I Am NOT My Body!

A characteristic emotion on seeing a favourite novel turned into a film is puzzlement. We may not hate the actor playing a particular role – we might find them rather beautiful – it's just that they tend not to be as we imagined they should be. We never thought that Tolstoy's Anna Karenina or Ishiguro's Stevens or Jane Austen's Marianne Dashwood Or Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby would look quite like. When we originally read the novel, we didn't necessarily even have any fixed idea of what these characters should look like. Their identities were free of the tyrannical requirement for a face. We were liberated to see them in their unbounded entirety because we didn't have I have to visualise them concretely. Their appearances were fluid and, when necessary, hazy, so as better to allow their multiplicity to take form. By not having to look a certain way, they could be far more than just one thing. The discomfort that we feel at the cinema reflects, on a small scale, the pain that we are likely to experience with far greater force closer to home, in the bathroom Through mirror and in relation to ourselves. Here, too, we're prone to looking at the face in front of us and thinking – even if we don't hate how we look, though we probably do a bit – that our features are in multiple ways extremely unfaithful to how it feels to be us. As with a character in a novel, we know ourselves in the comforting darkness of the inner mind, where we don't place strict boundaries or blunt conclusions on who we might be. We give ourselves latitude. We know we have a thousand moods, that we are a bewildering mixture of the kind and the selfish, the immoral and the good, the confused and the clear eyed. We know that we harbour infinite possibilities, that we are at once artists, ploughmen, accountants, babies, presidents, lunatics, men, boys, girls, women, dolphins, octopuses, jellyfish and ballerinas. Pretty much any life form that has ever bubbled up and breathed on the earth has some echo Inside us. How perplexing, therefore, to have to look in the mirror and be obtusely presented with just one particular person, with one predominant expression, one rather serious nose, one set of sensible ears and one pair of cautious lips. This perplexing feeling first descends in adolescence. If we're frequently to be found a bit dazed on the sofa at that age, or snappy towards our parents, or melancholic dressed in some sort of shapeless black tunic, it's hardly a surprise given that we have recently – and probably really for the first time – become properly aware of how our bodies must look To other people. And what a cage we're condemned to inhabit, having once blithely assumed that we might be as free of definition as a cloud or an ellipsis. Our face in the mirror may come as no less of a surprise for us than would for a reader the arrival of a random Hollywood star in the space of a fictional persona. Someone is playing us and we're really not Not sure we like who's been cast. We're sometimes given advice on how to cope at this point. We must learn to love what has happened to us and who, equipped with this new body, we have turned out to be. We should consider ourselves with enthusiasm and gratitude and interpret our bodies as a gift of nature. We are, whatever we feel, beautiful. We should give ourselves a hug. The advice may be well-meaning and in its place apt, but there might be another, starker philosophy to try out too. We might look at the face in the mirror and pull an incensed mutinous smile as if to say, that really isn't me and never will be. Rather than attempting to overcome our initial discomfort, we might hold on to it and make a sort of cult of it, founding a major part of our identity on a gutsy and insolent refusal to take on board the so-called gift of nature we don't actually like very much. Following the novelist Kingsley Amis in his truculent description of his body as a sort of idiot to which he was chained for 50 years, we might consider our appearance as a banal and ridiculous actor to whom some sort of malevolent casting agent has mysteriously decided to shackle us, and to whom we owe no particular favours or loyalty. We might think of our body as a sort of taxi that the universe has rudely shoved us into, Not a vehicle that we have carefully had the opportunity to choose and to deserve. Out of such insubordination can come a liberating lightness. No longer do we have to worry whether or not we are our own faces. We'll know for sure that, well, we aren't really. We'll hint to the world that there are armies of people, beings funnier and sadder, cleverer and simpler, more masculine and more feminine, struggling to get out of us. At the same time, we'll be able to bring our knowledge of the radical disconnection between outer form and inner character to bear on our view of other people. We'll cease taking their appearance as some sort of truth about them. We'll know that they are likely to feel as let down by their bodies and faces as we do. We'll thereby come to see beauty where maybe no one else has learnt to spot it, because we're going to be looking with new and more penetrating sorts of eyes beneath the surface of bodies and faces. And most importantly, we'll start to feel compassion for ourselves and other people for the blatant injustice of the facial lottery that we have all been compelled to play. We're really honest. No one is as normal as they seem. Play our card game to find out just how weird, or not, you are. 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