Also I should point out that I do NOT have any of these photos, the photographer moved out of town before I could get copies. So please DO NOT ask me for any. Thank you 7 April 1997 Naked Inside my Skin If someone had told me a year ago that I would be standing naked in the desert on a cold January morning allowing a virtual stranger to photograph me, I would have laughed. You know the type of laugh I mean, the one that eats you up inside as it rings hollow through your soul. I would have made a joke about it; all of my life I have made jokes about myself, my body and anything else that made me uncomfortable. For years I had torn myself apart physically and mentally for not fitting in with society's idea of beauty. I had convinced myself that if I could make people laugh, they would not realize how unhappy I was. I thought that if I got in the first shot, so to speak, then anything they could say would not hurt so badly. In the past, I would have been very uncomfortable with the idea of someone I was not involved with seeing me naked, without the protection of my clothing, or strangers seeing pictures of me naked, without the protection of my humor to distract them from my flaws. Yet there I was in the desert, standing naked on a mesa in the middle of winter. I have always felt part of the high mountain desert where I was born and now I was as close to it as I could get. The desert in winter is a strange place, a monotone diorama of gray and tan rolling curves and surprising angles. Here in the desert, earth meets the sky along a horizon that can be seen from every direction. The angles and curves of the desert are thrown into contrasts of light and darkness every time the sun brakes through the clouds. To one side of me gentle hills rise up, flowing like the hips and thighs of giant women who sleep, waiting for the end of time. In front of me the land rolls like a soft gray sea, broken by islands of rocks and the scars of roads and railroad tracks. As I pose, I feel the freshness of the air in my lungs and realize that here, twenty miles away and above the city, I have escaped the smoke and fog we politely refer to as an inversion. The air is moist, cold and bracing with the scent of old sage and yarrow, a slightly sweet, antiseptic smell that reminds me of life, sex and ancient dreams. There I stand as the wind whips around me like frozen silk and the cold damp earth numbs my feet through the soft folds of flannel I have laid down to protect them. In the past, I have seen my flesh as a sin, an excess, but as I watch the photographer, a healthy young man in boots, denim and a leather jacket shiver every time the wind blows, I realized I am wrong. My body is a blessing, a gift from my ancestors protecting me and keeping me comfortable. Even with every inch of my skin bare to the world, I am able to laugh and smile as the camera catches all of me on film. So what has changed? How did I go from fear to comfort, even confidence? Did I lose half my body weight, tone up and get cosmetic surgery to smooth out my bumps and cover up my stretch marks? Did I suddenly fit in with society's limited idea of beauty? Well no, I am more or less the same size I have been for years, BIG, The super-size of big. Everything about me is big, my legs, hips, belly and breasts are all built on a truly grand scale. So what did change? I did. I'd love to say that a plump little fairy-godmother type showed up out of nowhere and said, "Love yourself. Don't judge yourself by someone else's ideas. Be happy; you're not only OK the way you are, you're great," and poof, I believed it. Unfortunately this is real life, not a fairy tale, and chubby little ladies with wings do not just come along and change your very nature overnight as if you were a frog princess sitting on a lily-pad. One thing I have learned is that if you think you are a frog and you think everyone else thinks you are a frog, then chances are everyone, including you, will treat you like a frog. For most of my life I treated myself a lot worse than a frog. I was so full of self-hatred and disgust that I had no room for anything else. For years I abused myself mentally and physically. I told myself all the time what a horrible person I was and how I didn't deserve to live. Physically I tried to drink myself into oblivion and when that did not work, I fell into a cycle of self-abuse that nearly crippled or killed me time and again. It has taken me years to break away from the obsession to hurt myself. It was like my jokes. I had convinced myself that as long as I was controlling the pain, no one could ever hurt me as bad as I could. I know it does not make sense, but hating yourself because you do not look like everyone else does not make sense either. When I started to realize that not only did I deserve to live but that I also deserved to be happy, I realized that I had no idea how to go about it. I knew I had to stop hating myself but I did not know where to start. I had people who loved me and gave me a lot of support but for every couple of steps I took forward, I seemed to slip back one or two. I have always been a reader, so when my fairy godmother did show up, it only made sense that her wand was a magazine called Radiance. About two years ago I found a copy of Alice Ansfield's magazine, Radiance: for Large Women, at Coffee-News, a local coffee shop. As I started reading, things finally started to make sense to me. I had never seen a high quality magazine with a large beautifully dressed woman on the cover before, though I had read some books on size acceptance. I was surprised at how good I felt as I looked through Radiance. I felt as if I was being given a gift. Here were big beautiful women who were making a difference in the world, sometimes just by their examples. This magazine told me I had a choice. I could stand tall or suffer. Diets do not work most of the time, not all skinny people are happy and all big people are not miserable. Oh yeah, and fat is not a four-letter word. It was not easy, but I started to believe that I could love myself the way I am. Even when I thought I could never feel happy in my body the way it is, I tried. I read everything I could get my hands on and I began to talk to other people about how I felt. Until I began to work on changing the way I thought about myself I never really understood the saying "fake it 'til you make it." I began to realize that even when I felt awful about myself, if I behaved as if I felt beautiful, smart and sexy, then other people acted as if they believed it as well. The more I received positive responses, the easier it was to actually believe I deserve them. Then one day in the middle of 1996 I realized I was not faking it anymore; I had made it. I had moved from crippling self-hatred to self-acceptance. For the first time in my life I loved myself enough to treat myself with respect and to demand it from others. One of the things I have learned is that the more you think you are worth, the better people will treat you. I used to say that when I lost weight I would do all the things I had dreamed about. I would travel. I would buy myself the best perfumes and beautiful clothing. I would wear silk, satin, velvet and lace. Now I realize I do not have to wait. My trip to Texas was wonderful. My closet is full of wonderful clothing and Lane Bryant and the Bon Marche's credit departments send me a thank you note every month. For the first time I can remember I am happy with the person I am and the body I have. Now I have become a size-activist because I want other people to have what I have for the first time in my life, a sense of self-worth. When I am confronted with ignorant or abusive behavior from people about size, I speak out. When I see an ad or a program that treats large people as if they were stupid or only good as material for malicious jokes, I write to the advertisers and the people who carry it. Whether or not it changes the way the producers look at large people or not, at least I know I have tried to make a difference. I am an artist and after years of not being able to look at myself in the mirror I have started painting and drawing pictures of big beautiful women. This is one of the things that motivated me to pose for nude photos; I found it nearly impossible to find artistic photos of big naked women that I wanted to draw. The other reason I decided to take my clothes off in front of a camera was fear. I hate being afraid of anything, and when I realized that this has always been something I feared, I knew I had to face it and the only way to do that was to strip. By stripping away my fears and inhibitions, I took another step towards my goal of total self acceptance. Sometimes I feel that to really accept yourself you need to strip away the layers of fear, anger, lies, vanity, dreams and stories. Then rebuild yourself by picking only what is beneficial, reexamining everything else, discard what has harmed you and reshape everything else. Which brings me to being naked, naked in the desert, naked under the sky, in the wind and most of all naked in my skin which is a pretty good place to be.