self, or instead play the part of the loving mother/mirror, reflecting a positive image back to myself: ‘I love your true self, and I’ll give you the structure you need to bring it into the world’.

Perhaps I can also realise that in judging my own appearance, my over-active superego is playing the part of a potentially disapproving world. And while I can’t necessarily dismantle the impossible standard of beauty I’ve internalised – how can any one person hope to do that? – I can detach from my image a little bit: if I don’t necessarily like what I see in the mirror – viewed through the eyes of the wider world – that doesn’t mean I don’t like me – the me I feel from the inside.

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Vein hopes

If this blog is to be honest I have to deal with the issue of body image, which at different times, depending on how I'm 'travelling', dominates my life.

When I take a step back from my body image 'issues', what I find fascinating is how the horror I sometimes feel at some aspect of my body is mobile, choosing different elements to focus on -- suggesting of course that the feeling has less to do with the realities of my body and more to do with my psyche. You would think an awareness of this would help to avoid the sometimes obsessive focus on what's 'wrong' but unfortunately it doesn't work like that.

Ageing is the enemy of those with body image problems. This is because with age the body continues to change and there are always new, heart-sinking discoveries to make as the skin continues to thin, sag, collect 'liver spots' and grow ugly new growths with obscure Latin names and no discernible raison d'etre.

So one week it will be my pointy nose, growing ever-longer as I age, that is ruining my life and I'll be convinced that the only solution is to submit eventually to rhinoplasty. Then for about a day my nose will seem suddenly quite manageable. But a short while later I'll discover with a sickening lurch that the veins on my legs seem to be becoming more visible by the day. And then as I inspect myself it will become horrifyingly clear that the veins are now crisscrossing my entire body, their paths and connections there for the world to see, their blu-ish tinge destroying my fantasy of ever having a body I could happily display to the most casual lover.

The veins are an interesting example because they have become more prominent since I started exercising. This is ironic as I began my exercise regime partly to help manage my body image problems! But when you take part in regular exercise the veins become healthier and larger and if you happen to have increasingly thin skin, as I do, they are even more visible. From the forums I visited on the internet it seems that veins also become more prominent in pregnancy, particularly over the breasts.

The celebrity mags love to focus on the ugly hand veins of middle-aged, mostly female celebrities and in the course of coming to terms with mine I found on the internet numerous close-ups of the tortured, stringy networks on the hands of Madonna, Angelina and Sarah Jessica Parker. If they could put up with veins like that in the interests of good health and nice biceps, perhaps I could put up with my less prominent versions?

In fact, discovering these glaring imperfections on the bodies of those whose career it is to maintain bodily perfection was incredibly therapeutic. I figured that these women could not have helped noticing their veins, perhaps hated them, but were obviously not going to give up exercising.

And there is no way of hiding veins like this -- you can cover them with fake tan but the outlines are still apparent (there is a plastic surgeon in New York who apparently removes hand veins, but what horrific consequences to the venous system might this extreme course of action lead to?) So the likes of Angelina were choosing to live with a conventionally ugly physical attribute fully on display for the merciless cameras of the papparazzi.

And conventionally may be the operative word here. The Elizabethans apparently considered skin with visible blue veins a sign of refinement. I am both literally and figuratively thin-skinned and it's tempting to think there is a link between them, but this seems absurd. Regardless, I'm stuck with having an outlet for my neurotic feelings always handy should I look down at any visible body part.

The trick is to distract oneself as one would a child: 'look over there!' Self-obsession and rumination lead nowhere. The world and its objects can provide a safe landing place for the attention.

Mindfulness helps too, developing an awareness of thought processes without judging them, but without mistaking them for the truth. Mind noting is one useful mindfulness technique, ie saying something like 'thinking about veins' when obsession strikes.

Another technique -- which I dislike because it relies on others' misfortune -- is to compare my body image problems with those who have serious skin problems or disfigurements.

I can't pretend that my prominent veins are a positive thing or that I would not be without them because they have made me humble. I still dream of a thick, firm skin that covers up the constant flow of blood through my body and leaves me less exposed. But for this day only, for this hour, for this minute, I can put up with my veins.

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